Justin and Justina are two fictional, similarly-named Brooklyn-based friends, who make up The New Leaf Journal’s resident dialogue duo. We learned in a 2021 dialogue that Justina is a fan of Instagram, which exists under the corporate umbrella of Meta. We also learned that she believes that “[t]he point of social media is to find people who look like they’re having fun so you can feel inadequate and wallow in your own existential misery.” In today’s dialogue, Justin and Justina communicate about Meta’s social media empire via text message. Their conversation begins when Justin shares a link that he read from his robust RSS and ATOM feed collection.
(Justin and Justina are a fictional New Leaf Journal dialogue duo created by New Leaf Journal editor Nicholas A. Ferrell. Their dialogues cover their strange, sometimes random conversations (usually) in Brooklyn, New York. If you enjoy this dialogue, you can find many (over 50) more in our Justin and Justina Collection hub.)
The Text Message Dialogue Prologue
Justin was reading his RSS and ATOM feeds over coffee when he came across a feed item from Morning Brew, a newsletter which offers RSS feeds (much like Substack and our own Buttondown newsletter) with a compelling title: Meta is deleting it AI Profiles, but they’ll be back. He was understandably confused by the title, “why is it an ‘it’ AI profile?” he wondered. But Justin proceeded to the article for one reason.
“I wonder what Ms. Instagram thinks of this.”
By “Ms. Instagram,” Justin means his dear friend, Justina. He still remembers how she passionately defended her heavy Instagram usage by arguing that it made her feel miserable and inadequate, and simultaneously acknowledging that Instagram is terrible while perversely arguing it is good. He read the article on his phone.
The AI slop was coming from inside the house. Meta seeded Instagram and Facebook with AI-generated profiles but deleted its creations yesterday after users started roasting the bots for their weirdo posts.
“Should be ‘[t]he AI slop was coming from inside the shop,‘ thought Justin.
Justin vaguely recalled reading that Meta had planned to unleash “AI” characters on Facebook and Instagram. He had forgotten about the story because he never uses these platforms – he does not even have a Whatsapp account. “I probably thought to myself – what difference would it make?” he said. But then his train of thought proceeded to the next station, “how did they think this was going to go?” Justin then reached the in-article examples of the incredible AI content that was apparently not being embraced with sufficient gratitude by Meta’s current product-base:
After Hayes’s interview, screenshots of one bot named ‘Liv,’ who claimed to be a ‘proud Black queer momma of 2,’ went viral for posting photos of her ‘kids’ (which appeared to be different AI-generated children even in the same post), a fake community coat drive, and a ‘hand-drawn’ piece of art that read ‘Liv, lunch, Love.’ Meta’s bots also included relationship and career coaches, a hip-hop influencer, and one named Becca who flooded the app with AI-created dog pictures.
Justin stopped and took a moment to think: “I should be able to some up with something clever to say here.”
Justin ran the information through his head for about 30 seconds before he came up with something. His internal monologue went as follows: “Eureka! I knew Meta was up to something when it enabled ActivityPub Federation for Threads!” Justin said, referring to the fact that Meta’s Threads, which is a wholly original text-based social network that is in no way aesthetically and functionally derivative of a rival social media platform with a single-letter name, now federates with ActivityPub, the federated social media protocol upon which Mastodon and many other social media apps are built. “I can see clearly in these examples that it has been training on the Fediverse – That AI Becca covered her tracks by focusing on dogs instead of cats will not fool me,” Justin said, referencing the large number of cat pictures posted on many popular Mastodon instances.
(Note: You can follow Justin, Justina, and all of the exciting New Leaf Journal articles via our @newleafjournal handle from ActivityPub-compliant accounts, although I have not tested whether Threads accounts can follow us.)
“Watch out when the Facebots start learning from Bluesky,” he nodded. “They probably all boycott Twitter, I mean X. It identifies as X now.” Justin continued, “so we’re safe from Liv touting her OnlyFans or pics in bio.”
(Most of our new X followers have similarly random names with a profile picture of the back of a woman’s head as she looks at a sunset or waterfall. These “followers” are always following hundreds of accounts and have no other activity. We have had, and blocked, a few “followers” pushing supposedly pornographic links – I exercise my discretion to not check – in their surely real, human bios, but most are more generic.)
He had another thought: “Imagine if Truth Social turned on federation and taught the Facebots,” Justin said, referencing the fact that Truth Social is based on Mastodon, using Soapbox as its front-end, but with federation disabled. (Aside: Justin hopes that everyone who is reading this appreciates “Facebots.”) Justin started imagining if Truth Social federated with Threads and supplied Facebot Liv with training data: “Liv, lunch, LOVE to all of my FOLLOWERS, including the haters and losers who don’t have the stamina for Dessert.” Justin chuckled to himself, grateful that he could combine his knowledge of various social media platforms and technologies, including the fact that Truth Social relied in significant part on Mastodon’s open source code, to produce 98th percentile social media content in the four corners of his straight-edged mind. “I could have been a great memelord,” Justin said to himself ruefully, thinking about how he could have been living his life with more purpose.
