Update 1/03/24: After the publication of this article, Meta told 404 Media that it had begun to delete the AI-generated accounts and that many had been managed by humans. Since then, Meta has deleted the accounts. Our original story follows below.
As I stared into the dead-eyed visage of "Carter," one of Meta's new AI posters, I remembered a line from Dawn of the Dead. "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."
Something about George Romero's 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta's suite of AI-created profiles. The movie's blue-skinned corpses don't know they're dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That's how many of our social media spaces feel now. Digital town squares populated by undead posters, zombies spouting lines they learned from an LLM, the digested material from decades of the internet spewed back at the audience. That's what Meta is selling now.
Meta's various sites have over 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world's population. But businesses demand constant growth and, not content with almost half of the living people on the planet, Meta has decided to cut out the middle-man. It is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated posters of its own creation.
A December 27, 2024 article in Financial Times laid out the vision. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI at Meta, told the outlet. "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."
[...] The AIs don't seem to be faring well on Instagram. They have low engagement numbers and people are calling them out as AI slop. It's different on Facebook, where the norm has been AI-powered slop for a year now. The post has 13 likes and 2 comments on Instagram and 192 likes, 112 comments, and 33 shares on Facebook. Many of the comments are spam, links to other profiles, or phishing bait of one kind or another.
But it's all interaction and, on a spreadsheet, that's all that matters.
[...] The AI apocalypse is here and it's far stupider and more depressing than we were promised. Instead of being hunted down by a gleaming metal skeleton in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we are surrounded by zombies endlessly repeating our own posts back to us.
And the worst is yet to come. Remember that to power these nightmares Big Tech is going to revive the nuclear power industry. That's our future. A barren mall kept alight with nuclear power, filled with the dead and the never-born.
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Blogger Matt Webb point out that nations have begun to need a strategic fact reserve, in light of the problem arising from LLMs and other AI models starting to consume and re-process the slop which they themselves have produced.
The future needs trusted, uncontaminated, complete training data.
From the point of view of national interests, each country (or each trading bloc) will need its own training data, as a reserve, and a hedge against the interests of others.
Probably the best way to start is to take a snapshot of the internet and keep it somewhere really safe. We can sift through it later; the world's data will never be more available or less contaminated than it is today. Like when GitHub stored all public code in an Arctic vault (02/02/2020): a very-long-term archival facility 250 meters deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain. Or the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But actually I think this is a job for librarians and archivists.
What we need is a long-term national programme to slowly, carefully accept digital data into a read-only archive. We need the expertise of librarians, archivists and museums in the careful and deliberate process of acquisition and accessioning (PDF).
(Look and if this is an excuse for governments to funnel money to the cultural sector then so much the better.)
It should start today.
Already, AI slop is filling the WWW and starting to drown out legitimate, authoritative sources through sheer volume.
Previously
(2025) Meta's AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop
(2024) Thousands Turned Out For Nonexistent Halloween Parade Promoted By AI Listing
(2024) Annoyed Redditors Tanking Google Search Results Illustrates Perils of AI Scrapers
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 06, @12:48PM (10 children)
This is all dead internet theory stuff.
Most people are not online and fewer are every month, but ad companies can only survive if the graph moves up, so this is preparatory work before its admitted some/lots/most internet traffic already was bots.
The next iteration they'll "forget" to announce the source is AI, then we can have soft disclosure that they've had bots making up traffic for years on the less reputable sites (online dating, etc) then finally they'll admit Facebook is mostly empty of humans.
My kids don't use FB, most of my coworkers don't, almost my entire high school graduating class from a long time ago does not use FB. It's just bots clicking on ads all the way down.
In the end the internet will stick around as a handy corporate interface (instead of mailing in bills or talking to customer service on the phone, they'll always have public utility websites) and social addicts and the classic computer people, the kind of folks we were on BBSes with in the late 80s early 90s. Oh and hard core consumers, online shopping and streaming of corporate slop videos, of course.
