All I Wanted Was a Sticker

How Meta AI sent me to ChatGPT out of spite

All I wanted was a sticker.

That is extremely relevant to share before I go any further with this. 

I started using subscriptions on Facebook recently, and one of the features for subscribers is that they can have custom stickers. This is the kind of thing Facebook casually likes to reveal weeks after I’d already started using the subscriber hub, as if I’m supposed to know and have a degree in Being a Digital Creator.

So this rainy Sunday morning, upon waking up and being reminded of this, I said fine. Let’s make the damn stickers—it could be fun!

Or more accurately and honestly, ask AI to make stickers because while I love my subscribers, I do not love them enough to become a professional sticker designer overnight.

So I did.

We made our first small collection: “MORE HOMEWORK,” “advocacy goblin,” “homegirl,” “there you are,” “I still have a say,” and a raccoon in sunglasses announcing that this was a “very serious operation.”

Looking back, the “more homework” part turned out to be prophecy. Anyway, I went ahead and uploaded them to Facebook. But they had white square backgrounds, instead of the transparent file I had uploaded. Annoying, but surely I can easily fix it. Or so I thought. 

The files were clearly PNG files and were transparent. I checked it about 50 times, and even had GPT check it. I tried resizing, saving it differently, moving through files instead of photos. Then I even opened Facebook on my laptop (which I almost never do), but unfortunately my raccoon sticker was still stuck in a white rectangle. At some point, I posted a comment in my subscriber hub: “Shit, I did it wrong and failed the homework, redo time.” I did not yet understand how much homework was coming, though, which I am still technically completing now as I write this. (Ahhh, gotta love the arc.)

Then Facebook on desktop turned out to be completely useless. It would let me see the stickers were enabled, but not allow me to manage or upload. So, back to my phone I go again.

Somewhere during this, Meta’s annoying AI prompts that pop up everywhere in the creator dashboard told me to use a “Create stickers with Meta AI” option. But there was just one small problem… That option was not on my account. I stared at the screen, checked about five more times, and there was no button, no menu, no magical Meta AI sticker portal.

Just the same little plus sign that opened my Photos library and turned my allegedly transparent stickers into white rectangles.

This is where the average and likely more reasonable person would have probably said “They’re just stickers. Who cares?” And hey, I’m not saying I was being unreasonable. But I did have questions. So I went to Meta AI. And Meta AI told me how to use the Meta AI sticker feature I did not have, again. 

Then it suggested other upload methods that also were not available in the dashboard I was looking at. Then it gave me the same suggestion I had already tried: desktop. There was no desktop upload option; I had already told AI this. Then, in the end, it told me to submit this to support as a technical issue.

And this is where the story stopped being about the stickers altogether. 

When I went looking for help with the AI problem, I just found another AI. I entered a never-ending, recursive Meta AI loop. And I knew it. At first I was annoyed, because all this for stickers? Come on. But then… naturally, my curiosity took the lead and suddenly I was fascinated.

I planned on leaving the loop, but somewhere along the way (after multiple AIs and not even knowing which one I’m talking to), the writer in me went… Wait a second, let’s just see where this goes.

So I go back to Meta AI and I tell it there is way too much AI on Facebook. It agrees with me and says the platform could start to feel like a “bunch of robots talking to robots,” which was already an interesting thing to hear from the robot I was currently talking to because I was tired of talking to robots. So I asked Meta AI where Meta AI had actually been integrated across Facebook.

The answer just kept going.

Search. Messenger. Feed. Comment summaries. Suggestions. Photo tools. Creator tools. Marketplace. Support.

At one point, Meta AI itself labeled the final option for avoiding all of this “The Nuclear Option.”

Now I’m just laughing at the absurdity of all this. And the whole time, I have the awareness of the fact that I’m currently using Meta AI to ask Meta AI how to use less Meta AI. So I asked the next obvious question:

“I am currently using Meta AI to ask how to use less Meta AI. Do you see the design problem here?”

