At this point 50% of my FB feed is comprised of entirely made up shit like this. I'm a historian who studies politics and media, so it's easy for me to be a critical consumer of this schlock. But for the average consumer, this sort of social media is like putting a stick blender in one's brain.
Why do people want to consume such obviously phony content?
I assume they are incredibly bored and possibly also terrified of the apocalyptically violent and dangerous world outside their homes that FB has depicted for them, perhaps with the conscious intention to keep them glued even more to their screens.
Bob Dylan also invented time travel
I like learning things and seeing and saving new (to me) real pics of history. Fb has either out and out made up stories to go with a weirdly tweaked real photo or put a real story w a bad ai of someone there is plenty of real pics of One example is Mae West buying her apt bldg cuz they were racist
True story but they put the most bizarre ai mock up of Mae and said boxer, it looked nothing like her or him. I mean u don't have to take pics of her w black men, idk if that specific man has a photo w her but she featured black men in her plays
Oh, that this stupid shit will die under its own weight, or that weary targets will drown it in a bathtub.
I had to tell my mom to stop following a fake Minnesota Vikings account on that site because she was constantly believing the misinformation that they were constantly posting, like how Justin Jefferson adopted a homeless kid and other ridiculous stuff. I'm glad that she listened to me and did that.
It really is just stinking garbage at this point. I swear, social media is the worst thing to have happened in modern history. It's caused nothing but misery and death.
We got like 5 years of “oh so that’s what my 9th grade lab partner’s kids look like” and 15 years of misery.
All of this is completely true and all of it rings exceptionally hollow from someone with a Substack
And honestly, this is one of the easier ones to figure out. After the Texas floods, there were multiple AI slop Facebook posts "showing" celebrities like Tyler Perry in the impacted towns helping with search and rescue efforts. None of it was real. But if you are just scrolling it's hard to know.
Every day I am ever happier be off of the big tech social media platforms and on the fediverse/decentralized social web.
Very thoughtful of Bob to use his time machine to get married in 1993 or thereabout.
The fact that you don’t think Joan Baez knows how to use essential oils to roll back 60 years of aging says so much about you Seth.
OMG, seriously? It just boggles my mind that anyone is putting so much time and effort into cranking out sheer garbage. Yeah, yeah, I know it doesn't take that much effort anymore and that's a big part of the problem. It just seems insane to me.
For some reason a lot of these have McCartney, Dylan, Springsteen etc…ugly crying. Methinks the reason is not good.
I am de-substacking. Sorry to see you go. Happy to see you here.
the worst part is receiving these "recommendations" all the time. FB now is 50% things you do not follow, 45% advertisement (of which 40% are scams) and 5% is whatever is left.
My elderly mom has started watching these weird AI-generated prayers on YouTube. They are the creepiest, most dystopian things, like something out of Croenberg's VIDEODROME.
If only SM was moderated and regulated from day one with an iron fist 🙃
One of the small victories on our side is the pairing of the words AI + slop. It's everywhere, even on FB which seem like progress.
I deleted my FB account in 2020, after a longtime (and now former) acquaintance went full Nazi and daily reporting and flagging did nothing, and then my account was frozen for 10 days because I made a joke about Lysistrata. It's just all completely toxic bullshit.
I got sick of all the fake crap on fb, so I always just use the "Friends" feed. It's just stuff my friends have posted. An occasional ad but that's it. I refuse to be fed that garbage by "the algorithm". It's been a nice little life improvement. And Zuck thinks we want / need "AI friends". 🤦🏼♂️ /1
Facebook's core value is just being able to communicate & share stuff with friends. So just do that! Nope, these psychopaths can't just leave well enough alone. Change is not always good. If anything, do a better job at providing your core value. We don't need "AI friends" or AI generated content. 🤦🏼♂️
I was fooled until they said Steven Tyler and Paul McCartney played!
