Will it still be “social media” if it is overtaken by artificial intelligence?

In 2010, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for Facebook – by then, it had become a hugely popular social network with more than 500 million users.

“The main thing we focus on all day long is how do we help people engage and stay connected with their friends, family, and people in the community around them,” Zuckerberg told CNBC. “That’s what we care about, that’s why we started the company.”

Fifteen years and three billion users later, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has a new vision: AI-powered personas that exist alongside real people. 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, Ontario. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to communicate with a real human being.”

story Published last month The Financial Times laid out Meta’s plans to create artificial accounts on Facebook and Instagram, each with distinct characteristics, including racial and gender identities.

“They will have bios and profile pictures and they will be able to create and share content,” Connor Hayes, Meta’s vice president of generative AI product, told the newspaper.

The company began testing it in 2023. After the Times story was published, some angry users began a campaign to ban and report the accounts. One journalist Talk to an AI account who introduced herself as a black woman – and admitted that her development team did not include any black people.

Meta recently began quietly removing profiles, which Meta Canada spokesperson Julia Pereira told CBC News is managed by humans and part of an “early experiment.”

Pereira said the company deleted the accounts due to a bug that “affects users’ ability to block them.” “(We are) removing those accounts to fix the issue,” she added, but did not respond to a question about whether the accounts would be reinstated at a later date.

Artificial intelligence gets more eyeballs

Most of the major social media platforms have launched AI-powered features. X, formerly known as Twitter, collects user data to train its chatbot Grok (aka Allows other companies do the same); Snapchat He has “my own artificial intelligence”; And AI influencers like Lil Miquela are, too appeared Across TikTok and Instagram, sponsorship deals are being done with major brands.

The challenge is that AI content gets more attention, and therefore more advertising dollars: social media management company Buffer Found in October AI-powered posts have a higher average engagement rate than regular content, based on 1.2 million posts sent from its platform to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Growth is the “lifeblood” of companies like Meta, analyst Levy said. But most people who want a Facebook or Instagram account likely have one now, an existential crisis that will hit Facebook hard in 2022, when its overall user base becomes… decreased For the first time.

“The future of social media appears to be one in which content production is privileged over social interactions and social connections,” said Lai Tze Fan, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “However, it does not have to be this way.” University of Waterloo and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change.

Data, engagement and advertising dollars

She explains that Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, like other social media platforms, rely on basic economic exchange: users provide their data and posts, and the platforms are paid through advertising.

“If they’re going to continue with this economic model, I think they also have to think about why their users are using it in the first place,” she said. Consider the differences between TikTok, which offers a steady, never-ending stream of video content, and Facebook, which aims to help users maintain or create connections with others.

In Facebook’s case, “if that’s the real purpose of people using a platform like this, and instead they’re being bombarded with AI-generated content, then that really goes against the reason they’re on that platform in the first place.” He said.

However, some of our basic needs could be met by AI-generated calculations like those proposed by Meta, according to Karina Fuld, an assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.

“There are cases where this can be useful or real social needs can be met through these chatbots,” Fuld said. But she said that true social relationships require that the other entity be “cognitively capable” of social interaction.

When it comes to AI-generated characters, “everything you experience is more like a relationship with an artifact,” she said — like the emotions you might have for a character in a book. Some users have reported Romantic relationships With calculations generated by artificial intelligence, HaThe 2013 film is about a man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence program.

“You may feel real sympathy for Anna Karenina when you read the novel, but that is different from having a social relationship with her or with Santa Claus or with any other fictional character,” Fuld explained.

“These AI chatbots are more like something like that.”