8,855 long-form Facebook posts from various users using a 3rd party. The dataset spans from 2018 to November 2024, with a minimum of 100 posts per month, each containing at least 100 words.

seems like thats a good baseline rule and that was about the total number that matched it

With apparently 3 billion active users

Only summing up 9k posts over a 6 year stretch over 100 words feels like an outreach problem. Conclusion could be drawn that bots have better reach

Not my Annie! No! Not my Annie!

each post has to be 100 words with at least 100 posts a month

how many actual users do that?

And 58.82% are likely generated by human junk then.

I have no idea because I don’t use the site

My brother gave me his Facebook credentials so I could use marketplace without bothering him all the time. He's been a liberal left-winger all his life but for the past few years he's taken to ranting about how awful Democrats are ("Genocide Joe" etc.) while mocking people who believe that there's a connection between Trump and Putin. Sure enough, his Facebook is filled with posts about how awful Democrats are and how there's no connection between Trump and Putin - like, that's literally all that's on there. I've tried to get him to see that his worldview is entirely created by Facebook but he just won't accept it.

In my mind, this is really what sets social media apart from past mechanisms of social control. In the days of mass media, the propaganda was necessarily a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. Now, the pipeline of bullshit can be custom-tailored for each individual. So my brother, who would never support Trump and the Republicans, can nevertheless be fed a line of bullshit that he will accept and help Trump by not voting (he actually voted Green).

I don't use the site either but 100 words is a lot for a facebook post

That laptop lol.

I'm not necessarily saying they're conflicting goals, merely that they're not the same goal.

The incentive for the generator becomes "generate propaganda that doesn't have the language chatacteristics of typical LLMs", so the incentive is split between those goals. As a simplified example, if the additional incentive were "include the word bamboo in every response", I think we would both agree that it would do a worse job at its original goal, since the constraint means that outputs that would have been optimal previously are now considered poor responses.

Meanwhile, the detector network has a far simpler task - given some input string, give back a value representing the confidence it was output by a system rather than a person.

I think it's also worth considering that LLMs don't "think" in the same way people do - where people construct an abstract thought, then find the best combinations of words to express that thought, an LLM generates words that are likely to follow the preceding ones (including prompts). This does leave some space for detecting these different approaches better than at random, even though it's impossible to do so reliably.

But I guess really the important thing is that people running these bots don't really care if it's possible to find that the content is likely generated, just so long as it's not so obvious that the content gets removed. This means they're not really incentivised to spend money training models to avoid detection.

I was wondering who Facebook was for, good to know AI has low standards

Dead internet theory

My number also assumes one post per person so it’s overestimating the %

chat bots have been a thing, for a long time. I mean, a half decently trained Markov can handle social media postings and replies

In the last month it has become a barrage. The algorithms also seem to be in overdrive. If I like something I get bombarded with more stuff like that within a day. I'd say 90% of my feed is shit that has nothing to do with anyone I know.

The other 60% are old people re-sharing it.

and, is the jury already in on which ai is most fuckable?

Deleted my account a little while ago but for my feed I think it was higher. You couldn't block them fast enough, and mostly obviously AI pictures that if the comments are to be believed as being actual humans...people believed were real. It was a total nightmare land. I'm sad that I have now lost contact with the few distant friends I had on there but otherwise NOTHING lost.

I'd tell you, but my area network appears to have already started blocking DeepSeek.

I'm a big fan of a particularly virtual table-top tool called Foundry, which I use to host D&D games.

The Instagram algorithm picked this out of my cookies and fed it to Temu, which determined I must really like... lathing and spot-wielding and shit. So I keep getting ads for miniature industrial equipment. At-home tools for die casting and alloying and the like. From Temu! Absolutely crazy.