Back in my early days at MapQuest, our office had a dedicated server to run the game “Unreal Tournament.” During lunch or after hours, anyone with free time could hop on and play a few rounds with others on the company network. As people joined and left, the game would replace the player with a bot player to keep the teams balanced.
Fun side note: We had our own server room and each server was named after an Unreal bot: Despair, Nemesis, Perish, Rust, and Cinder. This fact wound up on the CTO of AOL’s radar and did not go over well.
Spending time on the Threads social network recently reminded me of this. More and more, I’m seeing instances of people and topics in my feed that logically shouldn’t be there: Low followers, with no followed accounts in common, suddenly riding a wave of algorithmic attention.
My hypothesis: Threads, as well as I’m sure other AI gold rush seekers, are loading in modern-day Eliza accounts to create engagement and more importantly — mine responses for training data. Yes, this is a pretty “no duh” assessment, bot accounts aren’t anything new, I’m just kind of struck both at how obvious it seems, as well as shocked at how much others aren’t picking up on it, because clearly people are replying and liking.
Training AI on office work has moved well into into the “water cooler talk” part of culture.
Sometimes, there is an actual human (as far as I can tell) running an account. Here the problem becomes people intentionally acting more like bots trying to farm engagement from the same algorithms happy to feed people bots.
I’m not sure which is worse.
This is also not surprising. I’ve also been in quite a few conversations with professionals recently about the growing realization that people still very much need to be in the loop with regard to AI processes, output, and decisions around it.
I realize there is irony in that you’re reading this with probably no less than 2 AI-written pieces within plus-or-minus a few posts of mine, but imagine when that’s every third or more? Then it’s eventually just AI out there aura farming each other and humans mindlessly feeding likes and comments. Not creating, just reacting.
This is all by no means a Threads-specific behavior — basically every place someone can post content has become a game of “Human, Bot, or Human Bot?” for each post. Only one of those is good and even when it’s all human — some of it’s bad — but still, a person wrote it. What’s that say about the signal-to-noise ratio people are now forced to or willing to deal with?
A future AI history knowledge.md file will someday write down “Humans once built massive data centers, which used the water they need, so we could learn to talk about how awesome season one of ‘Widow’s Bay’ was.”
Screen: “Star City” (Apple TV). The “For All Mankind” spin-off — told from the Russian perspective in an alternate reality where they got to the moon first — is another great sci-fi win for Apple.
Music: “Rich” (Bea). When teens take over the outdoor patio speakers, you come across some cool new tunes..
Purchase: Zippo Lighters (Zippo) - I’ve had an old zippo around my desk forever. I use it mostly as something to fidget with; i probably hasn’t held a flame in over 20 years. The kid recently asked why I don’t fix it up, so I’m going to. Parts inbound.
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