The unreconstructed Facebook
Plus signs of the approaching AI content tsunami (including a brilliant video)
When you’re Facebook, and you have billions of users, it’s very easy for small things to become absolutely gigantic things simply through a little bit of inattention. Thus it was on Wednesday, when somehow some bad code made it from test to production, and voilá:
Facebook experienced a bizarre bug on Wednesday morning that filled user feeds with endless posts from celebrity
accountsPages [corrected from the original by CA]. Multiple Verge staffers who attempted to use the social media network experienced the same issue, where their main News Feed was flooded with minor posts sent to pages for artists like Lady Gaga, Nirvana, and The Beatles. As of 5:15AM ET the issue appears to have been resolved after creating three hours of chaos.…Users were quick to take advantage of the bug and to send memes to celebrities that they knew would be shared far and wide. One widely shared image I saw on my own feed features a picture of a turkey sandwich with the caption, “If you see this share it to another celebrities Facebook page keep the turkey sandwich moving.” It seems everyone that follows that celebrity then saw the image in their feed.
Basically, the News Feed became the crap feed, exposing everyone to the unadulterated crap that is celebrity Page user comments. It was a reminder, if you needed one, that people are awful. (Except for you and me, of course.)
But it’s also a reminder that Facebook is awful, and brings out the awfulness in people. This time it was just foolish fun, but often it’s much worse because of the way that Facebook crashes people together.
A good example of this emerged in a Twitter thread by Jeremy Vine. He’s a national radio and TV presenter, lives in London, and is a passionate advocate for cycling: he cycles to and from work, and also rides a penny farthing, which is to normal cycling what free solo climbing is to roped climbing.
He’s also the target of a lot of hate from people in Chiswick, west London, who don’t like cyclists and don’t like him, not necessarily in that order. In a Twitter thread over the course of the week, he posted about his puzzlement with these people.
And..
It’s a slightly bizarre tale, with accusations of beheaded tulips, and people wishing for Vine to “come a cropper—not break anything, but just look like the idiot he is”.
These people really are being horrible, and to what end? So if (or when) Vine does come a cropper, they can exult? Facebook gives them a consequence-free space in which to egg each other on, where they ignore their own rules. Sure, TV presenters may not be a protected class, but what they’re saying veers pretty close to hate speech.
One might say that Vine, with 780,000 Twitter followers, is punching down on these people by naming them, as he does, in the thread. But he’s clearly frustrated by the actions of these people. Facebook has brought them together. Hate cyclists? Live in Chiswick? Boy, does the algorithm have a page for you!
It’s classic social warming: bring people of similar views together, inject some contrary views occasionally, watch the sparks float upwards.
Let me finish with my own perspective. I cycled to and from work in London for years. (Yes there was a shower at work, thanks for asking.) The trip was about six miles each way, thankfully all almost flat, but doing it in rush hour was always…interesting.
Then for some years I drove, from outside London, into London. Doing both gave me a lot of appreciation for each side’s perspective: the struggle for space, the tension, the jockeying for position. And after a lot of consideration, my conclusion is this: cyclists have to do some actual work with both legs to even move. Car drivers are sitting in an armchair that moves when they incline one foot. So they can shut up.
Signs of the approaching tsunami
As a followup to last week’s post about the approaching tsunami of addictive AI-generated content, here are a few related links that popped up and seemed indicative.
• Dall-E generating hundreds of outfits so you can brainstorm. The film below is 24fps, so about 100 outfits, and there were probably a couple of hundred more.
• There’s a burgeoning market for prompts to make AI systems do things. (Though Andres Guadamuz, who we met last week, wonders about the copyright implications.) Next obvious step: get the AI systems to write the prompts. I did suggest that last week, but this suggests it’s closer than we thought.
• Capitol Music Group hires then fires “AR rapper” it signed from influencer company. Music Business Worldwide was pretty enthusiastic, ahead of the firing:
The virtual artist’s creator… told us at the time that Meka has been created using thousands of data points compiled from video games and social media.
Just over a year later, and FN Meka has over 10 million followers on TikTok.
Not only that, he’s just been ‘signed’ by one of the most powerful record companies in the world: Capitol Records / Capitol Music Group.
Capitol claims that FN Meka, who has over a billion views on TikTok, is the No.1 “virtual being” on the video platform, as well as the world’s “first AR artist” to sign with a major label.
Those “thousands of data points” didn’t, it seems, stop it from being “digital blackface” (the voice was human, though that was just a minor detail to be ironed out later), and really distasteful. Ryan Broderick is very dubious about the “influencer companies” behind stuff like this—as in, I think, an implication that those thousands of data points were in people’s minds rather than a computer—which makes sense. Yet once this reaches someone a bit smarter, it could become a thing.
• Amazing music video (helped by the fact it’s a great tune) by Phoenix called Alpha Zulu. The AI takes classic and old pictures and gets them to mouth things. Until a few years ago, you’d have had to pay a team of animators to do this and you’d be looking at a budget as big as next winter’s electricity bill. Now you can do it with what looks like the Revive app, which is only two months old. Turn it up loud, and enjoy. (Many thanks to Victor Z.)
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy. (Most popular link ever: why drowning doesn’t look like drowning.)
Holy cats that's an appealing video! Amazing how much personality comes through in an AI-animated image from master artists.