In 2023 Mark Zuckerberg is all about artificial intelligence. Just look at how many times he said “AI” at the company’s Connect Conference in September.
With all the hype surrounding AI, Facebook last week introduced a new feature on Messenger that lets users create AI-generated stickers. Of course, within a week of it going live, people were, unsurprisingly, using it to make absurd “art”.
First of all, we present “Mark Zuckerberg kills god”:
Art? Art.
What’s all this about? Meta, as part of the Connect Conference last month, introduced AI stickers across its family of apps including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The feature uses technology from Meta’s own large language model (LLM), Llama 2, and AI art generator Emu to create these AI stickers.
So innovative, much technology! We wonder what sort of masterpieces the billions of Facebook users are going to come up with? Oh … “Karl Marx large breasts” and “Trudeau buttocks”.
Others include “pregnant Shrek”, “Elmo knife”, and “Giving birth Pikachu”. All of them look fairly realistic, if you ask us.
The above tweet went viral on X, and soon, more users hopped on Messenger to unleash their creativity. Here’s another series of AI stickers by a user showcasing their artistic interpretations of world leaders like Trump, Putin and Xi.
One internet sleuth also discovered that for restricted keywords like “guns” or “penis”, a typo appears to be a workaround.
Wanky AI stickers
While many on social media poked fun at Meta, others highlighted this case as an example of Big Tech companies rushing to push out new AI-powered products solely to keep up with the ongoing “AI race”.
With users being able to generate images with restricted keywords like “guns”, as well as concerns over potentially copyrighted material produced by AI art generators, some criticised Meta for rolling out the AI stickers feature without due content moderation.
“And here I was, thinking the future would be full of hyper-intelligent androids and spaceships. Instead, we get this,” wrote software engineer Arvid Kahl on X.
“What I like most about the rush to implement half-assed ‘AI’ into everything is how clearly it illustrates that tech bros have learned absolutely nothing from the last decade of ugly experiences related to deploying half-cooked tech at unprecedented scale,” said Ars Technica journalist Karl Bode.
Facebook Messenger’s AI stickers feature will be available to millions of users over the next month, but is currently only available for the platform’s English language users.
