On AI: People need to stop oversharing

Meta's AI Chatbots seem compelled to share your interactions, and that is bad mmmmm'kay. Just say no.

A while back, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (heretofore Zuck) posited that Facebook’s research showed that the optimal number of friends for everyone is 15.

Not fourteen, not sixteen, but fifteen.

The problem is that on average, people have just three meatspace¹ friends, people they can text, go to the movies with, catch a concert with, or hang out at a dive bar with.

I thought that was what Facebook’s core mission was, to connect people and create lasting friendships, but I digress.

Anyhow, a rational person would realize that the solution would be to delete their Facebook account and start doing local things to meet people and to build a real friend-group.

But Zuck ain’t a rational person, as his skin-suit gets worried that real life friends would reduce the amount of data that Meta can Hoover up about everybody.

His answer? A curated set of AI Bots that will be your besties…

So, instead of going out, putting yourself out there, being a bit vulnerable to make human connections, he is advocating that you make a bevy of friends with his Dollar General AI discount bots.

And apparently people are taking him up, and diving in.

Alas, one of the benefits of having friends in meatspace, is that you can confide in them, and if you are truly friends, you don’t fear that they will broadcast that to the masses.

But that confidence is as alien to Facebook as Zuck is a poor analog of a human being.

Ergo: “META AI users confide on sex, God, and Trump. Some don’t know it’s public²” (Gifted link)

A man wants to know how to help his friend come out of the closet. An aunt struggles to find the right words to congratulate her niece on her graduation. And one guy wants to know how to ask a girl — “in Asian” — if she’s interested in older men.

The opening ‘graph is cringe. But, as the late Billy Mays would say there’s more.

In April, Meta launched their stand-alone app to give users a “personalized” and conversational experience, to you know “chat” with. And a lot of users did glom onto it³.

You know what? What people are asking it, confiding in it with, is being shared with their circles on Facebook.

Since the April launch, the app’s discover feed has been flooded with users’ conversations with Meta AI on personal topics about their lives or their private philosophical questions about the world. As the feature gained more attention, some users appeared to purposely promote comical conversations with Meta AI. Others are publishing AI-generated images about political topics such as President Donald Trump in a diaper, images of girls in sexual situations and promotions to their businesses. In at least one case, a person whose apparently real name was evident asked the bot to delete an exchange after posing an embarrassing question.

Christ on a pogo stick, people really don’t think before they post, and they still use the leakiest service to bare their secrets to.

STOP OVER SHARING

I am an AI skeptic. I know that there are some good uses for the technology (if you want to hear what I use it for, drop a comment and I will elaborate) but the improper use of whatever you ask it, what you paste into the prompt, to be used for future tuning and training of the model is really fucking bad.

“We’ve seen a lot of examples of people sending very, very personal information to AI therapist chatbots or saying very intimate things to chatbots in other settings,” said Calli Schroeder, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“I think many people assume there’s some baseline level of confidentiality there. There’s not. Everything you submit to an AI system at bare minimum goes to the company that’s hosting the AI.”

I am not sure why I am surprised that people are just offering up their deepest, darkest thoughts, opinions, and fantasies, but as we’ve seen throughout the arc of the Social Media era, people just overshare either because they lack the internal filter (and all the arguments against PC or politically correct speaking are about people wanting to unleash the worst of their ids) or they are looking for validation of their wonky views, and will just say shit online they would never say face-to-face.

Meta spokesman Daniel Roberts said chats with Meta AI are set to private by default and users have to actively tap the share or publish buttons before it shows up on the app’s discover feed. While some real identities are evident, people are free to pick a different username on the discover feed.

I am sure Daniel is a good corporate doobie, but I would bet my bottom dollar that even if users’ interactions with these chatbots is by default private, I am sure they use exploitative prompts to get the users to “opt in” to sharing.

I mean, Facebook has never done skeevy shit before, amirite?

