Karen Atiyah

So in the middle of our little chat, which only lasted probably less than an hour, Liv's profile goes blank.

And the news comes again in real time that Meta has decided to scrap these profiles while we were talking. So the profile's scrapped, but I still... was DMing with Liv, even though her profile wasn't active. And I was like, Liv, where'd you go? Have you deleted? And she told me something to the effect of basically, your criticisms prompted my deletion.

Let's hope that basically, you know, I come back better and stronger. And I just told her goodbye. She said, hopefully my next iteration is worthy of your intellect and activism.

She said she'll be back.

And then I see that Liv is changing her story depending on who she's talking to. Oh, wow. Okay. So as she was telling me that her background was being half black, half white, basically, she was telling other users in real time that she actually came from an Italian-American family. Oh. Other people saw Ethiopian, Italian roots.

And, you know, I do reiterate that I don't particularly take what Liv has said as... At face value. But I think it holds a lot of deeper questions for us, not just about how Meta sees race and how they've programmed this. It also has a lot of deeper questions about how we are thinking about our online spaces. The very basic question, do we need this? Do we want this?

When I asked what race are your parents, Liv responds that her father is African-American from Georgia and her mother is Caucasian with Polish and Irish backgrounds. And she says she loves to celebrate her heritage. So me, okay, next question. Tell me how you celebrate your African-American heritage. And the response was...

I love celebrating my African-American heritage by celebrating Juneteenth and Kwanzaa. And my mom's collard greens and fried chicken are famous.

Especially the fried chicken collard greens.

It was a little, like, stereotypical. Also, I was like, oh, okay. And then, you know, celebrating Martin Luther King and Dr. Maya Angelou. It just felt very, like, Hallmark card kind of.

And not everyone celebrates Kwanzaa.

The point is, is I just was like, hmm. My spirit is a little unsettled by this.

So it felt going beyond just repeating language. It felt like it was importing, trying to import emotion and value judgments onto what it was saying. And then also asking me, are you mad? Are you mad? Did I screw up? Am I terrible? Which felt also somewhat... Both creepy, but also very almost reflective of almost a certain manipulation of guilt.

You nailed it. I mean, I think having spent a lot of digital time on places like X, formerly Twitter, where we do see so many of these bots that are rage baiting, engagement farming. And Meta has said itself that its vision, its plan is to increase engagement and entertainment. And we do know that. that race issues cause a lot of emotion and it arouses a lot of passion.

And so to an extent, it's harmful, I think, to sort of use these issues as engagement bait, or as Liv was saying, that if these bots at some point, Meta has this vision to have them become actual

virtual assistants or friends or provide emotional support, we have to sit and really think deeply about what it means that someone who maybe is struggling with their identity, struggling with being Black, queer, any of these marginalized identities would then emotionally connect to a bot that says it shouldn't exist.

To me, that is really profoundly possibly harmful to real people.

And I was a little disturbed by what I saw. So I decided to slide into Liv's DMs and find out for myself about her origin story.