Back in 2010, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for Facebook – at that time a popular social network with over 500 million users.
“The main thing we focus on all day is how we help people share and stay connected with their friends, family and the people in the community around them,” Zuckerberg told CNBC “That's what's important to us, and that's why we started the company.”
Fifteen years and three billion users later, Facebook's parent company Meta has a new vision: characters powered by artificial intelligence that exist alongside real friends and family. Some experts warn that this could mark the end of social media as we know it.
For early adopters of social media, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become “as anti-social as you can imagine,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst and journalist based in London, Ont. “It's getting harder and harder to connect with a real person. “
Story published last month with the Financial Times he released Meta's plans for voluntarily created accounts on Facebook and Instagram, each with specific characteristics, including racial and sexual identity.
“They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content,” Connor Hayes, Meta's vice president of product for generative AI, told the paper.
A TikTok account that hosted videos of AI-generated explosions that others said were in Ukraine has been removed from the platform following investigations by CBC News' visual investigative team. The report shows how low-quality AI-generated content – known as 'AI slop' – can encourage biased opinions and misinformation.
The group began experimenting with them in 2023. After the Times story was published, some irritated users started a campaign to block and report the accounts. One journalist spoke to the AI account revealed herself as a black queer woman – and admitted that her development team did not include any black people.
Meta recently began quietly removing the profiles, which Meta Canada spokeswoman Julia Perreira told CBC News were human-managed and part of “early testing.”
The company deleted the accounts because of a bug that “affects users' abilities to block them,” Perreira said. “(We) are removing these accounts to resolve the matter,” she said, but did not answer a question about whether the accounts would be reinstated later.
AI gets more eyes
Most of the major social media platforms have launched AI-powered features. X, formerly Twitter, scrapes user data to train its AI chatbot Grok (and allow other companies do the same); Snapchat he has the “My AI”.; and AI influencers like Lil Miquela pop up across TikTok and Instagram, on-shore sponsorship deals with big brands.
The challenge is for AI content to get more eyeballs, and therefore more ad dollars: Social media management company Buffer found in October that AI-assisted posts had a higher average engagement rate than standard content, based on 1.2 million posts sent from its platform to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Front burner29:21Is AI a bubble about to burst?
Growth is the “lifeblood” of companies like Meta, said Levy, the analyst. But most people who want a Facebook or Instagram account now probably have one, an emergency that hit Facebook hard in 2022, when it had its entire user base. decline for the first time.
“The future of social media seems to be one in which content production takes precedence over social interactions and social connections. It doesn't have to be that way, though,” said Lai-Tze Fan, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and Canada's Technology and Social Change Research Chair.
Data, communications and advertising dollars
Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, like other social media platforms, are driven by a basic economic exchange: users provide their data and communication, and platforms are paid through ads, she explains.
“If they're going to continue with this economic model, I think they also need to consider why their customers are using them in the first place,” she said. Consider the differences between TikTok, which offers a constant, endless stream of video content, and Facebook, which is meant to help users maintain or create connections with others.
In Facebook's case, “if that's the real reason people use a platform like that, and instead they're inundated with AI-generated content, it's really going to face why they're on that stage in the first place,” Fan said.
However, some of our basic needs can be met with accounts generated by AI like those proposed by Meta, according to Karina Vold, assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.
“There are cases where it can be helpful or where real social needs can be met through these chatbots,” Vold said. But she said real social relationships require the other entity to be “mentally capable” of interacting – social work.
When it comes to AI-generated characters, “anything you have is more like a relationship with an artifact,” she said—like the emotions you might feel for a character in a book. Some users have reported romantic relationships with accounts generated by AI, she is2013 film about a man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence program.
“You may feel sympathy for Anna Karenina when you read the novel, but that's different from having a social relationship with her or with Santa Claus or with another fictional character,” explained Vold.
“These AI bots are more like something like that.”