The usual sophistry against dead internet theory, traditionally revolves around at least a handful of addicts exist therefore everyone is a heavy user, word salad chopping about exact definitions, quoting self-serving authorities and propaganda outlets as a source of truth, more or less the usual...
(Score: 5, Funny) by EEMac on Monday January 06, @02:31PM (2 children)
I've had the same discussion with my 80+-year-old dad several times over the last few years:
"You're on facebook, right?"
"No."
"Hey, Where are you on FaceBook?"
"I'm not on FaceBook? Why would I be on FaceBook?"
Etc.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, @02:42PM
AOL It's The Internet(tm).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, @10:00PM
Why the hell I wanna get in bed with Facebook?
I have more than enough stuff to do already!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday January 06, @02:47PM (1 child)
And the thing is, we all know Facebook did this to themselves.
There were always holdouts like me who saw Facebook as an unwanted intrusion into our (small, introverted) social lives, but they really fucked up when they started chasing control. They wanted people to stay on their site, so they controlled what you saw. They wanted people to publish through their site, so they controlled how much what you shared got spread. They wanted every last penny of advertising dollar, so they controlled every aspect of every second you spent there, and it created a deeply unpleasant experience no one actually enjoyed, but a few people persisted in using because of the sunk cost fallacy and ever shrinking network effect.
People don't actually like being put in carefully constructed mazes where they have no control.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 07, @12:11AM
You're kidding yourself.
Facebook didn't do this to themselves, all social media will die with their generation. Kids don't want to be where their parents are.
I hear the kids are on TikTok now, and don't kid yourself, TikTok will die too.
Well, at least they aren't on my lawn.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Monday January 06, @05:02PM (2 children)
What's particularly bad about it right now is that if you want to check to see if a link is dead, there's a decent chance that it won't give you a 404 error unless the site operator has screwed it up. A bunch of the dead links that were in my book marks forward to AI generated pages, and it makes it a right pain for any sort of automated extension to verify if the link still goes anywhere, because most of them do, just not to anything but AI slop. And, so any automated system I could put into place to watch to see if there are any links that are going nowhere for a prolonged period of time, for possible removal, require somebody to actually look at the page and see if it still leads to anything sensible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, @10:31PM
Dead links seem to go to Taboola or Outbrain.
Companies like those seem to take great delight in toying with a dead brain like a cat toys with a dead mouse.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07, @02:19AM
> ...require somebody to actually look at the page and see if it still leads to anything sensible.
Well, you could train an "AI" to be a link checker, by having it watch you prune bad links...(ducking!!)
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday January 06, @09:36PM (1 child)
The biggest change I've seen (and continue to see) is the use of FB Marketplace. Craigslist used to be a great resource for finding used vehicles, now it's all about FBM. I refuse to use FB and still rely on CL, but it's definitely getting more difficult to find decent used vehicles there. Thankfully, the last 2 vehicles I've bought were from CL posters who also posted their vehicle on FBM.
If you want a good laugh, check out Dalton's crackheads of FB [youtube.com] series.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday January 07, @02:24AM
When I was hunting for a used truck... they were kinda thin on the local CL, so I wandered through FB Marketplace.
And soon left again, because there were so many slimeballs hawking flipper vehicles (ie. barely-running crap off the bottom-feeder trade-in market. If it doesn't have a current local plate, assume it's a flipper.)
Went back to CL. Eventually found a truck there.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Monday January 06, @03:00PM (1 child)
Preface, I can't really recommend Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. I found the bulk of the book to be a terrible slog. It is well over a 1000 pages, and like most of Neal's work, probably could have been a tad more concise. However, I found the first 200 pages or so to be rather interesting and pertinent.
