What exactly is the use case for the fake AI profiles?
It wasn’t that terribly long ago — less than ten years, surely — that I found Instagram to be the most useful of the social media platforms. While I enjoyed Twitter for the snarky banter, and mostly avoided Facebook as it became a cesspool of political toxicity (how quaint that at one time it was Facebook that was most toxic, as compared to the platform I like to think of as a sans serif swastika since the great exodus of users not called WulfBrigade1488), Instagram was where I connected with real people and managed to have actual, real-life experiences.
For example, through a mutual Instagram friend, I connected with a runner from New York City who was trying to do a marathon or half-marathon in every state. I was doing the Twin Cities Polar Dash the same year she was, and we ran together for about 3/4 of it before she sprinted off into the distance so as not to have too abysmal a time on her permanent record. Later, my family met up with her on a trip to the Big Apple, and she gave us a whirlwind tour that included a noodle shop in Queens, a trip on the Roosevelt Island Tramway, and a stop at a shoe store in Chelsea where we just missed bumping into Childish Gambino.
Through other Istagram connections, I found great vegetarian food in San Francisco, fun sites in Costa Rica, and traded tips for things to do in Chicago. It was easy to curate my feed to include just things that interested me — running, hiking, camping, reading, seeing concerts — and I never felt that scrolling through the pictures and stories on Instagram was a soul-sucking void in the way Facebook always was.
At some point, though — probably five or six years after Facebook acquired the platform — it suddenly became much less useful. My feed was filled up with things I definitely didn’t choose — “reels” by “influencers”, political content, and many, many more ads — and it was relatively difficult to banish them from my sight. As it became less and less useful, I spent less and less time there, until a once important piece of my social media diet fell away completely. I would check it once a week, then maybe once a month, in an attempt to catch posts from my son in Brussels or old connections scattered around the world, but pretty much all I saw was junk, much of it clearly generated by AI.
And then I started see articles like this one, about the AI bots that Meta is unleashing on Instagram, and that’s the nudge I needed to finally delete my account. I want nothing to do with a platform that thinks connecting with an “AI character profile” is in any way comparable, or even superior, to connecting with a human being.
And the cherry on top is that the bot that has drawn the most attention, “himamaliv”, claims to be a “proud Black queer momma of 2.” WEARING DIGITAL BLACKFACE AND RAINBOW-WASHING YOUR CREEPY AI IS NOT THE SAME THING AS INCLUSIVITY.
Yes, we absolutely need to hear the voices of “proud Black queer mommas” (and straight mommas, white queers, proud Latinx folx, etc., etc., etc.) — I say that as a lily white cis-gendered 99% straight (Timothée, call me next time you’re in the Twin Cities …) male who tries really hard to read books by people who are none of those things, and to understand the perspectives and experiences of people at every intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. But the voice of an AI bot that claims those labels is not the same thing at all. It’s a deracinated, neutered, artificial, soulless, and entirely creepy corporate maneuver that needs to be seen for the dystopian nightmare it is.
I suppose a case can be made for some sort of “AI character profile” (though for the life of me I can’t imagine what it is), but they ought not to be claiming an identity that doesn’t belong to a corporate entity like Meta. Let robots be robots, and not weird simulacra.
Something this weird and gross is surely, one hopes, a sign that we’ve reached “peak AI,” and the tides of bullshit are going to start to recede, letting humans take center stage in human life once again. Or so I would hope if I believed anymore in hope — it’s more likely that “himamalev” is a harbinger of worse, and weirder, things to come.
