People Are Disgusted by Facebook’s Plan to Deploy AI-Powered “Users”

Folks on social media are in an uproar after Meta announced that it's planning to load Facebook up with AI "users," better known as bots.

First reported by the Financial Times, this plan to populate the dying social network with these so-called "characters" is geared towards driving engagement — even though other platforms, including Meta's Instagram, have been roiled by unauthorized bots for years.

"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, Meta's vice-president of product for generative AI, told the FT. "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."

While it's unclear when this plan will move forward, Hayes said that there are already "hundreds of thousands" of characters that have been created on the site — though most, for now, remain private.

Unsurprisingly, users on the r/futurology subreddit saw right through the ruse.

"Translation: 'Our real users are quitting the platform, so we will fill our community with fake users instead,'" one user wrote.

As another aptly put it, "the advertisers buying space on [Facebook] won’t be able to tell the difference either, so it’s all just more clicks and more ad revenue."

The potential implications for advertising on the platform overall seemed to strike a chord with the Redditors.

"With advertising being their bread and butter and pretty much the reason they still exist, how is this legal and not misrepresenting numbers to clients?" another user mused. "If they tell advertisers that they get X number of impressions, engagement, etc. but those aren’t real people anymore, that seems like straight up lying. Wild that they’re just coming right out with it and doubling down."

For others, the prospect of fake users is yet another reason they're ditching Facebook.

"I rarely check my FB feed at all anymore, and when I do it’s almost entirely made up of pages I don’t follow and have never interacted with," another user wrote. "There’s no way to actually get rid of them, just briefly mute them. So now we can look forward to our actual contacts being even harder to see among a bunch of fictitious users too."

Unfortunately, those left on the platform — the elderly and assorted right-wingers who are regularly duped by obvious AI slop — may not be able to tell the difference.

"I think the old people that use it the most are the least likely to notice," one user concluded.

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