a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service | The company uses “phone farms” of AI-generated accounts and advertises: “Never pay a human again.”
https://www.404media.co/a16z-backed-startup-sells-thousands-of-synthetic-influencers-to-manipulate-social-media-as-a-service/
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“Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in clear violation of policies for all major social media platforms.
“Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims [sic],” the company’s site says. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know exactly how its service works, but the company appears to be pitching a service designed to circumvent many of the methods social media platforms use to detect inauthentic behavior. It uses AI to generate social media accounts and posts, with a human doing 5 percent of “touch up” work at the end of the process.
On a podcast earlier this month, Doublespeed cofounder Zuhair Lakhani said that the company uses a “phone farm” to run AI-generated accounts on TikTok. So-called “click farms” often use [hundreds of mobile phones](https://www.cnn.com/style/vietnam-farms-jack-latham-beggars-honey?ref=404media.co) to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason. Lakhani said one Doublespeed client generated 4.7 million views in less than four weeks with just 15 of its AI-generated accounts.
Marc Andreessen, after whom half of Andreessen Horowitz is named, also sits on Meta’s board of directors. Meta did not immediately respond to our question about one of its board members backing a company that blatantly aims to violate its policy on “authentic identity representation.”
Everyone needs to look into a16z and see who’s involved. It’s insane.
“Never pay a human again” <<- you see this bit , we used to get gaslit and called a conspiracy theorist for pointing this bit out in the past.
This is his fake consent is created and now they don’t need the village idiots.
They’re 10 years behind Russia and, to a smaller extent, China. Russia has been controlling the narratives in America for over a decade with extreme success. The more automated and streamlined the process, the more effective they have become. With the arrival of chatbots that make them indistinguishable from native speakers, their success has been off the charts.
Bot Farms is already a thing in Asia, been a thing for years. I guess no one hides anymore.
Social media is the one thing I’m extremely accelerationist about, so I wish them tons of luck and will be praying for a future of desolate ghost town platforms with only cellphones in datacenters yammering bullshit to each other.
This isn’t new (as far as services go) – but it does kind of confirm the dead internet theory
Come on, Abania has overplayed everyone)) just check out this news on Albania’s AI minister’s “pregnancy” with 83 children, one for each member of the Parliament. First I thought they smoke some glamorous weed, but when I read the article it actually turned out thry mean it: https://www.news18.com/world/albanias-ai-minister-pregnant-with-83-children-pm-edi-ramas-bizarre-announcement-ws-l-9659877.html