Opening up a whole new dimension of adtech personalization/engagement here... more evil brainstorming:
- electronic billboards on the bus corner start doing this while walking down the street
- your favorite peacock sitcom starts injecting your friends or recent vacation locations or friends' recent vacation locations on the main character's digital picture frame. Your buddy recently went to Sandals Resort in Jamaica? Now that's going to be emphasized in the unused screen real estate in the background of the bar scene to play on your fomo.
- hell, sporting games already have digital billboards on the field barriers that are customized for different markets / broadcasters... why not customize them further for the individual stream
I've always wondered about that scene: does everyone around him see him in the ads as well? If so, that would mean that they're appropriating his image to sell to others. Perhaps they're laser / audio projections, so each person only sees their own ad.
Truly one of the most prophetic movies in recent memory. It started out innocently enough with people just stealing the gestures and UIs from the film. But we have now progressed to also taking the highly targeted and personalized advertising coupled with mass surveillance and even the idea of precrime that is now being built around AI as if that is more accurate than the fantastical psychics of the movie. Just another example of us creating the torment nexus.
About 4 years ago I was at a VC pitch day and one of the teams rehearsing their pitch before hand was basically proposing this for augmented reality. I was mildly horrified that people saw that sort of thing as something people would want, but hey - $$$ is all that matters right? I really hope those folks never got funded.
Standard internet outrage bait. There are no ads in the photos. The person uploaded their photo to Meta AI's "imagine me" feature which generates photos of you in exotic situations, and now the company is...putting them in exotic situations. That's literally what it is for.
It's technically opt-in. You have to use their image generator, which requires agreeing to this "images appear in your feed randomly" feature implicitly. [0] You think you're just generating 1 photo, but you're actually signing up to a service that generates photos and adds them to your instagram feed. Even their help docs don't mention that nuance though. [1] It's not technically an ad, even though it mostly functions like one since the purpose of these images isn't anything more than bait to get the user to use meta ai more... I guess.
It is still weird. Imagine you try out Photoshop online with your private photos. A few minutes later, you start seeing ads with those same photos edited in different ways. Even if those ads are visible only to you, it will still feel pretty creepy.
No, the person uploaded their photo to Meta AI to get a picture with some background, once. They then started seeing ads for MetaAI offering to generate more images of them, for a cost. Only the ads were still using their face from the photo they only uploaded once.
This is like using an online photo editing tool once, and then seeing ads to that photo editing tool show up on the internet, still using the image you up loaded that one time.
I’ve developed a habbit of automatically downvoting the top comment on most popular submissions because more often than not they are always some knee-jerk, often stupid contrarian reaction to the submission.
I don’t know when this trend started but I don’t remember it being this bad in the past.
I completely agree, and I'm baffled that so many miss the point, and/or subscribe to the original outrage. This is the same as someone uploading a photo, adding a filter, and later the application itself suggesting another filter, with a preview.
I do think that Meta, and others should be grilled to hell and back - but this particular situation is not noteworthy at all. Goes to show actually, how important PR is - the thing, and its public perception are completely separated, and so, needs its own management. Even if the thing in question is a tech thing on a tech forum.
but putting that aside meta does give themself the right to use your face for ads and has used it and has won law suites about it before (through the cases I was aware of are quite old, i.e. before various right to be forgotten laws or GDPR).
So if they want to use your face to create an bot account to "increase engagement" they probably can do so without (legal) repercussions.
What nobody mentions about "only you can see this" is that "you" refers to ordinary users of the service and there is no mention if employees are included in that grouping. It has happened before that systems secure from the public were misused by persons with privileges within the organization.
The obvious response is "well, yeah. So? They need it." but that's not how ordinary people, who don't deal with this daily, think. When they see "only you can see this" I think they take it literally.
The computer is always watching and sometimes so are the people running the computers.
That's... not an ad? User used Meta AI to touch up a selfie, now Meta AI is generating more selfies for you.
I can understand the annoyance from cross-linking apps in the same way it's annoying to get the Threads popup in your feed, but really, this is utter clickbait.
kind of an interesting question -- are product nudges ads? like when there's a button to use a paid feature which pops up on top of a different button, is it an ad? it's not third party.
I mean it really is an ad, just an ad for one of Meta’s own products. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is quite literally an ad where one team is winning the ad auction to place these into the feed.
I'll play some defence for them here. You were playing with Meta's AI face tool, and now it's taken some results from that and swapped them in where ads would usually go. I'm assuming they don't do this if you just uploaded photos to Facebook/Instagram, you seemingly gave them a picture with the direct intent of them using it to make AI images.
It doesn't seem that much different from when I'm typing a chat reply in Snapchat and it starts automatically suggesting stickers with mine and my friends' faces doing silly things with cartoon bodies. Or using my avatar to try and upsell me to their premium subscription. Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
I instantly revoked Facebook's access to my photos a few years back, when it had taken photos from my camera roll and put it into my feed with a "do you want to share this"? I was browsing on the subway, and did not expect a medical picture of me showing up for everyone there to see. And I realized facebook as well could do what they wanted with my pictures.