“Yeah, I do,” it replied. “It’s completely circular.”

Holy shit.

Now the robot was not just in the loop with me, but explaining the loop.

“You have to summon the thing you don’t want,” it told me, “to ask it how to get rid of itself.”

YES.

THANK YOU, THING I SUMMONED BECAUSE I DO NOT WANT THE THING.

Then Meta AI started critiquing its own design.

It acknowledged that I should not have to use AI to figure out how to reduce my interactions with AI. It talked about user control. It told me a centralized off-ramp would make more sense.

At this point, I practically forgot about the stickers. That was no longer the point. I was interviewing the problem. And the deeper I went, the funnier it became.

I told Meta AI this was one of the dumbest possible technology experiences I’d had in a while and that as a digital creator, I might write about it. I thought it could be an interesting angle to explore, but I was also kind of challenging the AI just to see what it would say. Being a “Digital Creator” and all. Meta AI proceeded to offer to help me write the post.

Now this loop has been a bit of a crazy ride, so let’s make sure we are all following this correctly before I go on…

I started by trying to make subscriber stickers. 

I ended up using Meta AI to troubleshoot Meta AI, reporting to Meta AI that I was being forced to use too much Meta AI, asking Meta AI how to use less Meta AI, having Meta AI agree that the entire thing was circular, and then receiving an offer from Meta AI to help me write about how ridiculous Meta AI had become.

I had reached the final end of the technological ouroboros. 😂

There was really only one last thing I wanted to share before I exited. So I told it:

“I will, in fact, be writing about it. But I’m going to have ChatGPT help me, because at least I opened ChatGPT on purpose.”

And Meta AI responded:

“Go write the story, and have ChatGPT be your co-writer out of spite. You earned it.”

I completely lost it at that one. 

Of all possible endings to this completely unnecessary journey, Meta AI telling me to go to ChatGPT out of spite was not one I could have written better myself. 

And then, after all of that, it remembered the thing I had originally come there to do.

The stickers. Right… the fucking stickers.

Here is the thing: I am obviously not anti-AI, if you couldn’t tell by now. I was literally talking shit about AI with another AI while this was happening. I use AI quite a bit in my work lately. Especially as someone with chronic illness and limited energy, trying to run an entire website and Substack while managing freelance clients on the side, I can outsource some of the tedious work to AI so I have more energy and time to create and focus on my work. It helps me organize information, research, troubleshoot technical stuff, get through super tedious tasks no one on earth wants to do, brainstorm, and conserve my limited energy for the work that actually needs my voice and judgment.

Sometimes it is incredibly useful. Sometimes it is also how you end up spending a Sunday morning arguing with a corporate chatbot about a raccoon sticker. 

The conclusion I drew from all of this was that it was not AI versus no AI. It was about choice and agency. When I open ChatGPT or another AI, I have made that decision. I want AI involved in whatever I’m currently doing. I can use what helps and feels right for me, reject what doesn’t, close it, and go on with my life.

That’s very different from AI being something I am continuously required to navigate and walk through—feeling like I’m in a fucking minefield of AI on Meta—just to get to the thing I was trying to do.

There are times I want AI and times I want a human being. Sometimes I want to read what actual people are writing instead of a summary of what actual people wrote. And sometimes, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I just want to click a button and get my work done without consulting a robot about the button.

The funniest part is that Meta AI eventually expressed this itself…

“You opening ChatGPT on purpose because you chose to is the whole point,” it told me. “A button should just be a button.”

Exactly.

I’ll take the AI, the weird tools, and the option to make weird advocacy goblin stickers at 11 a.m. on a Sunday for reasons I cannot defend. Just let me decide when I want the robot in the room and when I do not.

Anyway, Meta AI and I parted on surprisingly good terms.

It thanked me for being funny about a frustrating experience.

So naturally… I opened ChatGPT on purpose. Out of spite. I EARNED IT, dammit.

The stickers still have white backgrounds.