I never had a personal Facebook account but do spend time on the blog's account because I am fascinated by what Facebook does to harvest attention and create stickiness. While there are many shiny things littered on the surface and only needs infinite scrolling to distract and waste time, I have yet to come across a single thing of real value that I discovered by way of Facebook. The notion that it now represents the zombie internet makes good sense to me.
It is reductive to call Facebook the “Dead Internet.” There are real people on Facebook, and real people are being fed this content. The images themselves are being made by AI at the direction of real humans who have learned that spam can be monetized. Real humans at Facebook the company are choosing not to or are not equipped to take action on these accounts or this type of content, which now makes up an unknown but significant portion of content on the site. AI spam, as well as the specter of AI content, is impacting how real people use Facebook and perceive reality more broadly. Facebook itself is shoving its own AI features down people’s throats, and has made clear that it is going to continue spending billions of dollars on AI features that it intends to make core to its products and business model.
One reason all of this works is people need to escape reality from time to time - some for longer than others. It matters little if the content is real or fake, human or AI-generated. Bizarre is entertaining and can provide much needed escape. If bots are chatting with each other and producing a stream of semi-realistic content, it only helps the cause of escapism. A human who's account all this is being streamed to has to even less than they had to do before. There is no need to even participate in the flow because everything is self-sustained. Until the "real" world offers a quality of experience that exceeds what the zombie internet can provide, Facebook will continue to come ahead.
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