Folks on social media are in an uproar after Meta announced that it’s planning to load Facebook up with AI “users,” better known as bots. First reported by the Financial Times, this plan to populate the dying social network with these so-called “characters” is geared towards driving engagement — even though other platforms, including Meta’s Instagram, have been roiled by unauthorized bots for years. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, Meta’s vice-president of product for generative AI, told the FT. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform… that’s where we see all of this going.” While it’s unclear when this plan will move forward, Hayes said that there are already “hundreds of thousands” of characters that have been created on the site — though most, for now, remain private. Unsurprisingly, users on the r/futurology subreddit saw right through the ruse. “Translation: ‘Our real users are quitting the platform, so we will fill our community with fake users instead,'” one user wrote. As another aptly put it, “the advertisers buying space on [Facebook] won’t be able to tell the difference either, so it’s all just more clicks and more ad revenue.” The potential implications for advertising on the platform overall seemed to strike a chord with the Redditors. “With advertising being their bread and butter and pretty much the reason they still exist,…People Are Disgusted by Facebook’s Plan to Deploy AI-Powered “Users”