Meredith Whittaker
Meta making fake AI bot users is tedious, death drive-coded AI desperation
That aside, the Q I want answered is how fake 'users' will be (dis)counted when calculating ad clicks, auction prices? You know, the already sketchy pseudoscience on which the surveillance biz model house o' cards rests...
Nemo_bis 🌈
@PetterOfCats Reality check: the "pivot to video" hype was a complete fabrication (either a scam or just total incompetence at #Facebook), yet it took 3 years to settle in court and 5 years to *start* reversing it. https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-the-news-video-on-facebook-coffin/
PetterOfCats
@_dm @Mer__edith as someone who has worked with many marketing depts in a number of enterprise level corporations, no one would realize this was happening or question it or question it enough to resolve it. I've literally been in dozens of meetings where the topic of "FB is reporting high traffic that doesn't jive with AA, must be an AA problem..."
So much trust is placed in the platforms that you cannot even question it.
dm
@Mer__edith Well, if we’re lucky, we’ll find out which of us is right. ;)
But I think the rationale of “engagement pumping via fake content”, while icky (and obviously a betrayal of Meta’s alleged mission of “connecting people”), is pretty coherent and consistent with increasing ad revenue.
Whereas “fake traffic” is basically a scam on advertisers and, importantly, advertisers ultimately do see their own conversion rates from paid traffic—so they can catch on very quickly if Meta starts sending a lot of traffic which doesn’t convert. So the “fake traffic” approach strikes me as something that would cause the business to unravel in very short order.
dm
@Mer__edith Meta’s business is heavily dependent on keeping advertisers happy, and ad companies are hugely responsive to advertiser concerns about click fraud. They’re not going to start generating fraudulent traffic; that’d kill the golden goose.
Meredith Whittaker
@_dm Arguably fake users making fake content we click on, that clicks on us, is fraudulent traffic. And allegations of funny accounting, boring on/constituting fraud have been leveled at Meta for years. Since Meta owns the 'data' and the process of creating it, with almost no accountability, it's not clear to me that this is a bright line that won't be (hasn't already been) crossed.
dm
@Mer__edith The whole thing is weird, but I don’t see why attributing clicks is hard. Meta’s AI bots will presumably generate fake content, but won’t click ads, right?
Like, in implementation, this is just content generation. But it isn’t an automated browser surfing the web or whatever.
Meredith Whittaker
@_dm Why do you assume this?
Joxe Rojas 🥐
@Mer__edith Literally stage III of enshittification as per @pluralistic definition : the service is no longer good for end users, nor for advertisers either, but *tries* to be attractive for investors: "hey, now with more AI!".
kuteboiCoder
@Mer__edith@mastodon.world
The real question is why does the biggest #social #media #network in the world need fake users.
anubis2814
gentoobro
Because AI accounts are more interesting than Boomers talking about their cats.
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