Originally published at: Facebook is paying people to make the AI slop that infests it - Boing Boing
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This is the hellscape my mother keeps trying to get me to rejoin?
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I don’t need any more reasons to be happy with my decision not to use Facebook products, but they keep on rolling in.
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This isn’t really a surprise from Mr. Pivot-to-Video himself; but I have to wonder how the con works to convince advertisers that running ads against ‘content’ so organic that you need to pay someone to churn it out is worth whatever the going rate is.
Do they just lie blatantly and consistently? Do some weasel-wording about the details of how impression targeting tools actually work; then claim it’s on you for not understanding the ever-shifting black box behind the GUI? Do both sides agree that content provenance is irrelevant so long as The Algorithm suspects that it’s real people looking at it, and the ads, rather than bots watching bots?
Are advertisers just really easy to lie to because being in advertising requires faith in the efficacy of advertising?
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Maybe FOMO? The advertisers know it’s all crap, but maybe, just maybe it isn’t and their competitor could gain a fractional advantage?
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You nailed it. Without that belief and the ability to sell it to the executives who control the money, corporate advertising managers would be out of a job with no useful skills and experience to fall back on.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – Department store mogul John Wanamaker
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Any chance of removing/blurring that freaky image in the header?
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The advertisers tricked into paying for it all.
Sadly, the time is long past, in all probability, when legislation and regulation can bring socievil media to heel. Emerging legislation may have a beneficial effect but there will always be places beyond the legislative boundaries that are able to be exploited.
Ultimately, until the people paying for this - the advertisers - start flexing their muscles (and yay to xitter advertisers for doing this - it was so effective that Skum had to start an unwinnable lawsuit) we are stuck with it. Which is one more reason - not that I need any more - not to use xitter and fuckbook.
And, of course, too many advertisers still adhere to the ‘I don’t know which half is wasted’ mantra, so “that’s alright then”.
In this day and age there may still be an unknowable proportion wasted, but it is not hard to find out which adverts you are paying for are (likely to be) on pages of
- AI slop
- fascist or nazi fuckwittery
- places/countries where inciting genocide is deemed ok by the host site
- generally anti-democracy messages or authoritarian abuse
But advertising managers have their budgets and as long as they can show a ‘return’ on that, who inside the corporation gives a fuck about anything else?
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I genuinely enjoy FB for keeping up with family and friends. I use Messenger every day with my GF and the team that works on The Shadow fanzine. And there are several hobby groups that I find valuable.
But the shear amount of shit around all of that is super annoying. Like swimming through port waters full of trash.
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Are you using FB Purity? It keeps the trash levels bearable for me, at least?
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No, thanks for the suggestion!
I don’t see how that’s remotely possible. Sounds like someone selling their expertise in making money on Facebook is overstating revenue, to make money. Ten cents per like? No way. Compare that to the tiniest fraction of a cent artists get for every play of their songs on streaming services. The economics here don’t add up. Still, people obviously are making some money, but if it’s people in the global South driving this, a) it wouldn’t take much revenue to make it worthwhile, and b) it might not be worthwhile - they might not be getting the revenue they expect, and it’s all a house of cards, even on their end.
I have to say though, this his hilarious. Using speech-to-text, machine translating to English and then feeding that through an image generator is perfect. Being paid (however much) to destroy the functionality of Facebook with a flood of machine-generated shit, liked by cognitively declining Boomers who somehow think it’s real, is beautiful. (Aided by a lack of moderation, underfunded as Zuck wasted billions on AI? Magnificent.) Hopefully this is the end of social media as we know it, to be replaced by something better.
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The last straw on Facebook for me was a ‘friend’ who kept uncritically reposting images that were very obviously AI generated that he believed somehow validated/confirmed his idiot conspiracy theories.
My life has only improved without that toxic platform in it. Not knowing what my cousin had for lunch yesterday, when I haven’t seen him in person since the mid 80s - just a price I’m going to have to pay I suppose.
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Why not both?
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