Someone has had their reputation unfairly ruined, the Twitter-mob has formed, and they can't show their face anywhere. I don't recall why; it isn't really important. Next to "fix" said character's reputation a torrent of slop about said person is released in volumes the internet has never seen. There is so much misinformation, it is impossible to know what to believe. Somehow that opens Pandora's box, and the internet is never the same. The wealthy pay editors to curate a feed for them because the raw internet is thereafter an unmanageable torrent of garbage. I bring it up only because it feels odd for something to feel so prophetic so quick, but I still think he was more lucky than good. I think Neal was really more after algorithm driven feeds and their impacts than AI driven slop. The book was published in 2019 before GPT-3 really started making a splash.
After that, there's an interesting, if cynical and cutting, commentary on the state of affairs in a near-ish future USA. Then I kind of wished I'd just stopped reading. It descends into a really long and boring kind of bass ackwards retelling of a digital Paradise Lost where all the Forthrasts and Shaftoes of README and Cryptonomicon come back to be brilliant, wealthy, and eventually dead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07, @08:47AM
Neal is a really smart and insightful guy. He quite likely correctly predicted both. His major fault is that he doesn't seem to know how to finish a book. Even in his earlier ones where an editor still had enough clout to tell him "That book is too long. Cut it" he still couldn't write a good ending. They just sort of stop.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Monday January 06, @06:00PM
Indeed my "timeline" is now littered with AI generated "groups" beckoning me to "follow" them, almost every other post. But honestly, is this "slop" any different than 75% of the crap at Facebook?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday January 06, @06:32PM (2 children)
Google says "LLM stands for Master of Laws, a graduate degree in law." Somehow I doubt that's what the stupidly lazy author meant by that unfortunate acronym. Acronyms should always be defined, even if you are sure your audience knows the meaning.
BTW, "BTW" is an acronym for "By the way," and "WTF" is short for "What, Teddy Frankenstein?"
The lazy author of the original article is woefully incompetent, leading me to question the premise of the article itself. But unfortunately, competence died around the time Chad Bush was elected president by the Supreme Court.
Was the article AI generated? That would be a delicious irony!
Meta's various sites have over 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world's population.
How do you know it's incredible, since you were too lazy to do the simple math? 8/3=x% isn't hard, I think that's grade school math. In my head, it's slightly less than 30%. Not so incredible!
The article is as poorly written as most of Farsebook posts. And considering the shown intelligence of most Farsebook posters, we'd probably be better off if all of its content was AI garbage.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Monday January 06, @06:57PM
How many of those are actually unique, human users? Many people have an account on multiple Meta sites, and often even multiple account on the same site. There are also, of course commercial / business accounts and accounts for other types of organizations and groups. These are not actual, unique users, they are inflated numbers and also don't include all the bot accounts.
I use the Messenger system (using Opera's built-in client) for some messaging and video calls because it normally just works, although it is very temperamental and flakey since they forced all conversations to be encrypted. I'm most certainly not against the end-to-end encryption, but their rollout has caused all sorts of follow-on issues. Many things simply don't work correctly anymore.
I also log into Facebook itself occasionally as our small community here has a couple of local groups for our residents and community operations that happen to (unfortunately) still be hosted on Facebook, otherwise I probably wouldn't even still have an account on that cesspool there at all. If I happen to look at the actual areas outside those groups on the odd occasion where I do actually log in, it is all curated garbage that I have absolutely NO interest in and thinly-veiled ads.
The enshittification is continuing apace, and surely must be nearing completion where it finally sinks under its own mass of total and absolute utter shit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday January 06, @10:37PM
This. 100% This!
As a former software instructor the one major guide line in creating new instructional material for our classes was "Always define an acronym when first used. Never make assumptions that your students will already know what it means." 99 times out of 100 people will be to embarrassed to ask the meaning during class and they will not fully understand what your teaching.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Monday January 06, @06:41PM (3 children)
But where did all the people go? If Elon did one good thing, probably more, when he bought Twitter/X was to reveal that the service was indeed filled with dead accounts, fake accounts, bots and just shit in general. I have a strong suspicion that a lot of other services have similar issues, but they are not really talked much about. Facebook, Youtube etc how can people with hundreds of thousands of subscribers have views in the thousands? If they are not dead accounts, fake accounts or bots. They claim to have subscribers, accounts and god knows what but it's tumbleweed city.
