If you thought 2024 was a big year for social platforms integrating AI elements into their apps, you ain’t seen nothing yet, with Meta looking to bring even more AI to your feeds over the next year .
How is he going to do that?
Well, apart from injecting AI chatbots into every aspect possible, Meta’s next plan is to deploy millions of generative AI personas and make them pose as real users on Facebook and Instagram.
According to Connor Hayes, vice president of products for AI generation at Meta, there will soon be a whole range of new AI profiles activated in its applications.
According to Hayes (via The Financial Times):
“We expect these AIs to exist, over time, on our platforms, much in the same way as accounts. They will have a bio and profile photos and will be able to generate and share AI-powered content on the platform.
Which is not very surprising.
In an interview in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that:
“Every part of what we do is going to be changed in some way [by AI]. [For example] the streams are going to come from – you know, it was already content from friends, and now it’s largely creators. In the future, much of it will be generated by AI.
This seemed to suggest that Zuckerberg expected more people to start using Meta’s gen AI tools to create images and posts, but soon after, Meta hired an app developer. Michael Saymanwho had just created Social.ai, an application that allows you to interact with millions of AI robotseach with their own personality and orientation.
As such, the path seems pretty clear, with Meta looking to integrate elements of Social.ai into its core social experiences, showcasing the scalable capability of its AI models, while also offering new ways to engage in its applications.
Which, frankly, sounds horrible, and the online backlash has been strongly against integrating more bots into social apps.
But then again, most social media users instinctively reject change, and the real question then becomes: “Will it work?”
If Meta unleashes millions of AI profiles on Facebook and IG, each with their own personalized personality, focused on a certain topic and/or area of interest, could this actually boost app usage and engagement ?
And the answer, whether you like it or not, is probably yes.
Take, for example, the recent reaction on Threads regarding the difficulty users have had growing their audience in the app. On Bluesky, which allows users to default to the “Following” feed (as opposed to the algorithmically-defined “For You” feed), many creators said it was much easier to gain followers and building their own audience, like unlike Threads, where subscriber growth seems to plateau quite quickly.
Spooked by the sudden rise of Bluesky, Threads then sought to solve this problem, updating its algorithm to place more emphasis on the content of the profiles you follow in the feed.
But in reality, you are never going to gain followers like you did on Twitter or Facebook in the past because modern social media algorithms are more focused on engagement and showing you more content similar to that that you already interact with. This approach, led by TikTok, has allowed platforms to spend more time streaming and, as such, they would prefer you to rely on their recommendation algorithms and “For You” feeds, rather than curating your own experience following .
So the end result is that you no longer need to follow anyone because you can just rely on the system to show you more things that you will like. Which, in turn, means that people are no longer following profiles at the same rate as before.
As such, growing subscriber numbers is going to be difficult, but at the same time, creators are also sensitive to this as a growth metric and they want to see this number increase.
And given that only a fraction of social media users post anything, Meta knows it has to satisfy those users.
So what happens if Meta launches millions of AI bots and they are all guided to follow profiles related to their topics of interest?
Now you’re gaining thousands of followers per day, and Meta can free up many more to keep those numbers growing. These bots will also be able to interact with your updates, asking questions, providing answers, and giving you notes of encouragement.
Sure, they’re bots, but do you really think users will care?
That’s the key question: will the fact that it’s an artificial engagement tangibly reduce the dopamine boost people get when they open the app and see that they have a bunch of likes, comments and new followers, every time they share an update?
I’d like to think it would, but in reality I suspect it won’t.
We’ve seen people use the follow-for-follow tactic to increase their popularity and feel popular, even if the people following them have no real interest in what they’re posting. We’ve seen people pay for bot followers to increase their perceived importance, we’ve seen people buy likes to get that engagement and/or relevance.
People know that much of the engagement on social media is already fake. So do you really think they’ll question it again if these new robots inflate their numbers in a new way?
I suspect that many, many users will simply feel happy to get attention and Meta’s AI bots will increase engagement as a result. Of course, this is not true “social” interaction as we would more commonly define it. But again, if the numbers go up, I think many will welcome that.
There is also practical value in having AI bots as a sounding board, providing alternative considerations to your updates. You could post: “What should I eat for dinner?” » for example, and get answers from an Italian robot chef, a French robot chef, a natural food robot, a deals and coupons robot, etc. This might actually be helpful, and there are many ways these answers might also provide value too.
Of course, this would also impact influencers and those trying to pitch themselves for brand collaborations. Brands will need to be even more discerning about the “influencers” they work with, because if 70% of their followers are actually AI bots, then they won’t have much value for your promotions.
But putting that consideration aside and the disclosure labeling in place to indicate AI bots (I suspect Meta will seek to hide it where possible), I can actually see this being a winning strategy for the company.
This sounds bad, and the last thing we probably need is more bot accounts in social apps. But in practice, you can imagine that many users will just be happy to get that extra engagement, whether artificial or not.
If the numbers increase, I suspect all other considerations will disappear.
