So is Meta really going to roll out an army of AI bot profiles in its apps, which will interact with people like human users do?
That’s what reports coming out of Meta HQ have suggested, with Zuck and Co. becoming increasingly enamored with the viability of AI chatbots, and their capacity to drive conversation and engagement across its apps.
And it certainly sounds like this is the way that Zuck is leaning, based on an interview with podcaster Dwarkeh Patel this week, in which Zuck espoused the many possibilities that he sees for AI interaction.
As per Zuckerberg:
“Today, most of the time spent on Facebook and Instagram is on video, but do you think in five years we’re just going to be sitting in our feed and consuming media that’s just video? No, it’s going to be interactive. You’ll be scrolling through your feed. There will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it, and it talks back, or it changes what it’s doing. Or you can jump into it like a game and interact with it. That’s all going to be AI.”
It definitely sounds like Zuckerberg sees AI engagement as a big part of the next big connective shift.
Though interactive content is one thing, that’s not quite the same as AI bot profiles that you engage with like friends.
Zuckerberg also shared his thoughts on this aspect:
“I do think people are going to use AI for a lot of social tasks. Already, one of the main things we see people using Meta AI for is talking through difficult conversations that they need to have with people in their lives; ‘I’m having this issue with my girlfriend. Help me have this conversation,’ or, ‘I need to have a hard conversation with my boss at work, how do I have that conversation?’ That’s pretty helpful. As the personalization loop kicks in and the AI starts to get to know you better and better, that will just be really compelling.”
Yes, AI profiles as “friends,” or at the least, as trusted advisors who can help you with life’s various quandaries.
Zuckerberg sees this as being a valuable, viable usage for AI tools, based on rising usage, and that does point to the implementation of AI profiles as entities that you can engage with in social apps.
But also:
“The average American has fewer than three people they would consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it’s something like 15 friends or something. […] The average person wants more connection than they have.”
This further points to the use case for AI bots as “friends”, and using AI entities to respond to user posts, which could provide a more meaningful, beneficial user experience.
Would that still be “social” media? I mean, engaging with a raft of bots wouldn’t be “social” as we generally define that term. But as Zuckerberg notes, people want more friends to talk to, and many users are already finding this kind of expanded kinship, or at least advisory council, from AI chatbots.
Why not formalize this in user profiles that’ll provide different takes on your updates? Why not enable users to pose questions as posts, then let AI bots reply, along with humans?
Given the trends that Zuckerberg is pointing to here, that would make sense, and that already sounds a lot like social.ai, the app that now Meta employee Michael Sayman launched last year.
Meta hired Sayman not long after he launched this app, essentially acquiring it in the process. And that seems a lot like where Zuckerberg’s heading with his views on AI bot interaction, facilitating bot replies that can offer alternate perspective on whatever you post.
“There’s a lot of concern people raise like, ‘Is this going to replace real-world, physical, in-person connections?’ And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don’t have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
To be clear, Meta hasn’t shared any specifics about its AI bot profile integration as yet, though at least one Meta exec has suggested that this is where things are headed.
And given the notes that Zuck highlights, that does make sense, that does seem to be where Zuckerberg sees things headed in terms of the evolution of AI profiles and how we interact with them.
Zuckerberg further notes that video engagement with AI will be important, in terms of seeing these AI bot profiles as they interact. Which is what we’ve seen in Asia, with the rise of AI bots conducting live-streams on behalf of brands.
Zuckerberg sees this as being the next big shift, facilitating engagement with AI entities that are presented as real people, real things that you can have a relationship with (within obvious limitations).
Is that a good thing?
I mean, clearly people are already getting value out of engaging with AI bots, and formalizing that into a social media experience makes some sense. But we also don’t yet understand the full implications of such, in terms of mental health impacts, while the accuracy, and trustworthiness of AI bots is another query.
Relying on regurgitated internet content seems like a recipe for disaster in many respects, and how you filter that, at massive scale, is another question. There are also concerns around influence, and how AI bots will be able to guide human user behaviors, and who pulls the strings on that front.
So while Zuck and Co. might be keen to push things forward, and get us all chatting to AI bots, as a means to fill the connection gap, there still seems like a lot of other concerns we should be addressing, as best we can, before we move to that next step.
I’m not sure we actually will, as Meta, again, seems super keen to keep moving, and it does indeed sound like it will soon be rolling out AI bot profiles at scale.
My concern, then, is that we’ll still have to address these issues, but that’ll happen, instead, in retrospect, and after the damage has already been done.