The content collapse is coming
One of the few things I take solace in is that my 80 year old parents do not use any social media. I still worry about them encountering AI slop, but at least it's not shoved in their faces on an hourly basis.
It looks fake as hell
Well yeah, that 50% sucks. But the other 50% of facebook is *chef's kiss*
📌
Puh-lease have someone make an app that detects this (based on your knowledge)OR do an online course TEACHING how to spot it. I worry for the kids coming up (and of course the older folks who grew up trusting TV)
To me these are easy to spot as slop because it’s usually something that didn’t happen so much it un-happened something that did, the images look wrong (that’s… not what Joan Baez looks like now), and there’s also something about the lighting and rendering that is always off.
I agree - it's easy to tell nowadays and they all look maybe 50/60 BUT others cannot.
Facebook is as SORRY as suckerburg is ugly
No one could believe it really happened.
I see that garbage and think of it the same way I do about the 100,000 TikTok accounts posting AI garbage that all claim to be “Elon Musk”: why fucking bother.
Joan Baez looks amazing, and more Indian than Mexican now
Have an older FB friend and his posts are 75% this shit, almost exactly. Even when people call it out he doesn't reply, I suspect because FB likely sends him 300 notifications a day and they swallow up anything real. Its friggin bleak.
I have two real life friends who apparently turn off their brains when they log onto FB: the AI crap I get is from them, and it doesn't matter how many times it's pointed it out to them that it's bs.
Listening today to the Trashfuture podcast and they proposed a test for seniors like some jurisdictions have in order to keep driving after 70 or whatever that they'd need to prove they can identify AI slop before we allow them on the Internet and I'm coming around to the idea.
The older of my friends who does this is over 70. Yesterday she shared something so obviously AI that even her kids called her on it. She would benefit from admitting she's not good at fact checking and telling what's bs. And then learning to work on that.
Internet reeducation camps for boomers
Even if the consumer has a healthy skepticism about what they're seeing, they're still wasting their cognitive energies trying to figure out what information is reliable and what is not, energy that could be spent not on compensating for Mark Zuckerberg's profit-maximizing moral vacuity.
I don't go on FB, but YouTube is in a race to the bottom with this stupid bullshit, in content and ads. Now it won't let me block ads 😡.
Totally spot on about Zuckerberg. Facebook and twitter are a sewer.
We're living in a darkening age of epistemological neoliberalism...by which I mean that each consumer of knowledge is left entirely up to their own devices to try to figure out which bits of data are reliable & which ones are not. All of the institutions which used to help us do that work are dying.
They're not dying, they're being murdered.
Correct, Susan. Thanks for reminder.
Remember the "Kill Your TV" movement? Ditch your phone... problem solved. Human beings are NOT hard wired for the onslaught of information / data blasting at us. It was bad enough 30 years ago before widespread use of computer screens. The Luddites were NOT wrong.
Remember though, that the Luddites were not anti-technology, but rather pro-technology in the hands of the people. They wanted the capital gains to remain with the workers, not capital.
This idea has aged exceptionally well!
bsky.app/profile/math...
This is a key point that I keep arguing with my peers about. They say “I go to the source” eg I listen directly to rfk or joe Rogan, or even NYT and draw my own conclusions. But the average individual is not equipped to parse the propaganda/lies/misinformation flowing from those sources
More than ever you need the work of historians, sociologists, scholars, researchers etc to help contextualize media
That's a bit patronizing. Everyone has to figure shit out for themselves. We're all equipped with a brain.
But to follow every fact and verify it is impossible. We rely on sources to tell us things and do not necessarily have the proof documents easily available. I stopped going to a bar because a co-owner purportedly signed a private letter pushing back against an essential service in my neighborhood.
When it was corrected, I missed the correction in everything else that happened. I found out this morning that I was sideeyeing a reasonably good bar (bad food, also expensive) without having seen an update. I'm sure you've experienced similar, because we're not all chasing documentary evidence.
