Facebook announced they are going to get more aggressive with allowing AI-generated users and profiles on Facebook. In a move literally no one was asking for, they announced the shift and one of their senior AI execs at Facebook described their vision this way:
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going.”
People were justifiably “disgusted” as several media reports noted, and also worried that a platform which is already frequently used by both the elderly and conspiracy theorists, among many others, will now make it even harder for the most vulnerable people to separate fabrication from reality. On a business level, marketers are worried that now AI-generated “impressions” which are obviously worthless will now be counted when measuring the impact of messages and generating invoices for advertising – leading to inflated numbers and fraudulent billing.
You would expect there will be some measures in place to prevent this, but the broader dangers of unleashing so many fake accounts and training them to presumably get closer and closer to mimicking the behaviors and quirks of real people is almost certainly a terrible idea on many levels. Which unfortunately offers no insulation against them going ahead and doing it anyway.
