Meta AI Launches This Month’s Featured Flavor of Techno-Dystopia and It’s a Kendall Jenner Chatbot

Issue #176 | October 12, 2023

It’s been a tough week. I don’t know how other people are coping, but not since September 11th have I felt such sickening dread upon waking up every morning. I don’t want to say anything publicly — well scratch that, I very much do — but fear losing friends, followers, and yes, the passive income of my remaining Patreon subscribers. (Much love to all 13 of you, including mom.)

Thankfully, Meta has come up with a solution to this very problem, just in time: Meta AI is now a feature on both Facebook and Instagram that allows you to chat with your favorite influencer’s AI alter-ego. That’s right, we’ve crossed the “Black Mirror” rubicon and not a moment too soon, in my opinion. Selfless heroes Kendall Jenner and Charli D’Amelio sacrificed whole hours of their time to sit in a recording studio for millions of dollars just so we can all finally indulge our worst parasocial media habits with an AI-generated chatbot. But not any chatbot: a VERIFIED chatbot, with a timeline of your favorite Internet content creator’s deepfakes that has been officially approved and licensed! So that’s fun!

These fictionalized AI versions of famous people will respond, 24/7! That’s what they are literally built for.

Seriously: Tell them your dreams, your secrets, your fears, your mother’s maiden name, your social security number. They won’t judge you. They’re not even AI versions of themselves, but rather “Personas” with distinct character traits that serve as some kind of meta (Meta?) ironic commentary on the concept of internet celebrity. Kendall Jenner is yoursisbillie, an older sister/confidant who has always got your back, which is different than in real life, where I’m pretty sure she’s one of the younger ones. Youngest? Who knows, I’m not venturing back from my Internet sabbatical to fact-check Jenner-Kardashian lineage. You guys do your own research.

MrBeast is comedyzach, the “big brother who is always here for all the jokes, the banter and not the feels,” which is how we know this is a pretend person and not the ACTUAL MrBeast, who has famously never said anything remotely funny, ever. Paris Hilton is amberthedetective who is “on the case.” Actually, that one is perfect, no notes. Snoop Dogg is meethedungeonmaster; in real life, Snoop Dogg thinks Dungeons & Dragons is for dorks.

THE COMMENTS SECTION

“Meta’s AI Personas aren’t as harmless as they seem. Kids will confide in these fake influencers, thinking they’ve found friends, putting their data at risk. Kids having fake AI friends is bad enough, but the thought of what Meta will do with this sensitive data is terrifying.”
—Twitter user Jake Denton (@RealJDenton) on the dangers of Meta’s AI Personas.

I can sort of squint and see the appeal: We’ve made peace with the cognitive dissonance required for influencers to exist in the first place. Consuming content is intimacy aspartame: not a market substitute, doesn’t taste the same, deteriorating our health… but there’s a reason why I’m sitting here trying to make a belabored metaphor while staring at this Diet Canada Dry.

And if starring in our own pseudo-IRL fan fiction isn’t making good on the Internet’s futuristic sci-fi promise, then I don’t know what will. (If memory serves, not crypto, NFTs, Bored Apes, or hanging out in the Metaverse sans legs.)

Add to that layer of headiness the fact that these AI influencers are different “characters” than their IRL counterparts, which forces us to acknowledge that we understand influencer personas as a role they play, and have no problem accepting them going by a different name and identity, talking completely differently, as long as we can stare at their profile photo and imagine its MrBeast speaking to us.

But I have some concerns, and a lot of questions. Questions like: Why do these characters get billed as your older sibling? What does that do for us, as fans? Thinking that people want their AI pretending to be influencers pretending to be an older sister who only exclusively interacts with them through Instagram is the single worst case of millennial mindworms I’ve seen in a hot minute.

But that’s just the superficial stuff: What’s really concerning is the implications for users of Meta’s social platforms. While these weblebrities got paid obscene amounts of money for a finite two-year contract as a Persona, Meta’s already gone and announced the loud part out loud: The goal here is for EVERYONE to soon have their own digital avatar, not just the rich and famous and technically not scabbing, I guess, since social media is not a struck studio. (But seeing as how SAG is fighting at this very moment for contract protections against studios using their digital likeness for AI replication in perpetuity, the mega-influencer deal brokered for the initial Personas roll-out flagrantly flies in the face of the strike’s spirit, if not literal letter of the law.)

The problem is, when it comes to compensating creators, there’s precedent for the AI influencer bait-and-switch. That’s what happened over at Fanhouse, a Patreon/OnlyFans comp whose story plays out like every cautionary tale of aughts startups: Founded by creators, the company was successful and solvent right up until it took on $20 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz in 2020. Under pressure from its investors to deliver exponential growth, Fanhouse began quietly testing out other products. One happened to be AI content, which the platform trained using top creators who were paid to create virtual versions of themselves. Those avatars, it was pitched, could then be used by the creators themselves to generate extra income in the form of bonus content. What could go wrong?

A lot, actually. Co-founder Rosie Nguyen announced her resignation via a shade-filled Twitter thread mere hours before it was announced that the company had been sold to Passes, an AI girlfriend generator, which promptly got rid of the platform’s terms and services. For users who hadn’t been approached to work on the AI side project, there was a well-founded concern about Passes and its founder Lucy Guo’s intention for the technology. There was also, after the Fanhouse sale and despite the word of its new owner, no way for users to opt out of the service. Understandably, creators felt this to be a huge violation, as there was now the potential for Passes to create AI nude dupes of Fanhouse creators, performing endlessly in any manner of NSFW content, without compensation or consent.

In no reality does Mark Zuckerberg, the greatest information scraper of our era, not look at the Fanhouse experiment and say: yes. He’s already doing it. He’s telling you it’s being done. You can talk to Billie or Zack right now and see the proof is in the digital pudding. This is the horrifying realization of our sci-fi Internet’s promise: that it’s bad is a given, what’s worse is how insipid and stupid our timeline’s version of even the worst crypto horrors could be. Vapid. No Neos in sight. I didn’t even get to learn kung-fu.

– Drew Grant, Managing Editor

NOTED BY LON HARRIS

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IN THE BIZ

Threads unveiled an exciting update, introducing both an edit feature and the new Voice Threads, offering these features for free, in contrast to X.
Kick is expanding its Creator Incentive Program by announcing the 50 streamers in its second class. These streamers will receive hourly compensation based on their followers and watch time.
YouTube has introduced a feature allowing creators to incorporate multi-language audio tracks for audio descriptions in their videos. U.S.-based creators now also have the ability to display their preferred pronouns on their channel pages.
For World Mental Health Day, TikTok unveiled enhanced support features, such as improved access to mental health organizations and creator initiatives focused on promoting mental wellbeing-related content.