Facebook Thinks AI Bots Will Be Your New Social Media Friends
Real human friends are soon to be out-of-date in Silicon Valley. Instead, your new social media friend will soon be an artificial intelligence bot, according to one executive from Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company.
Connor Hayes, Meta’s vice president of product for generative AI, told the Financial Times last week that the company expects AI bots will “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.”
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform,” Hayes added.
Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is increasingly turning to AI to spur user engagement. In July, the company introduced its AI Studio tool, allowing users to create AI characters. The AI characters will serve as “an extension” of its users and be able to respond to direct messages and story replies for other social media friends, Meta said when the tool was first introduced.
The company also teased a new AI tool in October that allows users to make 16 second videos based on text prompts; the tool, dubbed Movie Gen, is expected to roll out in 2025.
Meta’s bet on AI bots could be seen as a new, creative way to keep users on its platforms and off of rival apps like TikTok and YouTube. (Those two platforms were recently found by Pew Research Center to be the most popular apps among American teenagers.)
It is also a move that comes as Meta is running out of new people to join its social network. Meta reported 3.29 billion people used at least one of its apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — on a daily basis by the end of Q3. Two years prior, the company had 2.93 billion people using at least one of its apps daily.
Meta and Zuckerberg have shown a willingness to bet big on other emerging technologies in recent years, with mixed results. The company has put billions of dollars into getting the Metaverse, its virtual reality platform where users interact with one another using computer-generated likenesses, off of the ground. Zuckerberg called the Metaverse the “holy grail” of social media experiences in 2022, but so far it has not gained much traction, and the company has not shared an update on how many of its users have joined it.
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