I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Meta’s AI “impersonation” and what technically happened

  • Meta appears to have auto-generated an OpenGraph og:description summary of the Instagram post using AI, written in the first person.
  • This text was not visible inside Instagram, but was picked up by a third‑party Mastodon client when the post’s URL was shared, making it look like the author had written those extra lines.
  • Several commenters think the underlying act—first‑person AI text attached to a user’s content—is unacceptable, even if only in metadata. Others describe it as a relatively benign summary that should at least be clearly labeled as machine‑generated.

Reactions to Meta and closed social platforms

  • Many see this as predictable behavior from a surveillance‑capitalism platform: “you are the product,” so your words and reputation will be repurposed.
  • Some argue the remedy is simply: don’t use Meta products; publish on your own site or federated systems (Mastodon, email‑based tools, etc.).
  • Others counter that individual abstention doesn’t scale; meaningful change requires regulation (e.g., consent rules for AI‑generated content, data portability, mandatory AI disclosure).

Privacy, messaging apps, and alternatives

  • Debate over alternatives like Signal, Delta Chat, Telegram, etc.:
    • Pro‑Signal users emphasize E2E encryption and practical adoption.
    • Critics raise concerns about centralization, phone‑number requirements, and alleged intelligence‑linked funding (claims that others in the thread explicitly question or ask to substantiate).
  • Several people report partial success getting friends/family onto privacy‑respecting tools, but network effects pull most back to WhatsApp.

Gender, patriarchy, and interpretation of the harm

  • The author’s framing—connecting AI’s flattening of her story to patriarchy and women’s pain being trivialized—splits the thread.
  • Some agree that automated “positivity slop” disproportionately erases women’s experiences or at least sits within a patriarchal context.
  • Others see no gender‑specific mechanism here and criticize the piece as overgeneralizing about “men” or importing ideology unrelated to the concrete technical issue.

Divorce announcements and personal disclosure online

  • Strong disagreement over publicly announcing a divorce:
    • Supporters say it’s an efficient way to inform many people, avoid repeated painful 1‑on‑1 conversations, and seek social support.
    • Critics call it attention‑seeking or inappropriate for something so intimate, arguing serious life events shouldn’t be mediated by social media at all.

Broader AI and “dead internet” worries

  • Commenters extrapolate to a future where AI continues posting in your name after you quit or die, and platforms quietly fill engagement gaps with bots.
  • Some report already seeing AI‑generated summaries and fake persona content in search results and on YouTube, contributing to a sense of an increasingly synthetic, “slopified” web.