Why your Facebook feed is filled with errors

 

Vanity Plate of the Day: EVL QU3N driven by a woman in a BMW SUV with a Harvard Alumni license plate holder who absconded with several minutes of her life due to her parking efforts. Truth in advertising at least.

 

Let’s take some time to talk about AI slop today.

 

Now I have to admit that I am in part responsible for this disaster. When I signed up on Blogger two decades ago, I gave Google the right to use whatever I wrote for their nefarious purposes in return for me to not have to figure out how to host a web page. So, in case you ever wonder why your AI result has no idea on how to use a comma, well, that is on me.

 

If you are like me at some point you’ve discovered that your Facebook feed is filled with posts like this one.

 

 

Catch the problem? How in the world does Barry Sanders get listed amongst the tragic history of Lions QBs? It’s such an obvious error that you immediately assume that it had to be made by a computer. What human could recall Gary Danielson but not remember that Barry Sanders was a running back. I’d give a high school student a B- if they handed me this; sure, the infographic looks nice but a simple Wikipedia search would show a major error.

 

This causes some people to believe that AI won’t kill us all because it is clearly stupid. They’re wrong in that AI is going to kill us all but not for this reason. The more disturbing fact is that AI is stupid because we are intentionally training it to be stupid. To understand that I have to explain what I learned during my brief time in marketing.

 

There are multiple types of products. My specialty was the product that I sell you a subscription for, never use, and hopefully forget to cancel the subscription month after month. This is also known as “The Planet Fitness Business Model.” It’s wonderful when it works. Then again, when I came to after having my heart stopped for nearly a minute I was sweating profusely so while I can say it is great for the bottom line it may not be the best for, uh, one’s eternal soul.

 

Another type of product is the free thing that you give out to get attention and then use that attention to sell another product. That is what all of these AI slop posts are. If they were accurate no one would ever pay attention to them because who really needs to discuss the career of Charlie Batch? But, the fact that Barry Sanders is included on the list makes your eyes stop, delay your doom scrolling, maybe even post a comment, and give advertisers a bunch of opportunities to sell you something.

 

So, it is better for the post to be wrong than accurate. Add in formatting errors, wrong pictures, and fancy but inane graphics and you suddenly have a tool for capturing the attention of a consumer. And we’ve trained AI to produce exactly this type of content.

 

That is right. We aren’t training AI to be smart. We are training it to produce output at the level of a lazy high school student so we can shake our head at how bad it is. That momentarily head shake is all that is needed for that next ad post to be read. It is deviously ingenious and this is coming from someone who sold horoscopes for a living. Again, I wish I could say I was joking about the whole cold sweat thing but that was one hundred percent true.

 

If we build social media for engagement then it is best to put in false information that makes people interact and argue about how wrong it is. Ignoring the fact that some people will assume that it has to be right given that it is on the internet with a pretty picture. For some people this leads to a dopamine black hole. For others, it makes the internet nearly useless.

 

I think Gen X falls into the latter category. A subject that I am going to be writing about a lot this month.