I think the bigger issue is 65+ guys perving on girls young enough to be their daughters. Old guys who think they are still 25 and have game.
My father has been very insistent on having a health insurance plan that could have a spouse added because he is sure one of the thirst traps he sends gift cards to is going to marry him. My sister had to have a conversation with him about not looking at nudes on his phone while visiting his grandkids.
Ugh. The only consolation my sister and I have is that at least no actual young women are being harassed by him.
The solution? Flood Facebook with AI generated boomers and let the bot system implode and take facebook down with it.
The AI generated boomers are all commenting on political posts and telling us why lefties are wrong and global warming isn’t real.
Not a boomer but I follow a thirst trap guy on youtube who I was always sure was AI (like fully artificial, not based on a real person), but then he posted a really messy video (like imperfect skin, not fully shredded, awful lighting, messy room that didn’t look glamorous) and now I’m no longer sure, like there’s a chance it’s a real guy recording himself then asking AI to make him look flawless. Which means I may have been thirsting over a human all this time, ugh.
The point is I knew AI could improve real videos or generate realistic videos from scratch, but I assumed it was still easy to tell one from the other. Well, turns out either AI is now able to generate messy videos from scratch (that truly look low quality/effort) or it’s able to make real videos look like they were made from scratch. So I genuinely don’t trust myself to distinguish what’s AI anymore. And I’m around 30, so I don’t even have the age excuse.
Which means I may have been thirsting over a human all this time, ugh.
So thirsting over AI is your preference? Eww
lol no I was joking, but I did subscribe to this guy specifically because I was curious about the concept, like I read the comments and I can’t tell if people are role playing or they actually think it’s a real guy (and as I said, it might actually be and I was the actual fool).
I ran into a Discord where the sole topic was running hot girl “AI influencers” on Instagram. Literally hundreds of thousands of people thirsted over them, and the operaters made real money.
Their systems were pretty sophisticated. The whole process is automated; LLMs write the posts and do sexy DMs, imagegen and videogen models and such do the sexy images and videos, controlnet keeps the look consistent-enough between media. LLM agents press all the buttons. I think there may have even been OnlyFans stuff.
So a single operator could run dozens of bots.
…It’s not hard for these models, either. DMs and short Insta posts are stupidly simple language, and media of sexy people in clothes, doing insta-style poses, probably makes up most of the image/video model training corpus.
I think there was some engagement farming with other bots, of course, but it would snowball and turn organic. Real Instagram users were thirsting over these bots.
…It got me thinking.
Is it really that different from a parasocial relationship with a “real” influencer?
I mean, functionally, its exactly the same. The users can’t even tell the difference.
I posit that the whole “thirst” influencer system was broken and exploitive to everyone involved, except Facebook.
It was fucked up to begin with.
AI just made it more obvious to onlookers. It destroyed the pretense that any of it was “real.”
What a lot of people fail to realize is that the whole industry is based on selling a fantasy. It’s no different then getting the girl friend experience from a prostitute. I don’t think there’s a meaningful difference between a real person and an AI in these industries.
IMO it’s only a problem when the customer doesn’t understand that they’re buying an illusion.
IMO it’s only a problem when the customer doesn’t understand that they’re buying an illusion.
+1. But I wonder how many know it’s an illusion.
I’m the wrong person to analyze this though, as I do not get why people engage in these services. Like, I get roleplaying, I’ve daydreamed or even written out long fantasies, but why would I (for example) pay for some girl to talk it out on the phone?
…Much less gawk at some influencer on Insta?
What’s the point?
Also:
I’d love to do case studies on the real people at the end of these things.
Like, who is scrolling Facebook and Insta to thirst over algorithmic posts, yet is somehow unaware of the generative explosion?
Do they know, and just don’t care? Do they think they could tell if an image is fake, or is it true unawareness?
What do they do in real life? What are their relationships like?
How does this system work.
I think it’s easy to assume they’re all basement dwellers or whatever, but one could stereotype Lemmy the same way, and that’s just not true.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, such studies must exist. I don’t want to fall into the “I didn’t even try to search for the answer” thing.
But all this has happened so fast. And clearly the studies aren’t being acted on…
My father is retired, my sister and I have carefully avoided describing AI to him because he would for sure get AI psychosis if he started conversing with a chat bot, his relationships are all unhealthy. My sister and I have made him agree to let us control his retirement income in exchange for bailing him out of a particularly financially devastating one of the many scams he fell for in retirement. We give him a weekly allowance for groceries and prescriptions and gift cards to give to thirst traps.
He is absolutely unaware they are fake, at a core identity level of refusal to grapple with reality. Some combination of he always had some susceptibility to this kind of thing, lost his only close trusted reality check person when he and my mom split up after over twenty years, and aging-related cognitive impairment.
gift cards to give to thirst traps.
What does he use specifically, though? Facebook, Instagram? OF?
On his phone, right?
I apologize if that’s a weird question, but I’m… scientifically curious. I know lots of folks are susceptible, but I’m interested in the systems that suck folks like your father in.
We have to start adopting more accurate terminology for demographics. Most boomers are in their 70s and 80s. The ‘boomer’ shortcut has outlived it’s usefulness. I’m a ‘young’ boomer at 68.
I saw a lot of these so-called boomers at J6. Except that they were in their 30s and 40s. Boomers ain’t scaling walls no more.
Yeah, there’s people other than boomers, there’s gen Jones, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z zoomers
My dad listens to AI generated stories. I still don’t know if he realizes they are Fictional AI stories, or if this is his way of killing time by this instead of listening to audio books. I guess audiobooks take commitment
Dude, AI content is now getting past me. Like all the tells are gone. Audio is clear, what they’re saying makes sense, video doesn’t have any strange artifacts. The only real tell is if the content is too extreme in some form or fashion.
