Does this backfire? I don't want to have a fake relationship with a computer, and if "creators" on Meta's platforms are more likely to be fake than real, then I think I'm going to be not bothering too much with FB/IG anymore.
I had a long conversation with an OnlyFans star a while back. One of the very surprising things that I learned was that she paid a very large portion of her earnings to a firm that outsourced chat and audience interaction to a mix of AI and real humans. Her fans never knew the difference.
Its an open secret at this point in that industry. People have done AMAs as people who maintain a string of whales for some fake persona like this. The only people not in on the joke are these whales who probably would refuse to believe it’s a joke even if you put the evidence in front of them.
If you look at a earnings screenshot of, for example, Bhad Barbie, she earned ~ $40 million in 2022. $15m from subscriptions and the other $25m from paid messages.
But honestly I think this is going to mess people up.
Consider the awkward teenager, who rather than do the hard work of learning to meet people and engage with the world, can sit at phone and have what their brains perceive as robust relationships with internet friends who are actually just bots.
Yes, I can believe that some people will get sucked into this. It's sad, and Meta seems to be evolving into a Black Mirror-esque predator.
I still hope it backfires, though. Are awkward teenagers really a lucrative segment? Perhaps they can spend their parents' money initially, but eventually I think they churn or become not very profitable.
Well if it causes problems, an AI therapist is just a subscription plan away. /s
BTW the problem you describe has been happening already for at least a decade. It's why many livestreamers effectively run a softcore channel, because they get more followers, interaction and gifts when they dress skimpy than when they don't.
One of the most important aspects of being an online influencer is their parasocial relationship between their audience, both the good (the relationship will cause people to interact with you more often, which converts into making more money) and the bad (the relationship may cause some people to think they're "owed" a relationship with the creator and act out with toxic behaviors).
A persona chatbot is one way for creators to benefit from the good and avoid the bad.
This was my objection to even primitive AIs like Siri. I don't want to talk to computers, or treat them like intelligent beings in any sense, or have them scanning my documents, texts, and emails for appointments and travel plans. So at least in my case, yes that was a backfire for Apple, they spent a lot of money to acquire Siri and then further develop it and it's the first thing I actively disable when I get a new phone.
Creators have been using AI doubles for a while now, and that’s likely to continue expanding whether or not individual social platforms offer tools for it.
Sounds more like an optional way people can interact with the creators. Currently you can only send DM, spamming their inboxes, or reacting to a post. The creators won't be fake, but the interactions with their communities will be
OK, but my impression of Meta is even lower than it was before.
Until now, I didn't trust Meta, but I trusted the people & creators I connected with. Now I don't feel like I will trust anything at all on a Meta platform.
That makes me a lot less interested in using the platforms at all.
That ship has long since sailed already. As other commenters in the thread pointed out, plenty of "online social media personalities" already hire dozens to hundreds of offshore workers to impersonate them in chats. When you have 10M fans, and let's say 0.1% of them want to chat with you all day, that's still 10K people.