And, with a job that requires reading documentary evidence constantly, I can tell you *no one~ is doing this without getting paid for it, because it is miserable enough to do while getting paid.
I was a high school journalism teacher. I'm well aware of disinformation and how it's disseminated. I can also tell you that despite their protestations to the contrary, most adults simply read what they want to read and dont bother with veracity. Cognitive dissonance is too painful.
We are in an epistemological crisis. A significant portion of the U.S. population, MAGA Republicans, base their knowledge on whatever they wish were true, completely ignoring data and facts.
You’re right, but also, weren’t tabloids pushing this type of nonsense since time immemorial?
Absolutely. The difference is that their circulation was small compared to mainstream outlets, and also few people with political or other forms of institutional power would base their statements or decisions on what appeared in those outlets. Today's GOP is basically the National Enquirer.
You could read the Enquirer and know it was likely gossipy fiction and read the NYTimes and trust that it was probably true. Now it's all mixed up in a blender.
What is sad and dangerous is how young people without the skills to pick apart and analyze what they see.
Young people have no idea who any of those people are. This is clearly aimed at boomers who really do have 0 tools for dealing with it.
All of us are subject to it--it's a problem for all generations. There was a time when my students were constantly updating me. Now they come in and each one has a whole world of thought stopping cliches--all different ones, often opposite ones. Young generation don't even share one reality now.
I was not addressing those particular examples, but those that are aiming for teens engagement.
Great insight. It’s grim, as there are no ready solutions. I find myself wishing for an electronics-frying solar flare and/or the Kessler syndrome as a deus ex machina type solution to the problem, tho I imagine the consequences would be pretty rough in other ways.
We can do our own research: like on energy, cancer, or physics.
You been reading Willamette Week politics coverage again?
Oh, that's what they said about supermarkets.
It's a monkey's paw to make us all philosophers.
Think or drown in the AI slop
As if the sense-making crisis wasn't bad enough a decade ago, this all is in such an overdrive that it's hard to comprehend the disastrous effects it's having on society(even though much of it is obvious and in our faces).
I saw a TED talk by a guy whose profession is passing judgment on the validity, or lack thereof, of "photographs." He said that fully 50% of supposed photos online are fake. It doesn't bother me much now, because so much of the slop is obvious. I dread the day when it gets a lot harder to tell.
"Pictures don't lie." Those were the days.
What are you telling me? Are you saying that the brief video clip of Taylor Swift dancing topless might not be real?
"Epistemological neoliberalism!" Perfect term for this! (And hello from a WU alumna.)
They are under attack, but don’t give up!
We're also looking at ugly things. Why would we want to surround ourselves with ugly things? Constantly looking at ugly things affects our taste.
A few years back I overheard a co-worker exclaim how she “didn’t even watch the news anymore and just got everything from Facebook”, implying it was somehow better or more legitimate. 😳
I can't help but notice that my older acquaintances (65+) seem clearly less equipped to be on guard for this and correctly distinguish/filter. And it saddens me to realize this will be a very effective tool for elder abuse/scamming.
I asked my mum (75) about why she finds it so hard to critically evalaute stuff online, news etc. She said that in the 50s (in the UK at least) you respected and trusted authority. In return 'authority' was reasonably honest. It's really hard for her to process that & be more sceptical.
In our generation, if something appeared in print it gained respect, because we assumed that editors with an eye on libel laws were careful to ascertain its truth.
Exactly this. Also, although papers were to the left or right, journalists and editors wanted to report facts and do proper investigative journalism.
Yeah, I have the same struggles with my own parents, 80+. Their minds are just trained on data from a different era. When you answered a phone in 1970, the chances of the caller being from a transnational gang of financial criminals from Asia was essentially zero. Now, it's very high.
In fairness, at the moment she's pretty good with that and if she's in the right mood will string them along for a bit before telling them to f off! It's all the online stuff that she finds so hard and things like GB news.
