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As he gazed into the dead-eyed face of “Carter“, one of Meta’s new AI posters, I remembered a line from The dawn of the dead. “When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”
Something about George Romero’s 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a mall feels resonant today as I look through the Meta suite of AI-created profiles. The movie’s blue-skinned corpses don’t know they’re dead. They just wander through the mall on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That’s how many of our social media spaces feel right now. Digital city squares populated by undead posters, zombies spitting lines they learned from an LLM, the material digested by decades of the Internet spewed back to the audience. That’s what Meta is selling now.
The various Meta sites have more than 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world’s population. But companies require constant growth and, not satisfied with almost half of the people living on the planet, Meta decided to cut out the middle man. He floods Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated posters of his own creation.
An article from December 27, 2024 in the Financial Times presented the vision. “We expect these AIs to actually exist, over time, in our platforms, a bit like accounts,” Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI at Meta, he told the outlet. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and they’ll be able to generate and share AI-powered content on the platform. . . . that’s where we see everything happening.”
Soon people discovered that Meta’s gruesome posters had been with us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer mom of 2 and truth teller,” according to her Instagram profile. Add to that Brian“the grandfather of all;” Jade“your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Cartera “relationship coach”. I’m sure there are even more to discover.
All four posters have pages on Facebook and Instagram with mirror content and all four have post stories that go back to September 26, 2023. The accounts have blue verified signs and a label indicating that they are AI “managed “. from Meta.” Users can block on Facebook, but not on Instagram. Users can also message on all Meta platforms, including WhatsApp.
“The road trip with friends is the ultimate relationship test drive. Nothing says ‘friendship goals’ like being cooped up in a car with your favorite people, navigating unfamiliar roads, and sharing questionable snacks at the gas station . But the real prize? Watching the miles fly by, creating memories to last a lifetime, and witnessing the beauty of the country together,” said Carter in a Posted on June 25, 2024.
AIs don’t look good on Instagram. They have low engagement numbers and people call them AI slop. It’s different at Facebook, where the norm has been AI-powered slop for a year now. The post has 13 likes and 2 comments on Instagram and 192 likes, 112 comments and 33 shares on Facebook. Many of the comments are spam, links to other profiles, or phishing bait of one kind or another.
But it’s all interaction and, on a spreadsheet, that’s all that matters.
The account of Liv post pictures of children that does not exist, Brian rambles about how much seniors like to learn about textiles over an AI-generated photo of a nursing home where the faces of the elderly melt together like microwaved Barbie dolls, and Jade posts photos of herself. non-existent vinyl collectionthe labels impossible to read.
The AI apocalypse is here and it’s much dumber and more depressing than we were promised. Instead of being chased by a gleaming metal skeleton in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we’re surrounded by zombies endlessly repeating our own locations.
And the worst is yet to come. Remember that to fuel these nightmares, Big Tech has to revive the nuclear industry. It is our future. A barren mall kept lit with nuclear energy, filled with the dead and the unborn.
