gift cards to give to thirst traps.
What does he use specifically, though? Facebook, Instagram? OF?
On his phone, right?
I apologize if that’s a weird question, but I’m… scientifically curious. I know lots of folks are susceptible, but I’m interested in the systems that suck folks like your father in.
IMO it’s only a problem when the customer doesn’t understand that they’re buying an illusion.
+1. But I wonder how many know it’s an illusion.
I’m the wrong person to analyze this though, as I do not get why people engage in these services. Like, I get roleplaying, I’ve daydreamed or even written out long fantasies, but why would I (for example) pay for some girl to talk it out on the phone?
…Much less gawk at some influencer on Insta?
What’s the point?
I’m always shocked by how LLM illiterate professionals or even leading “science influencers” are.
…But I know why.
It’s on purpose
Literally everything about the most common (Big Tech) interfaces obfuscates everything about them, to the maximum degree, to present them as “sycophantic oracles” and maximize engagement. If that’s all one is exposed to, there is literally no way to get a cold ass bucket of water in the face by peeking under the hood.
It’s all very… anti science.
On a semi related note, see this absolutely unhinged but not wrong rant:
The Conspiracy Against High Temperature Sampling
https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb08b94bce20d5397
It is related. Anyone, even Hank Green, will rely on AI more if they never get a chance to poke it and peel it apart.
Like, if I ware in charge of a university, I would mandate a course where everyone gets a untuned base model in raw completion mode, and gleefully watch the slow realization. “Wait… all “AI” is just this?”
Also:
I’d love to do case studies on the real people at the end of these things.
Like, who is scrolling Facebook and Insta to thirst over algorithmic posts, yet is somehow unaware of the generative explosion?
Do they know, and just don’t care? Do they think they could tell if an image is fake, or is it true unawareness?
What do they do in real life? What are their relationships like?
How does this system work.
I think it’s easy to assume they’re all basement dwellers or whatever, but one could stereotype Lemmy the same way, and that’s just not true.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, such studies must exist. I don’t want to fall into the “I didn’t even try to search for the answer” thing.
But all this has happened so fast. And clearly the studies aren’t being acted on…
I ran into a Discord where the sole topic was running hot girl “AI influencers” on Instagram. Literally hundreds of thousands of people thirsted over them, and the operaters made real money.
Their systems were pretty sophisticated. The whole process is automated; LLMs write the posts and do sexy DMs, imagegen and videogen models and such do the sexy images and videos, controlnet keeps the look consistent-enough between media. LLM agents press all the buttons. I think there may have even been OnlyFans stuff.
So a single operator could run dozens of bots.
…It’s not hard for these models, either. DMs and short Insta posts are stupidly simple language, and media of sexy people in clothes, doing insta-style poses, probably makes up most of the image/video model training corpus.
I think there was some engagement farming with other bots, of course, but it would snowball and turn organic. Real Instagram users were thirsting over these bots.
…It got me thinking.
Is it really that different from a parasocial relationship with a “real” influencer?
I mean, functionally, its exactly the same. The users can’t even tell the difference.
I posit that the whole “thirst” influencer system was broken and exploitive to everyone involved, except Facebook.
It was fucked up to begin with.
AI just made it more obvious to onlookers. It destroyed the pretense that any of it was “real.”
It’s ironic. Windows went on AI, not just visibly with Cortana, but under the hood too. For example, they spent a ton developing ONNX, even before “AI” was everywhere, and still push it as a format.
Same with the vendors. AMD NPUs (for instance) were only supported on Windows forever; I think they still are. Same with Intel’s.
…And yet Windows is basically useless for local AI, compared to linux.