Is FB optimized to kill my time?

post by MrRobot · 2017-11-02T05:51:19.694Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

If you have been using FB pretty frequently for the past few years, have you recently acquired a FB friend who you've never met in real life, but who suddently posts the exact content you love?? (Except just a few posts that are totally weird.)

Well, I think that "friend" is not a real person, and is actually a result of an ML network that was trained on my FB data. FB knows I'm more likely to pay attention to posts from my "friends", instead of ads, so it created bot friends.

(If you don't have a FB friend like that, well, may be it's just just a fluke.)

5 comments

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comment by ChristianKl · 2017-11-03T21:16:30.078Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Facebook bots that impersonate human's exist for the purposes of promoting various articles and facebook pages by liking them.

There no reason to call them AGI's.

There's also no reason to invent conspiracy theories and I don't want this kind of content on this website.

comment by Kazi Siddiqui (kazi-siddiqui) · 2017-11-02T06:16:11.400Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes. Sources: 1 2

comment by MrRobot · 2017-11-02T06:27:14.919Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Additional note on the person: my "friend"'s posts are mostly liked only by me. It's like he doesn't have any other friends who like his posts......

Replies from: kazi-siddiqui
comment by Kazi Siddiqui (kazi-siddiqui) · 2017-11-02T08:44:05.438Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Your friend is not an AI, but FB's algorithm did bring you two together because it is optimized to have both of you spend as much time online as possible.

comment by MrRobot · 2017-11-02T06:46:21.768Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

When did "don't talk to strangers online, they might kidnap you" become "don't talk to strangers online, it might be the AGI"?