Hmmm, can Facebook’s brain trust ultimately win the battle for control of the virtual landscape?
Lately the Facebook (aka Meta) algorithms, or those who manipulate them, have decided that I must be a horny old man. My feed regularly displays multiple, AI-generated images of Jennifer Aniston in bikinis or lingerie attire. Most have her upper body physical assets considerably enlarged and bear only a passing resemblance to her.
Perhaps I paused a moment too long to… let’s go with ponder, over these images. (I am, after all, only human.) Subsequently, more and more of these AI-generated posts began to appear for other female celebrities such as Scarlet Johansson. Some days these posts clog up my feed.
In addition, there were a few days when my feed included revealing photos of mothers breastfeeding their infants. Presumably this was a widespread problem that the Facebook tech team got a handle on as those posts have ceased.
For the record, there are other annoying things clogging up my feed. I frequently get tagged by people for posts advocating their viewpoint on a particular issue. All of them are from complete strangers and are by and large on topics I have no opinion on one way or the other.
And of course, there is an ever-increasing volume of ads and paid posts. I confess I contributed to this trend in the last decade of my working career as social media made a move to become the premiere marketing tool of its age.
I did a Google search with the question: How many Facebook posts are generated per day? Figures came back for 2022 which are revealing although by now wildly out of date:
- Approximately 2.7 million posts every minute.
- 165 million posts per hour.
- 3 billion posts every day and 119 billion every month.
Facebook is becoming an unmanageable beast. I have no doubt that tech-savvy users are employing AI programs to wreak havoc with the algorithms and turn them to their advantage. No doubt Facebook is also employing AI to try and adjudicate content and fight back against those attempting to take it over.
Many years back I wrote a post that likened Facebook to a 200-tentacled octopus. That metaphor has long since ceased to have any validity.
Facebook is now a virtual, ideological and commercial AI-driven war zone in which the technologically-gifted do battle with the Facebook tech geniuses for control of the landscape. I am unconvinced that this is a battle Facebook can ultimately win.
FYI: I link to all my blog posts on Facebook. It is entirely possible that the Facebook algorithms will quarantine this post and prevent it from being seen. Let me know if you in fact see this post before the algorithm weeds it out.
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Tags: AI · artificial intelligence · Facebook · Meta · metaphor · Michae Robert DyetNo Comments