Social Media’s Eerie AI Ecosystems
By Camryn Brown
I’ll start off by saying I definitely took a few creative liberties on this assignment. I started off with the prompt of AI and marketing, but the more research I did and the more thought I put into it, the more I wanted to write about something a little different.
Maybe this is just me, but I’ve been really put off by all of the “new” AI features on social media in the last year or so. It seems like every platform has its own named version of AI. Meta, Gemini, and Grok are just a few. These chatbots are showing up everywhere (and I do mean everywhere). I can’t even online shop without the website forcefully suggesting I get help from their own AI bot. Even Google now provides an “AI overview” anytime you search anything.
Here’s the thing though, these new AI features, for the most part, aren’t even doing anything groundbreaking. Sure, the generative AI aspect is something we haven’t seen before, but at least for as long as I can remember, Google has highlighted the most relevant search results, which is essentially the same function as the AI overview. And these chatbots on shopping websites will just spit out some information you can find on the FAQ section of the website before handing you over to a human customer service representative. The biggest difference is branding. Companies like Google want to be seen as relevant and innovative. The quickest way to do that? Slap the word AI on an already existing feature of the product.
This AI craze introduces even more convenience to our already infinite and instant source of entertainment and information but let me introduce you to a dark side of an AI-centric internet. Ever heard of the dead internet theory? The original theory itself gets pretty weird, so I’ll just keep it to the point. The idea is that the internet is becoming so overrun by bots and AI that it’ll eventually become sort of unusable. A virtual Ghost town. Of course, this is barely the tip of the iceberg. You can find a really interesting Forbes article about it here. Now this theory is far-fetched and definitely a long way from becoming a reality, but I do think it's an interesting thing to remember when considering the current state of the internet.
I think the best example of this is probably Facebook. Granted Facebook still has billions of active monthly users but scroll for ten minutes and I’m willing to bet you’ll come across at least one AI post. You've found one? Great. Now check the comments. You’re probably seeing variations or just copies of the same comment. Now look at the accounts commenting. The majority of them are just bots. So, just to recap, these bots are using AI to rapidly create and post content for other bots. The post gets engagement, the account makes more. No human interaction is necessary. The cycle will just continue to repeat itself, completely flooding the platform with AI nonsense. Facebook has done very little to stop this. They claim to be fighting AI spam, but they’ve also made it clear that their flagging system is pretty unreliable (you can check out their statements here). Plus, its hard to flag an entire AI ecosystem, and even if they did, what would that do?
So I’ve mentioned accounts run by AI systems. What if we gave those accounts priority over human run accounts? That’s actually what’s happening on X. And they aren’t just being given priority. They’re being paid. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X he put two major changes into place that, in my opinion, kind of destroyed the platform. First, verification became a subscription. Second, they began to monetize posts. So engagement farming and spam posting are not only mostly unregulated but actually incentivized. Verified posts and responses are given priority and moved to the top of feeds, and now that people can make money, who’s to stop them from programming a bot to respond to a popular tweet a couple dozen times and make a couple bucks? Definitely not X, because they’ve been trying and failing for the better part of two years.
Now, do I think generative AI is going to completely take over social media? No. It’s recognizable, it gets details wrong, and a lot of people seem to really be against it. I do however think that generative AI, in its current state on social media, is doing way more harm than good. It’s flooding pages with irrelevant nonsense, it’s oversaturating markets and it’s indirectly causing a lot of problems for real artists and content creators. So while I don’t think we should panic, I do think it might be time for just a little concern.