Truth in journalism laws need to come back. We’re moving toward a future where we can only trust what we see or hear irl. I need a way that i can trust a source.
Sounds better than splitting the internet into three and forcing biometric verifications. Although that may end up happening for different reasons, aka a human only internet, a human & AI internet and a mainly AI only internet.
And it’ll happen to you, too!
Maybe, but I wouldn’t be leaving those comments for real women, either. E-girls existed long before AI did. What do these guys think is going to happen? Are these the dudes who go to strip clubs and think that the dancer is going to go home with them?
Cast a wide net mentality
Removed by mod
Good bot
🧩 Why whatever are you talking about—no clankers here! just us fellow skinbags!
Warning: AI assistants can make mistakes. AI assistants may generate inaccurate or harmful content.
I’ve been chewing out boomers I know who read off ai summaries. They don’t even notice the ai summary label.
I wonder, like others here, whether or not the same people posting the AI generated images aren’t also posting responses to make it look as if the images are convincing people they are real… those “life-like” response posts can make the images themselves more convincing, to some people.
Oh you don’t have to wonder. It is shilling and is just about as old as time.
Boomers think supernatural creatures control our fate. Why would we expect them to be capable of determining fiction from reality?
I’d like to see your ‘science’ explain where the missing socks go in the dryer.
The gnomes take them. Duhh. It’s scientifically proven.
100 likes, or even 1000 comments does not establish litterally anything about any demographic.
What the platforms know, but don’t share very easily or at all, is how well established those accounts making the likes and comments are.
There was a time when the Facebook users count was starting to grow past the global human population…
Are we sure all these boomers leaving comments aren’t also bots on Facebook?
They might be there to get the thirst traps traction to get out on all the old creeper’s algorithms in the first place.
A trick Reddit was pioneering all the way back in the late '00s. Drive engagement by using bots to fake engagement.
AI/bots creating content. AI/bots leaving comments.
Wait I’ve heard about this… 😟
Our university’s IT team actually pushed for this last year. AI to generate assignments… students get their own AI to do the assignments… then back to faculty AI to grade andngive feedback… all built into Blackboard and Canvas…
Facebook is bots ONLY. So none of this matters.
in a sense… I know some people like this
Me too, more than one.
I mean most of the influencer bullshit is artificial engagement anyway. People playing a role to entertain, gain attention, make money. If you look at porn comments, they are all dumb so it wouldn’t surprise me that the boomers leaving comments are similarly dumb “roleplaying”, knowing that this is just a fantasy sharing between gooners. They might simply not care if it’s real or not.
Personally I don’t get it, but whatever.
Yes but AI is taking jobs away from real live sex workers. Won’t anyone think about them.
This but unironically.
AI still can’t replace hookers.
…said the self-proclaimed “not-a-robot” named Roomba
Lol
Well, lol. Theoretically with VR headsets and cyberdildonics like automatic fleshlights / masturbators it could come pretty close with the current technology. The kind of looks and environment and dirty talk you want. Obviously it would still be limited.
So AI generated VR porn with cyberdildonics actually could make much of sex work redundant. Theoretically this is a good thing. No human needs to do sex work or porn or onlyfans just for money if they don’t genuinely enjoy doing it.
China already regulated this so that AI chat bots must not create addiction. It’s probably a wise course to follow lol.
So AI generated VR porn with cyberdildonics actually could make much of sex work redundant.
I doubt that the technology is there. Or, if it is, it’s prohibitively expensive.
Theoretically this is a good thing. No human needs to do sex work or porn or onlyfans just for money if they don’t genuinely enjoy doing it.
You honestly don’t believe that there are sex workers who are relying on their job for a paycheck? Why?
ok now this makes me feel bad about my ai use
Well, in a way most of the AI hype (like that you can easily replace office workers with chatbots or that software developers will become 10x more efficient and consequently you can fire 90% of your workforce) are a thirst trap for CEOs.
A bit like selling candy with crack on the schoolground of a primary school…
Not even CEOs, you can see various (at some point failed due to low quality high expenses workforce, that can now be replaced with AI, you get the idea) entrepreneurs and non-techies on Facebook write long excited posts about Claude.
About a computer program and a dataset running completely outside their control and scrutiny. Like white colonizers selling rifles to natives, but not machinery to make those rifles. Or ammunition, but not machinery to produce it. Or colored glass, but not technical processes to make said colored glass.
CEOs are right to be excited, they might be able to afford the real thing - self-hosted and with the accompanying processes, like healthy datasets, experienced people, nuances of adjusting models, stuff like that.
But people who are being shown that they can be replaced sufficiently well by a machine, that has another little trait of being completely adjustable - that I can’t understand.
Someone interested in humanitarian sciences and art being excited that there’s a machine parroting them well enough to replace them, except that machine can also be made to produce those things to fascist ends, - I don’t understand that.
I would like to politely suggest that placing a parenthetical three times longer than the sentence it’s nested in makes that sentence quite difficult to get through.
So, how would you phrase it? (I am assuming you do not want to divert from the argument.)
Well, in a way most of the AI hype is a thirst trap for CEOs - like that you can easily replace office workers with chatbots or that software developers will become 10x more efficient and consequently you can fire 90% of your workforce.
Do it like this:
Well, in a way most of the AI hype is a thirst trap for CEOs — like that you can easily replace office workers with chatbots or that software developers will become 10x more efficient and consequently you can fire 90% of your workforce.
and we’ll know you’re an AI.
