Mark Zuckerberg just freaked me out at Siggraph 2024, and it has nothing to do with Sweet Baby Rays. No, Zuckerberg, sitting down with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to muse on the future of generative AI, described a future in which your endless doom scrolling will get even more endless with AI-generated content built specifically for you.
I wish I had better words to describe this, but I should really leave it to Zuckerberg to say himself:
“With generative AI, I think we’re going to quickly move into this zone where, not only is the majority of the content that you see today on Instagram just recommended to you from stuff that’s out there in the world that matches your interests… I think in the future a lot of this stuff is going to be created with [generative AI] tools, too.
“Some of that is going to be creators using the tools to create new content. Some of it, I think eventually, is going to be content that’s either created on the fly for you, or pulled together and synthesized through different things that are out there.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets annoyed at the large AI popups slowly taking over Google and nearly every social media platform, but AI-generated content built for you on the fly is a big step beyond that. It’s not so much that these platforms want to keep you engaged — we know that’s the ultimate goal — but that it would be taking content you enjoy, ripping out the soul of the people who made that content, and coming up with something new. It’s an AI-generated blog post disguised as a social media post, and I don’t want to take part in that.
That’s not the future we’re in today, though. Zuckerberg was laying out a vision of the future, mainly on the back of Meta’s new AI Studio. This feature, which was unceremoniously announced with an off-hand comment during the chat, is built with Meta’s new Llama 3.1 model, and it allows users to discover different AI characters and creators to create their own AI for fans to interact with.
Zuckerberg says that one of the largest uses Meta has seen with Meta AI so far is for support. The executive says that users are interacting with the AI to role-play stressful situations in what he calls a “judgement-free zone.” There are a bunch of problems with interacting with an AI to deal with a stressful situation, and even more with users interacting with creator-made AI bots with the prevalence of para-social relationships online, but I guess this has been the direction we’ve been heading.
Still, you can create your own character on the AI Studio website, or in the Instagram app. Or you can just stick with Character.ai, which has done the same thing for quite some time.