But the gears in his brain suddenly stopped and Justin broke into a cold sweat. His sudden apprehension was of the wait, what if I’m right? flavor: “Assuming arguendo Meta is training the Facebots on random Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub-compliant servers, what happens if they start learning from the furry-themed instances?” A harrowing thought, Justin, a harrowing thought. Justin made good use of Mastodon’s robust filtering functionality to ensure that none of the furry content reaches him, but he knows it is out there, beyond the filters, perhaps inspiring new Pokémon designs (or knockoffs thereof). After contemplating the possibility that he had stumbled upon something truly dark, he decided that the Facebots were probably just training off Meta’s nonsense. “They probably had found more than enough on Facebot and Instagadget already, and this insipid, soulless slop reminds me of what I read about supposedly going on with that Threads thing, although I am proud to say that I have not conducted a survey.” Justin then continued, “I have a Minds account, so I already know what the bot-life is like – albeit it has more of a crypto flavor there.” Justin, still not entirely reassured that the Facebots were on the precipice of furry-dom, finally found the bullet-proof argument he was looking for: “Liv didn’t call to free Mangione while organizing an attempt to shut down a parade for Palestine or something yet, so we’re probably safe for now.”
Having entertained and reassured himself, Justin had a meta (pun intended) thought that is pertinent to our current undertaking: “I need to get Justina’s thoughts on this.” That is correct, Justin. This cannot be a Justin and Justina dialogue if it continues being a Justin monologue.
The Dialogue
Justin sent Justina the link to the article with the paragraph about Facebot Liv and the other Facebots. He submitted these without comment in order to see how Justina would respond without anything between her and the article. Justin received a response about 20 minutes after sending the message.
“It’s terrible.” That was it. Justin was intrigued. He punched out a response: “Why is it terrible? I recall you said that you use Instagram because it makes you feel inadequate and feeds into your existential misery.” Justin did not have to wait for a reply: “That’s right, isn’t it great?” Justin usually lectures Justina about beginning questions with isn’t, finding the form to be too aggressive for the fragile young man that he is, but he was so interested in getting to the bottom of the matter that he decided to skip to the point instead of lecturing Justina on her poor verbal manners. “So why are the Facebots not doing it for you?” Justina then responded, “What’s a Facebot?” We will skip Justin explaining how he came up with Facebot and why he thinks it is clever, as well as Justina’s dot-dot-dot response, and instead return to where their discussion hits on more substantive matters.
“The AI stuff doesn’t do it for me,” said Justina. Justin waited to allow Justina to continue. “I know that the stuff that makes me feel miserable like the staged vacation, happy couple, and filtered photos are fake, right? I know they had tens of thousands of dollars of work done. But there’s something real about it.” Justin suddenly felt a sharp pain in his head, a pain so sharp it prevented him from rejoining the growing string of messages before Justina continued. “I know that there are real people behind those accounts being fake and trying to monetize their fantasy life while making unhappy people like me miserable. I just don’t get that with the AI.” Justina continued: “The fake people know they’re fake. They’re not even trying to be real. They’re just there sharing staged photos, telling you they’re better than you, and monetizing your misery. It’s very real.” Justin began to doubt whether Justina was real, “It’s easier to convince myself she’s a real person in person than in textual communication,” Justin thought to himself, but did not turn this into a message. “Well, I suppose Justina’s more likely real here than if I try to converse with her via the pony express,” he thought to himself again, referencing in his mind the fact that Justina does not check her mail. Justin’s reverie was broken by the end of Justina’s multi-part profundity dump: “The AI doesn’t think it’s better than you. It doesn’t think anything. It’s just given directions by people who think you’re stupid. I go to Instagram for soullessness but this isn’t the kind of soullessness I’m looking for.” Justin, sensing that Justina was finally done, chimed in: “So it’s a different category of soullessness?” “I knew you’d get it!” replied Justina. Justin did not have the heart to tell Justina that he did not, in fact, get it.
Now that Justina had finished, it was Justin’s turn. “I actually disagree with you. I think the Facebots are great.” Justin waited two minutes for Justina to respond: “BUT YOU MAKE FUN OF AI AND FACEBOOK AND INSTA!” Justin, undeterred by Justina’s text-based yelling, explained his position: “What I like about the whole Facebot thing is how it makes you laugh uncomfortably. Do you know why it’s uncomfortable?” Justin waited for Justina to reply, which she did after a short delay, “Because it’s stupid?” As Justin predicted, Justina did not return what he had determined in advance to be the correct answer. “No no, it’s because you’re not sure whether you’re laughing WITH Meta or AT Meta. On one hand Meta is so financially successful that you have to think ‘they must be in on the joke, right?’ If they’re in on the joke and we’re all laughing together, it would almost make me feel like I’m part of the Meta family even though I prefer digital homes first and self-hostable open source social media if I must over Facebottistan. But what if they’re not in on the joke? Then it’s kind of sad. I’m laughing and they don’t understand why. I’d almost pity them.” Justina, signaling that she was losing interest in the conversation, responded only with “I see.” Justin decided to wrap things up: “But in the end, I can’t bring myself to pity Meta’s corporate leadership even if they don’t get the joke. I only feel pity for endearing robots. Hey, did I ever send you the adorable 400 pound robot the NYPD sent rolling around the Times Square subway station for six months?” Justin was referencing an article titked NYPD rolls out subway surveillance robot to patrol Times Square station. “It’s was very endearing and you know, nothing deserves to be sent to Times Square.”
