Comment by paxys
1 year ago
Either I'm crazy or everyone else here is.
"I asked Meta AI for photos of myself and it started advertising Meta AI by showing me photos of myself."
How does this "function like" an ad? Why are we even using the word ad? This is not how ads work. By this definition what isn't an ad?
These are newly generated images, not promoted by you, shown in your feed. That’s the true “service” on offer here, images are generated for you and put on your timeline.
But the UI to sign up for this service looks like a “type in the text box, get an image” sort of service. It also doesn’t mention this instagram integration, other than requiring you to log in with a meta account.
You still get to make your own promoted images, so that’s marginally useful.
The main weirdness is it making its own images, on your behalf.
If you get value from random slop images with no particular theme, then cool. You can look at them as they show up.
But really, these are just throw away assets. It’s just meant to get you to click thru into the meta.ai upsell this links to.
It’s not quite an ad… because technically… it did something for you? There’s some implication that this random feed of useless images of you is… valuable. So it’s a service you accidentally walk into using, that just happens to redirect you to meta.ai when you click on it.
It's absolutely still an ad; ads sometimes include samples, like when they hand out small bites in the supermarket, those might be tasty ads, but they are still ads.
It's not an ad. It's someone trying to figure out what to do with the crap ton of GPUs they've been allocated and told to find some way to show metrics for usage going up, up, up, and the only way they can think to accomplish that is to get people to use them with zero interaction, since basically nobody cares to engage with the features otherwise.
Gotta say, this first batch of released AI features for the masses has been deeply underwhelming. Custom emojis and random pictures of me in random situations in some feed where the only reason I'm not scrolling past it is that it's a picture of me I don't remember being in hardly seems worth the valuations the stock market has been giving these things.
I suspect that if there was a way to clean up the metrics to see only what people actually wanted to engage with with these AI products, it would pop the bubble instantly. So much gaming the metrics by forcing it on people then claiming victory for the AI.
(I don't use LLMs for coding but at least that has a very clear value proposition. Search is nice now, but mostly because conventional search was ruined with malice aforethought... search AIs will follow soon enough. Enjoy that honeymoon while you can.)