Is it still “social media” if it has been taken over by artificial intelligence?

In 2010, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for Facebook – then an extremely popular social networking site with over 500 million users.

“The main thing we focus on throughout the day is helping people share and stay connected with their friends, family and the communities around them,” Zuckerberg told CNBC. “That's what we care about and that's why we started the company.”

Fifteen years and three billion users later, Facebook's parent company Meta has a new vision: AI-powered characters existing alongside real ones friends and family. Some experts warn that this could mean 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.”

History published last month via the Financial Times outlined Meta's plans for artificially generated Facebook and Instagram accounts, each with distinct characteristics, including racial and sexual identities.

“They will have biographies and profile photos and will be able to generate and share content,” Connor Hayes, Meta's vice president of generative artificial intelligence products, told the newspaper.

The corporation began experimenting with them in 2023. After the Times article was published, some irate users launched a campaign to block and report the accounts. One journalist talked to the AI ​​account who identified herself as a black queer woman – and admitted that there were no Black people on her development team.

Meta recently began quietly removing these profiles, which Meta Canada spokeswoman Julia Perreira told CBC News said they were human-managed and part of an “early experiment.”

The company removed the accounts because of a bug that “impacted users' ability to block them,” Perreira said. “(We are) deleting these accounts to resolve the issue,” she added, but did not answer a question about whether the accounts would be restored at a later date.

AI gets more eyeballs

Most major social media platforms have launched AI-powered features. X, formerly Twitter, collects user data to train its AI chatbot Grok (i allows other companies do the same); Snapchat has its own “My Artificial Intelligence”; and AI influencers like Lil Miquela pop-up sponsorship deals are concluded with large brands on TikTok and Instagram.

The challenge is that AI content attracts more eyeballs and therefore more ad dollars: social media management company Buffer found in October that AI-powered posts had a higher average engagement rate than regular content, based on 1.2 million posts sent from the platform to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Growth is the “lifeblood” of companies like Meta, said Levy, the analyst. However, most people who want a Facebook or Instagram account probably already have one. The existential crisis that hit Facebook hard in 2022 when its total user base rejected for the first time.

“The future of social media seems to be one where content creation is privileged over social interaction and connection. But it doesn't have to be this way,” said Lai-Tze Fan, associate professor at the University of Waterloo and Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change.

Data, engagement and advertising dollars

Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, like other social media platforms, are driven by a basic economic exchange: users contribute their data and engage, and the platforms pay for advertising, he explains.

“If they are going to continue this economic model, I think they also need to consider why users are using them in the first place,” she said. Consider the differences between TikTok, which offers a constant, never-ending stream of video content, and Facebook, which is designed to help users maintain or create connections with others.

In Facebook's case, “if that's the real goal of people using a platform like this, and instead they're being inundated with AI-generated content, it really goes against why they're using this platform in the first place,” Fan said.

But according to Karina Vold, an assistant professor at the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, some of our basic needs can be met with artificial intelligence-generated accounts like the ones proposed by Meta.

“There are cases where this can be helpful or where real social needs can be met through chatbots,” Vold said. But she said true social relationships require the other individual to be “cognitively capable” of social interaction.

When it comes to AI-generated characters, “whatever you experience is more like a relationship with the artifact,” she said, like the emotions you might feel toward a character in a book. Some users reported romantic relationships with accounts generated by artificial intelligence, Hera 2013 film about a man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence program.

“When reading this novel, you feel a real sympathy for Anna Karenina, but that's different than having a social relationship with her, Santa Claus or some other fictional character,” Vold explained.

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