Internet dating sites are complaining, they always have. Less and less people, as the whole thing appears to have turned into a vanity-fuck-fest-project. With all the things they included in their various services they only have themselves to blame for their own downfalls. Trying so hard to monetize everything. Then they seem clueless to that real people apparently doesn't like that. They are not desperately hoping that "AI" will somehow save the house of cards they built out in their digital swamp.
So where did all the real people go? What are they doing now? Cause the "services" are not really providing things for them. I have not really seen any increases in people going out or reading more books or just doing things out and about.
The reference to Romero and his living dead zombie movies are perhaps after all a very apt description of all these services.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 07, @12:29PM (1 child)
I don't mind if the answer to this question is "Social media is filled with fake AIs". Think of the consequences:
1. Corporations will be spending a bunch of money on targeted advertising to bots. And then they'll realize that targeting ads that mostly hit bots doesn't work, and maybe move away from the business model of "gather every bit of data on every person out there we can possibly get our grubby paws on to sell them crap". This is the entire business model of social media, and it will cause the cesspool to collapse and maybe drain out.
2. Political groups will be spending a bunch of money on targeted influence operations that are hitting bots. And again, those won't work as well, and maybe, just maybe, we won't have as many political campaigns funded and on behalf of foreign government intel agencies.
3. Media outlets have already started to figure out that "random post from some random person" isn't something they should be treating as anything that should appear on the air or in an article. That trend should continue (obviously, public figure social media activity is different from that, and should be treated like other public statements by those figures).
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 07, @12:54PM
As you note they seem to have been catching on that these services appear to be filled with dead accounts, of one type or another. So one wonders if they will spend money on them, or if it's a wise investment. After all dead accounts doesn't vote or buy things. Telling people that you have X followers or likes or whatever isn't really impressive anymore, if it ever was.
Even with public figures such as celebs and politicians it just seems to be a never ending stream of curated posts about how happy or sad they are about something that has happened. It barely fills the role of a press release. It's also very often one-way communication, after all these people doesn't want to talk to normal common folks. They don't want to have discussions about things. So the service is in that regard basically pointless.
Still I wonder where all the normal people went and what they are doing now. I still see the smartphone zombies looking down into their phones all the time. But if all the services are failing. What are they doing? Or is it just doom-scrolling as they allow the AI crap to wash over them without any goal or purpose more then allowing the passage of time.
(Score: 2) by r_a_trip on Tuesday January 07, @02:35PM
The people are leaving the massive, everyone has to participate, big social media sites behind. I suspect that people are going back to smaller, regular haunts online, where they interact with other regulars. WhatsApp groups, select subreddits, comment sections of news aggregators, etc.
It isn't about having the most "Facebook friends", or giving "likes and subscribes" anymore. Liking and subscribing only leads to longer, fluffier videos so more adverts can be inserted into it. Having "Facebook friends" in the hundreds just means you are adding people willy-nilly.
People are cutting digital fluff from their lives. The current internet is a massive and useless time sink if you let it control you unfettered.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday January 08, @08:44AM
I already carefully choose social media that attract people I consider to be a friend. I have little desire to waste resources on bozos.
So, it's here, a Diesel Truck forum, and had been on an oil-man's forum (TheOilDrum.com ) where we had many interesting discussions on energy and petroleum related topics.
Uhhh, Facebook? Not my cup of tea. LinkedIn? Eh, entrance to a rat-race and deceit. I am an Engineer and not good at the art of psychology and manipulation. Not my forte. I make things. Even if I don't get paid, I will build for myself. It's in me to do it as much as it's in some to draw art or make music.
There isn't anything else out there I get much satisfaction from doing, as well as find little satisfaction in anyone's attempt to entertain me.
Even as a kid, I found my my most treasured things in someone else's trash pile, like an old TV set.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]