I suspect the eventual goal is to get citizens to train their own AI avatars, and then those avatars will be used to market to the citizens, to do market research, product research, manipulate politicians, etc. Will you click through letting them do what they want with an AI simulation of you? It starts with a photo. The "next big thing" is agents they say, a personal AI that you train to do things for you. And which incidentally builds an AI simulation of you, the ultimate training data for large models. You are the (AI training) product.
> Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
OK. In fact, I'll do better than that. I won't interact with any of their products or services in any way, including blocking all their domains several times over in various browser extensions.
Snapchat, too.
Actually I used my time machine to implement it already.
How much surreal harassment will you people put up with?
It's only a matter of time before this gets put into the programmatic ad formats where you can do individual level targeting. The advertiser won't ever have to see your image as meta will offer it as a service. More importantly, just like things like pmax (google's current optimization product), your account manager will heavily incentive you towards running these AI campaigns.
I'd say this is common wisdom on sites like HN, very much not outside the tech bubble. I can immediately bring to mind a good number of non-tech family members who would be completely freaked out by this.
Meta AI asks permission to do this, but note that in some U.S. states personal publicity rights end upon death. Isn't it hilariously Wallacian that this technology can be used to make targeted ads featuring the viewers deceased loved ones?
So, I had a terrific loss of the love of my life. I don't know how, but am seeing ads that literally resemble her likeness and it's happened more then once. Not look alike but her. Once I found out photobucket was training its AI on users photos, I removed them all and uploaded them to Google photos and now on youtube I'll see an add for a college and there she is dressed up graduation dress and colors of the college (a local) college.its like these evil companies are rubbing it in my face I'm thinking of getting a flip phone my heart is broken and continues to be everytime she pops up in an ad even though I know it's impossible to be her, the data analytics companies know of us through whatever our unique IDs are, picture scans or whatever the case and now they are breaking my heart daily and it's been over a year and I'm still mourning barely making it thru my days only to have her keep popping up how evil
Readit News
- electronic billboards on the bus corner start doing this while walking down the street
- your favorite peacock sitcom starts injecting your friends or recent vacation locations or friends' recent vacation locations on the main character's digital picture frame. Your buddy recently went to Sandals Resort in Jamaica? Now that's going to be emphasized in the unused screen real estate in the background of the bar scene to play on your fomo.
- hell, sporting games already have digital billboards on the field barriers that are customized for different markets / broadcasters... why not customize them further for the individual stream
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ
Deleted Comment
Welcome to our new dystopian hellscape.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-face-images-instagra...
[1] https://www.meta.com/help/artificial-intelligence/imagine/?s...
"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?
This is like using an online photo editing tool once, and then seeing ads to that photo editing tool show up on the internet, still using the image you up loaded that one time.
> You can turn this feature off and delete your setup photos in Meta AI settings at any time.
https://m.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/1108543930466238
I don’t know when this trend started but I don’t remember it being this bad in the past.
Dead Comment
I do think that Meta, and others should be grilled to hell and back - but this particular situation is not noteworthy at all. Goes to show actually, how important PR is - the thing, and its public perception are completely separated, and so, needs its own management. Even if the thing in question is a tech thing on a tech forum.
but putting that aside meta does give themself the right to use your face for ads and has used it and has won law suites about it before (through the cases I was aware of are quite old, i.e. before various right to be forgotten laws or GDPR).
So if they want to use your face to create an bot account to "increase engagement" they probably can do so without (legal) repercussions.
Dead Comment
Feels more like it generated more than the user asked for and now it’s just showing those images in their feed.
The obvious response is "well, yeah. So? They need it." but that's not how ordinary people, who don't deal with this daily, think. When they see "only you can see this" I think they take it literally.
The computer is always watching and sometimes so are the people running the computers.
I can understand the annoyance from cross-linking apps in the same way it's annoying to get the Threads popup in your feed, but really, this is utter clickbait.
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Deleted Comment
It doesn't seem that much different from when I'm typing a chat reply in Snapchat and it starts automatically suggesting stickers with mine and my friends' faces doing silly things with cartoon bodies. Or using my avatar to try and upsell me to their premium subscription. Don't give them a picture of your face to mess around with if you don't like them messing around using a picture of your face.
OK. In fact, I'll do better than that. I won't interact with any of their products or services in any way, including blocking all their domains several times over in various browser extensions.
Snapchat, too.
Actually I used my time machine to implement it already.
How much surreal harassment will you people put up with?
I recently had someone stunned (actually, truly stunned) that I didn’t have Instagram.
I spent 5 minutes looking at it years ago, and deleted it - and have never regretted that decision.
Notably, I’m also unsurprisingly no fun at parties.
Deleted Comment
While this example was unexpected, it was predicted (Minority Report et al.) and is very much in line with their MO.