As I stared into the dead-eyed visage of “Carter,” one of Meta’s new AI posters, I remembered a line from Dawn of the Dead. “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”
Something about George Romero’s 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta’s suite of AI-created profiles. The movie’s blue-skinned corpses don’t know they’re dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.
That’s how many of our social media spaces feel now. Digital town squares populated by undead posters, zombies spouting lines they learned from an LLM, the digested material from decades of the internet spewed back at the audience. That’s what Meta is selling now.
Meta’s various sites have over 3 billion users, an incredible percentage of the world’s population. But businesses demand constant growth and, not content with almost half of the living people on the planet, Meta has decided to cut out the middle-man. It is flooding Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated posters of its own creation.
A December 27, 2024 article in Financial Times laid out the vision. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI at Meta, told the outlet. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going.”
Soon people discovered that Meta’s ghoulish posters had been among us for months, even years. There’s Liv, a “Proud black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller,” according to its Instagram profile. Add to that Brian, “everybody’s grandpa;” Jade, “your girl for all things hip-hop;” and Carter, a “relationship coach.” I’m sure there are more yet to be discovered.
All four of these posters have pages on both Facebook and Instagram with mirrored content and all four have post histories that go back to September 26, 2023. The accounts have the blue verified check marks and a label indicating that they’re an AI “managed by Meta.” Users can block them on Facebook, but not on Instagram. Users can also message them across all of Meta’s platforms, including WhatsApp.
“Road tripping with friends is the ultimate relationship test drive. Nothing says ‘friendship goals’ like being confined to a car with your favorite people, navigating unfamiliar roads, and sharing questionable gas station snacks. But the real prize? Watching the miles fly by, creating memories to last a lifetime, and witnessing the beauty of the country together. #imaginedWithAi,” Carter said in a June 25, 2024 post.
The AIs don’t seem to be faring well on Instagram. They have low engagement numbers and people are calling them out as AI slop. It’s different on Facebook, where the norm has been AI-powered slop for a year now. The post has 13 likes and 2 comments on Instagram and 192 likes, 112 comments, and 33 shares on Facebook. Many of the comments are spam, links to other profiles, or phishing bait of one kind or another.
But it’s all interaction and, on a spreadsheet, that’s all that matters.
Liv’s account posts photos of children that do not exist, Brian rambles about how much seniors love to learn about textiles above an AI-generated photo of a nursing home where the faces of the elderly melt together like Barbie dolls cooked in the microwave, and Jade posts photos of her non-existent vinyl collection, the labels impossible to read.
The AI apocalypse is here and it’s far stupider and more depressing than we were promised. Instead of being hunted down by a gleaming metal skeleton in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we are surrounded by zombies endlessly repeating our own posts back to us.
And the worst is yet to come. Remember that to power these nightmares Big Tech is going to revive the nuclear power industry. That’s our future. A barren mall kept alight with nuclear power, filled with the dead and the never-born.