I follow a few pages on FB that are essentially scathing of politics, and of course, especially American politics in this day and age. And a couple of them are just your garden variety parody pages, focussing on local topics and taking the piss.
But I’ve noticed of late, the writing ‘style’ is remarkably similar with all of them. It’s hard to describe, but hit me like a red-hot anvil to the head when I finally tweaked to the phenomenon.
Am I reading (left wing) AI bots on my page, or have the punters just mooched onto the preferred writing style to get hits on their pages?
In this day and age? On Facebook? Discussing politics? I’d definitely default to assuming bots absent evidence to the contrary.
There’s too much geopolitical incentive, too much money, and too few human writers for bots NOT to be involved. They cost pennies to make and are incredibly difficult to filter out.
If you want insightful political discourse between actual people, Facebook is pretty much the single worst place to find it…
I ate at a mom n pop restaurant a couple days ago. First time I’d been there. Nice people, good food. The waitperson asked me to leave a Google review. I very rarely do that, but I made an exception for these folks since they’re a small business, not a corp.
On my phone I went to their website & clicked the review button. A Google page appeared. At the top was a pre-written review, and clearly generated by an AI bt. It used all the keywords and was effusive in its remarkably content-free praise of this place. Just below the prewritten review was an explanation. Paraphrasing:
Click this big button right here to post that text as your review. Or if you really prefer, scroll down to a text input box you can’t yet see because it’s off the bottom of the screen, and type whatever you want want in there. You can also copy/paste what we wrote for you into the text box and edit it there if you prefer.
I scrolled down to see the text input box was far smaller than the review they had written and would have been a PITA to try to say anything substantive in. I wrote my own couple of original human-generated sentences and clicked [post].
An hour or so later I got an email from Google saying that the ownership had replied to my kind review. Upon reading what ownership wrote, I saw it was obviously an AI bot-generated resonse.
So now for restaurant reviews we have bots masquerading as human diners posting reviews, and bots masquerading as managers answering those reviews.
My bottom line:
The stakes at an eatery are nothing compared to the stakes over who controls the minds of the public. Very soon everything will be bots and it’ll be nearly impossible to locate the occasional kernel of human-generated content among the automated spew of bots talking to bots so the humans can’t get a word in edgewise.
You do you. But FB is evil. The worst place ever for truth and correctness.
I don’t see one redeeming quality. Now don’t go saying I just use the Neighborhood or Family FB pages to keep up with my family and neigbors.
If you’re not in contact with them anyway, what do you care? I’m sure my 1000 cousins have a FB group. I haven’t talked to any of them in years. And if they kindly take me off their snail mail list, I’d be a happy person . I’m not giving graduation, wedding or shower gifts anymore.
So no, I do not go on FB. At all.
Seems a awful place to get any kind of news, political or other. Add bots and it’s a true waste of time.
Facebook is my example, but it’s not the only place where it’s going on. As @LSLGuy pointed out, AI will write your restaurant review for you. AI will filter Google for you to digest those 10,000 hits into one readable summary. Only problem is, you won’t know what algorithm it use to decide what to emphasize and what to omit in that summary.
AI may be supposed to take care of all the drudge work in our lives, but it turns out a lot of the drudge work involves actual thinking and judgments, I don’t think I want to turn that over to computers.
These are quite lengthy ‘essays’ (for want of a better word) much in the style and content of Heather Cox Richardson, but from a mostly Australian perspective. Of course much of the discourse centres around your illustrious President yada yada, but I was curious about the likelihood of AI or whatever. I care because after a while, the construction of the essays started to seem predictable and familiar
And it’s not just on FB Beck, so you can keep your snark to yourself. I get my news from a vast array of sources, from news-sites, to op-eds, to various other websites, including right here on the Dope.
The post was not asking for opinions about the value of FB in any way, so in your own words, you do you.
Well, not sure if this meets the definition of “redeeming quality”, but my primary purpose for using it is promoting my band and our shows. We have something like 15,000 followers, who are interested in knowing where our next shows are and who tune into our livestreamed performances and, as a result, donate money to the band. It works very well for us.
If it didn’t, however, I doubt I would be on FB anymore.
I also use FB for live music from the other side. It’s how I find out about tours of the dozens of bands I follow (including Disinfectus’s) . It’s indispensable for that. I never post or follow politics there.
I am on the book of faces to keep up with family/local events/etc. About once or twice a month I will post an old picture and write about my memories from that time. Or I will post a story about humorous life experiences. It’s been a good thing for me and I will continue to do it as long as I enjoy the activity.
I have a huge extended family and a number of friends scattered throughout the US and other countries. We get together when we can and keep up with each other in various ways that include visits/texting/calling.
For local issues, it’s a once/twice a day check in. Mostly to locate help for things like snow shoveling or to check on road conditions.
Occasionally something will catch my eye and I will try to read but it does all sound like bot regurgitation so I stopped doing that.
It all sounds the same. The writing cadence is pure AI in those kinds of posts.
My coworker today told me that her ring notifications are now coming in as written AI messages on her phone.