That's good. No matter how many times we tell my mother not to talk to strangers on the phone, she gets taken in by every sort of scammer. She's clearly on a list of vulnerable seniors and it's very hard to deal with effectively.
That must be awful. Are the phone company able to help in any way? I do worry about how my mum will cope as she gets older and if she starts getting confused.
Unplug
Something happened with FB in the last few weeks as my feed is now nothing, at least 85%, of this crap.
We live in a post facts world
I’ve asked people to get off Meta products, but I always get some form of “but how will I know what’s happening without it” as a response. How did they handle this incredible problem before Facebook? Also, why is knowing what’s happening so important that they’d pay the worst people for access?
boomers would know Dylan is 84
AI slop like this was why I finally deleted Facebook AND Instagram. My feeds were inundated with shit and I never saw posts from friends. If I wanted to see friend updates, I had to go through extra steps that I never had to back in the day. Both are useless. They've become spam and scam platforms.
My feed has a lot of tourism articles for places that don’t exist 🤡
We're actually going to burn the planet up making the most pointless, low quality content imaginable
This shit is just automatically pumped into people’s feed, without your knowledge or consent
I got off of fb after the 2016 election and the Cambridge analytica scandal and never looked back.
The only thing that I use Facebook for is to check in with friends and to visit a few very niche marketplace style groups. I don’t see anything like this in my feed.
I see it because I follow Oregon Republican accounts for research purposes. FB's algorithm seems to think I'm a 50 something white male conservative, and it's pretty terrifying if what it feeds me is indicative of what other folks in that demographic are seeing.
Yes.
Facebook has become the Inquirer magazine in the checkout aisle of the grocery store. Don’t want it, don’t need it. 🇨🇦
hey, they look great for their age! And it's swell that Stephen Tyler's vocal chords have miraculously healed.
I'm 46 and fairly well-read, at this point if I see a "historical picture" posted on the internet that I've never seen before, I just assume its not real. These are treacherous times.
And then there are just fakes that depend on ignorance and inattention. Recently I saw an image go viral that was allegedly of the Dionne quintuplets celebrating their 90th birthday together. I knew that at the time, only two were still alive (only one now). Most people congratulated them heartily.
There were many comments on how amazing it was that they had all lived to 90 and they were told they looked incredible. Me? I didn't think they looked so good with all those extra fingers. Part of it's social engineering. People believe what they want to believe without looking too closely.
People who have shipped Bob and Joan for decades, or want to believe all the Dionnes lived to 90 and look fabulous, or that a dolphin could rescue a drowning leopard cub, or that Egyptians filled bottles with food and threw them in the ocean hoping they'd reach Gaza--the bullshit detector shuts off.
On the plus side, you can't get arrested for beating people with AI slop.
🤚 Why be on FB anymore?
I saw one of McCartney visiting the supposed death bed of Phil Collins for a duet of Hey Jude. Done with fb.
I remember when the most annoying thing about FB was that they constantly ran clickbait blurbs implying a celebrity was dead who was still alive. This is just beyond.
For years now at least 99% of the ads I get on Facebook have been for scams. But, yeah, the number of pages pushing AI slop has skyrocketed.
There's not a day that goes by that I miss Facebook or Instagram.
So, why do you even use Facebook? Come up with one good reason.
Because I'm a scholar who writes about the far right in the Pacific Northwest and FB is one important place where those people engage with each other?
Your call, I guess.
Thanks for your permission to do my job.
Do what you do, in your scholarly space.
The jokes on Bob, as it was really Brad Pitt cosplaying Steven Tyler….
Why do people do this?
Tyler looks like Brad Pitt in a bad movie about Aerosmith
Joan Baez looks great for 84 !
And posts like that are why I cancelled everything meta. It’s all bullshit.
I think my favorite part is Steven Tyler singing at their wedding