Literally, the next ‘graph:

Meta’s approach of blending social networking components with an AI chatbot designed to give personal answers is a departure from the approach of some of the company’s biggest rivals. ChatGPT and Claude give similarly conversational and informative answers to questions posed by users, but there isn’t a similar feed where other people can see that content. Video- or image-generating AI tools such as Midjourney and OpenAI’s Sora have pages where people can share their work and see what AI has created for others, but neither service engages in text conversations that turn personal.

This is the biggest understatement of the century (bolded by me). No shit, Facebook and Meta will use everything that you say to them, upload, view, click on, comment on, or even to track you everywhere you go on the internet to assist their advertising side to target you.

This is not surprising. But Facebook is not the sole source of blame here. The whole nature of the chatbots, the engagement farming, the constant pull is psychologically designed to pull users deeper and deeper into the cocoon, and swaddles them in a personal seeming ecosystem that tuns off any natural defenses. And then to monetize that stream is a breach of implicit agreement.

Research shows that AI chatbots are uniquely designed to engage users’ social instincts by mirroring humanlike cues that give people a sense of connection, said Michal Luria, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington think tank.

“We just naturally respond as if we are talking to … another person, and this reaction is automatic,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to rewire.”

This is right, and this is human nature. That said, in personal (that is person to person) interactions, this is the norm. But assigning this “trust” to the Tech giants is no bueno. Naturally Zuck is his usual alien wearing an Edgar costume:

In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel that one of the main reasons people used Meta AI was to talk through difficult conversations they need to have with people in their lives — a use he thinks will become more compelling as the AI model gets to know its users.

“People use stuff that’s valuable for them,” he said. “If you think something someone is doing is bad and they think it’s really valuable, most of the time in my experience, they’re right, and you’re wrong.”

Meta AI’s discover feed is filled with questions about romantic relationships — a popular topic people discuss with chatbots. In one instance, a woman asks Meta AI if her 70-year-old boyfriend can really be a feminist if he says he’s willing to cook and clean but ultimately doesn’t. Meta AI tells her the obvious: that there appears to be a “disconnect” between her partner’s words and actions. Another user asked about the best way to “rebuild yourself after a breakup,” eliciting a boilerplate list of tips about self-care and setting boundaries from Meta AI.

Look, it is fine to ask a chatbot these things. If you want to build a lengthy session with ChatGPT or Claude go nuts. Sure, they’re gonna log it, and use that interchange as a future tuning exercise to improve the responses.

Just do not do it on Facebook’s or Meta’s AI products. They are going to use it the worst way possible, and open you up to embarrassment and ridicule, as they coerce you into making the feed public.

Not cool.

But, while I hinted that ChatGPT and Claude are less egregious, they are not blame free:

In April, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT would be able to recall old conversations that users did not ask the company to save. On X, CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI was excited about AI “systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized.”

The potential pitfalls of that approach became obvious the following month, when OpenAI had to roll back an update to ChatGPT that incorporated more personalization because it made the tool sycophantic and manipulative toward users. Last week, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, said the company intended to keep its privacy commitments to users after plaintiffs in a copyright lawsuit led by the New York Times demanded that OpenAI retain customer data indefinitely.

Not good.

Alas, it seems that our congress critters are falling all over themselves to not exercise any regulations, going so far as to prevent even states and local entities from offering any meaningful legislation to control these behemoths in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In short:

• If you are going to use AI, think about what you put into that prompt. Recognize that it will be saved, tied to your identity, and it will be used to train and tune future models

• Just don’t use Meta products at all. They have consistently proven that they are the fucking worst at any semblance of privacy or even ethics.

• Go out and touch grass. If you want more human interaction, join a club, go to events, and inhabit meatspace. It isn’t that difficult, and technology is NOT a substitute.

• If you are thinking of asking a chatbot (any chatbot) an embarrassing question, realize that it is not guaranteed to be private. If you can, run a local, offline client (Ollama makes this easy if you have enough of a computer).

1. meatspace is in real life, IRL, or face to face. Not intermediated by a social media intermediary

2. My anal self-added the Oxford comma; srsly WaPost figure this shit out…

3. I left Facebook in 2016, and I am amazed at how much better my life is. I hear that it has become fully enshittified. I made the right choice