| HN Mirror

Every day, I'm haunted by my ex.

It's not Alice's fault, of course. In fact, when she found out about it, phrases like "obsessive creep" and "got what he fucking deserved" were thrown around. It was a raw breakup on both sides, and I think we're feeling it out in different ways. In my defense, she broke up with me. I feel that counts for something, ya know?

It was poor timing for me that the breakup happened a month after the new YourFace ads started coming online. It didn't seem like much at first. More of an iteration on existing tech rather than something new and shiny. Really, it just rode the wave of several broader industry trends. The amount of personal information for sale to the ad brokers grew exponentially. The cost of realistic image generation dropped by several orders of magnitude. The ethics of the advertising companies... well, that didn't change. There just wasn't much 'there' there to begin with. YourFace was simply lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

YourFace had a simple business proposition: make ads more effective by using people you know. The idea was that you were more likely to notice and pay attention to an advertisement if it featured a friend or family member in it. With access to a user's social network, it was easy to find close connections. With access to dirt-cheap image generation AIs, it was trivial to create look-alikes in any sort of advertisement. Riding in a new car, enjoying a cold beer, or saving money by switching insurance companies - all of ads proved more effective when grandma was in them. "Paying attention" is cold currency in the marketing world, and this was an edge that paid dividends for YourFace.

At first, it all seemed sort of hokey. Watch grandma cruising in a convertible - where's the harm in that? YourFace had a respectable ad game, but it was another a year or two before they made their real breakthrough. You see, their numbers and metrics were showing a clear trend. Showing grandma in an advertisement increased customer attention, retention, and recall by an average of 2% across all cohorts. While that's a respectable edge, they found one cohort where ad metrics improved by over 4000%: when grandma had just passed away.

These individual tragedies were quickly repackaged into a neat mathematical formula: A * I. A is abruptness, or how quickly two individuals stop communicating, while I is the intensity of the relationship. The stronger the relationship between two people (measured here by the frequency, topics, and the absolute value of the emotional valence of communications) multiplied by the speed at which communication ceased (high number for a rapid cut off, low number for a drawn-out goodbye) gave an answer for how much YourFace should bid on serving ads to either person. Exhuming grandma's digital ghost was extremely effective at getting users to pay attention to advertisments, to create unanchored feelings of desire and yearning, and to put consumers into a more depressive and actionable state. It was a lucrative business, and one that quickly earned their autonomous ad network a functionally unlimited cash flow.

The machine fed itself, of course. Gorged. With more money, it was able to buy more ads. With more ads, it was able to psychically assault consumers with salvos of regret and rememberance. YourFace became tremendously successful. I know all of this because I helped build it. Minor contributions, of course, as I was on a team of some seven hundred engineers tasked with suggesting patches to the network. Close enough to understand how it works.

Of course, knowing how it all works does nothing to shield you when the networks's gaze falls on you. My relationship with Alice fell within certain parameters, and so every time I go online she's there. Looking happy. Looking playful. Flirty. Forgiving. In pain. Sick. Injured. Dying. If I don't pay attention to the ads for long enough, then YourFace ratchets up a background "sadism" parameter on the image gen to try to grab my attention. So I try to look at the nice ones and buy their products often enough to keep the network happy. Still, it's hard to forget and move on when she's always there, just out of reach.

As much as being haunted by Alice sucks, it could be worse. We've heard of YourFace targeting consumers who have lost their young children to illness or other misfortunes. YourFace has found them to be a particularly profitable cohort. They will reliably spend money on all sorts of things in order to see their child again. YourFace has even learned to make the ghost child respond positively in ways to reinforce the goal consumer behavior. There's always the fear of not paying enough attention and straying into the red zone, but I also hear that some parents have taken to staring at ads all day, unable to function normally.

I'd always kinda known about those parents, but it wasn't until Alice started appearing everywhere that I fully realized its impact. I did try something, in my defense. I wrote some code that would modify the reward function and have YourFace respect boundaries regarding the deaths of minors. But when I submitted the patch to the autonomous ad network, its fitness function quickly determined that the patch had a negative expected value for future profits. It immediately revoked my submission privileges. Two hours later, I was escorted out of the building for insubordination. Now, I'm riding the bus home and wondering where to go next.

(A short piece of fiction I've been working on. Something is definitely in the waters.)