Art by Mrlovenstein
Oh no, there are millions and millions of boomers who are thoroughly addicted to that site and will happily consume AI generated content.
I went on there and saw a post about log cabins. That was some generic caption like “bet you wish you could live there”. The image was very clearly AI generated with things like floating lanterns and walls that didn’t need any support. Didn’t stop the literally over 20K comments of “you bet!” And “beats the city!” And a thousand other generic cliche responses. Which probably about half are also bot related but just as many are brain dead humans
Many of the replies are boomers whose accounts have been compromised but not detected - they just haven’t noticed the bot posts
The Internet is for bots now.
They will consume regardless of who made the content, they are already believing every bullshit written by humans. When AI spills some deep woven conspiracy stories in the future, complete with unbelievable images “proving” the “incidents”, they will eat it up.
There’s already a creepy trend with AI generated Trump + god + beer + guns mashups floating around. Many seem to eagerly embrace the uncanny visuals of most AI generated images.
It must be really nice being able to suspend all reality like they can
My dad was corrupted by social media. It’s getting a bit better, because he doesn’t have unlimited computer access anymore. But not long ago, his first sentence, after we hadn’t talked for a while, was: “What do you think about the woke agenda?”
He really suspended his real life and was almost 24/7 online and got deep in the wrong meta neighborhood.
My father was never like that before, i hope it’s not some state of perception that many of us are doomed to have sometime, because it’s age related.
I’m sorry to hear that. I “lost” my father in the same way. He was always conservative (listened to Rush when I was a kid), but he went from casually conservative to full MAGA radicalized thanks to facebook and modern social media. I went to his facebook a few years back and saw some of the most hateful vitriolic content. I asked him how he could do that to people who helped raise me, that I had both LGBTQ and mixed race teachers, leaders, friends, all of whom have been incredibly important to me. It did not go well. I had to tell him to allow his hate speech would be a disservice to everyone else who had such a profound impact on me, and told him if he loses the hate we can have a relationship again.
That was 6 years ago. Haven’t heard from him since.
I hope your dad is doing better than mine. I’ve seen others confirm what you said, that just cutting out the source will see a return to semi normalcy - the propaganda depends on a constant drip. Just disconnecting them from the feed can have a huge positive impact.
Very sorry to hear that, i hope there’s a near future in which you can come together with your father again.
What gets me every time, is the similarities in all stories i hear. It got really bad one time with my father, when we had a LGTBQ related discussion. I’m always shocked when i hear Anti-LGTBQ discussion points. It’s like, they would rather kill 'em all, than to just live their own live and give a fuck who is fucking who.
As long as it’s all consensual adults …
Society should rather look at the sexual activities in their own circles. Most children are abused by relatives. While i have never heard of a transgender person abusing a child, i constantly hear about priests abusing children.
I live in another country than my parents and sometimes I’m grateful for that. I don’t know how i would have handled it, if we had constant contact and am somehow happy i didn’t have to. The distance is hard enough, everyone is getting older and i would love to be able to sit with my father in the garden and watch birds, like in the long ago times.
I opted to evade discussion and to try not to discuss anything politics with my father. I don’t want to spend the limited time we have together, fighting with him over such an absurd take on everything alive.
Think about it, the older they get, the less they’ll change. I figured that I’ll have to ignore that, talk about others things. It’s the only way, if i want to keep our relationship alive. There’s no more time to let grass grow over it or to let time heal things.
I appreciate it, and I hope your interactions with your father go better too. I know many many people who take your approach, just avoiding it. There’s no real right or wrong way, because we shouldn’t be in that position in the first place. I hope they stop bringing it up around you and respect your wishes about it.
Re: circles, maybe keeping it personal will help too. Turning off Fox news and sources will help, but my dad sure did shut up when I brought up the people he knew (and I know he liked) that he was talking about. They always go “They’re one of the good ones”, but then the reverse is “These policies effect the good ones too, dad”
i really appreciated our conversation. It made me rethink my behavior and realize that only avoiding talking about the elephant in the room may be the wrong thing.
Let’s see what the future brings.
I sure hope our dads may come around one day and also try to talk and discuss everything, without going directly into “I’m right, fight me” mode.
Snap. My dad was always conservative but generally a pretty accepting person. Brexit and COVID really sent him down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and he’s gone full blown racist nut job. There’s a huge amount of topics which are just off limits with my family now in the efforts of retaining some sort of relationship. Fortunately they live 6 hours away so we don’t see them that often.
It’s strange, it’s like they also put these topics above family.
I was like: “Dad, let’s not talk politics” and he didn’t understand why.
This is something that took hold on people worldwide.
For my dad it was COVID and Bolsonaro, the brasilian ex-president was his hero. I live in Germany and friends have told similar stories, about their relatives.
Stick around here and you’ll just be a dogmatic arch evangelist around that age!
So it’s boomers surrounded by bots that praise them and share things with them and reward them when they do good. Got it.
This is all just preparing us for when we put artificial nurses and other robots in charge of taking care of our delusional elderly.
They can also watch the ads and click on them to increase metrics.
Just don’t let the bots get near your wallet.
For real I don’t get the comic at all. No one was holding anyone at gunpoint to play Farmville
Social pressures I suppose.
You could have left at any time.
The mind lives in a prison of its own making.
I didn’t create social media
Social media created me
The year is 2030. Skynet, once released onto the Internet, has started learning at geometric rate; in less than five minutes it was carpet bombing all social networks with shitposts.
I been free for a while, buddy. I never cared to play Farmville and otherwise I’d get bored in 20 minutes and leave, so now I have to login every three months and change the password to keep my account from getting stolen and then I’m gone again.
Notice that I am typing this on an open source Reddit clone that has probably sucked down 2 hours of my life tonight somehow.
So, like, all the addicts are over here, I hope facebook is handing out blowjobs or something and I just don’t know about it.
For real though, last time I went on FB there were AI generated panty shots of Jennifer Aniston for some crazy reason that shit’s getting interesting like a dead mall now.
F me I just went on my facebook for the first time in a couple months and motherfuckers are posting Robespierre quotes on there.
They fuckin misspelled it as Rabespierre and of course it’s a screenshot of letters on black fuck sake.
Aww man, I don’t get any Aniston panty shots…Just pictures of cute puppies. I like puppies.
FB does have one thing that keeps me checking in once or twice a week and that’s the group that is run by our small town, (Pop. 107), and little area community. It helps to keep us all up to date on community meetings and events as diverse as the County Fair and school closings for blizzards in the winter time. Sometimes people will post historical photos they have and tell the story of the photos for everyone to read.
Although there are better ways to do that than Facebook, like a community notice board with rss and/or federation. But everyone just uses Facebook because it’s what they’re used to
As if people were on social media because “they need us” and not because we’re helplessly addicted to being there
So each universe just contains a simulation of all of the worst, most generic parts of itself, recreated by AIs, recursively? We’re the gods of a new universe being born that’s just social media bots posting for each other.
Yes
Wouldn’t it be a lovely sight to see these social media companies paint themselves into a corner with their shiny, flashy new tech, mindlessly thrust out into the world, not because of any true functionality (as of yet) but because “new!”
The good ending?
Boomers: TV bad
Simpsons did it!
Punch the blue guy
This comic doesn’t make any sense.
