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Your Meta AI Chats Will Soon Influence the Ads You See
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And even if you do you’re roughly 21 years late.
But only if you believe them.
Deleted FB ages ago, and why I won’t touch Gemini with a ten foot pole, and that turd Copilot.
It’s very easy to have the AI lie to you directly and push ads in chat in the guise of providing relevant answers. It’s easier than pinning ads. It’s only a matter of time before Meta/Facebook normalizes the “personalized” chat.
TL, DR: they don't need to listen to your microphone. They don't even need your friends to be on your Wi-Fi. They are connecting those dots and have been for some time. If you think that's creepy, it's probably even creepier than you can imagine.
It doesn't have to be your Wi-Fi (although wifi is nice for them). It can be your general proximity. It can be that you are friends in other places and they are connecting the dots that way.
Our phones may or may not be listening to us for ads, but advertisers figured out how to connect this stuff a long time ago, so they might as well be. There are maps of users and lists of people with interests and associations. And it's all for sale. Ad platforms are using machine learning to connect all the dots and figure out who was where and what they like.
You may not like pottery, but an advertiser may have done something as simple as advertising to your friends, but enabled a checkbox for AI driven audience expansion.
It could also be a simple as being friends with that person on a social platform. Even if you no longer use it, they can use old data to conclude who your relationships are with.
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Well, I will probably never have to worry about this. No META apps for me since 2019.
Yeah, they are awful.
Facebook took away targeting people by health conditions, but they allow advertisers to target people who have interests and associations around those conditions.
For example, I can't target Alzheimer's sufferers, but I can target people who follow the Alzheimer's association and other dementia groups!
...and of course that just happens to include people with that condition and their families. And with audience expansion and other methods, people who are friends of those people.
So scummy.
I'm a techie, but didn't quite "see the light" of why ChatGPT was the beginning of something entirely new.
I've since been listening to many podcasts discussing the very fast evolution of AI over the past 2 years, in the interest of making an informed decision, rather than just get bothered by the "noise".
The truth is— AI is not a fad, not a bubble, and is here to stay. It's being woven into the very fabric of countless industries and into society in ways we previously only saw in Sci-Fi.
My suggestion — let go of the resistance and start listening with an open mind. You don't have to jump on the bandwagon, but don't live with your head in the sand. AI is here to stay, and the world will ultimately be better for it.
Man, the world is in a ton of trouble. This is so crazy. The addiction will hit so hard for a lot of people. But there is no going back
This is true. If only the human race channeled as much energy as it does on sinister and greed into benefiting the species, animals and the planet, we could be so very good. Alas...
I don't know - if you ever need to do any kind of coding, AI is great.
I recently got out of HomeKit for my home automation stuff - started using Home Assistant and then exposing devices back to HK for native iPhone-based control. HomeKit's limitations (in terms of device support and automations) just got to be too annoying, even when using HomeBridge.
The point is, ChatGPT wrote dozens of of automations for me that would've taken me months to do on my own. Claude is also good at this.
Stuff like: mirror my living room light strip's color (in Kelvin, RGB or Mired - Micro Reciprocal Degrees) to my kitchen light strips, and my bedroom (but only if the door is open) and the corner light. But make the corner light's brightness 3-10% higher than the main light strip's brightness (since it's in the corner, it appears slightly more dim), depending on the brightness of the room. And adjust the color temperature of the lights gradually, throughout the day, to match the color temperature of the sun (circadian rhythm).
It would have taken me months to figure all of that out on my own, but I had ChatGPT write the YAML in about 5-10 minutes. Same for scripting stuff on my NAS, writing code for Portainer stack deployments and CloudFlare tunnel configurations, etc.
I hardly ever use Meta apps anymore as it’s descended to an algorithm generated hell with trashy advertising. Only hanging on for my business pages currently, but really, Meta doesn’t generate any income for me so there is no longer any point to social media... Have instead built a comprehensive website and a more traditional marketing plan (online trades business listings, community newsletter ad spots, email, business cards, word of mouth, testimonials, DL brochures, etc). Far less labour intensive to maintain than fluffing around in social media and 1000x more effective. Enquiries have gone up massively and I’m turning down jobs. See ya later Zucker!
There has, to this point in my life, never been a single moment when I found myself wishing I used any Meta platform. There have, however, been many days where I was glad I do not, and today is one of them.
This shouldn't be news to people who use FB, Google, or the like. It was just a matter of time before data scraping would happen for more profit. The sad thing is a lot of people will still move forward allowing this and more to happen. The best thing you can do is get rid of FB, Messenger, and deGoogle yourself.