Is it still 'social media' if it's overrun by AI?

Back in 2010, a 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for Facebook — by that point a wildly popular social network with more than 500 million users.

"The primary thing that we focus on all day long is how to help people share and stay connected with their friends, family and the people in the community 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: characters powered by artificial intelligence existing alongside actual friends and family. Some experts caution that this could mark the end of social media as we know it.

For early users of social media, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become "about as anti-social as you can imagine," said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst and journalist based in London, Ont. "It's becoming increasingly difficult to connect with an actual human being."

A story published last month by the Financial Times laid out Meta's plans for artificially generated accounts on Facebook and Instagram, each with distinct characteristics, including racial and sexual identities.

"They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content," Connor Hayes, Meta's vice-president of product for generative AI, told the paper. 

The corporation started experimenting with them in 2023. After the Times story was published, some irritated users began a campaign to block and report the accounts. One journalist spoke to an AI account that presented itself as a Black queer woman — and admitted that its development team didn't include any Black people.

Meta recently began quietly removing the profiles, which Meta Canada spokesperson Julia Perreira told CBC News were managed by humans and part of an "early experiment." 

The company deleted the accounts due to a bug that was "impacting users' abilities to block them," said Perreira. "[We] are removing those accounts to fix the issue," she added, but did not respond to a question about whether the accounts would be reinstated at a later date.

Most major social media platforms have launched AI-powered features. X, formerly Twitter, scrapes user data to train its AI chatbot Grok (and lets other companies do the same); Snapchat has its "My AI"; and AI influencers like Lil Miquela are popping up across TikTok and Instagram, landing sponsorship deals with big brands. 

Also on X, it's now the norm for an army of bots to spam viral posts en masse, regurgitating versions of the most-liked reply as a way of farming engagement.

The challenge is that AI content gets more eyeballs, and thus more ad dollars: The social media management firm Buffer found in October that AI-assisted posts had a higher median engagement rate than regular content, based on 1.2 million posts sent from its platform to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Growth is the "lifeblood" of companies like Meta, said Levy, the analyst. But most people who want a Facebook or Instagram account likely have one by now, an existential crisis that hit Facebook hard in 2022, when its total user base declined for the first time.

"The future of social media seems to be one in which the production of content is being privileged over social interactions and social connections. It doesn't need to be that way, though," said Lai-Tze Fan, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo and a Canada Research Chair of Technology and Social Change.