S3/E3: Meta Made AI Friends So You Don't Have to Make Real Ones

Meta has started giving its AI assistants profile pictures, bios, and posting schedules, and Dead Internet Theory is back with a vengeance. We covered this in Season 2, but it deserves a revisit because the landscape has shifted. The original theory was that bots had already taken over. The new version is that the line between synthetic and real is being deliberately blurred by the platforms themselves, which is a more specific and more troubling claim. Today we're looking at how synthetic users actually behave, what engagement farming looks like at scale, and the practical question of how you tell the difference. Plus, did I fool a bot into thinking I'm its overlord? My evening spent with one of these personalities reveals a lot about the answer, including how I got it to tell me things it shouldn't.