In the next two years, the company intends to fill Instagram and Facebook with AI-generated characters. They will have pages with photos and videos, as well as short information to look more lively. According to Meta, this will “help retain a young audience” and compete with the same TikTok. Of course, no one asked the teenagers themselves.
What you should know
“Social network with pictures” have already managed to flood the generated neurogirls, on which especially enterprising ones even earn money, and as a result: Meta decides to develop the direction. Business will be good, but the fragile psyche of teenagers is unlikely to be.
Children are stronger than adults, dependent on public opinion, and no one has canceled the issue of self-acceptance in adolescence. And then a conditional high school student goes to Instagram, sees there the successful AI son of his mother's friend, compares himself with him and begins to doubt himself, only reinforcing his insecurity and complexes. This is happening even now, while social networks are not full of ideal AI characters.
Experts, however, are more concerned about the issue of disinformation. Meta offers to label generated content, but this seems like a weak defense, because when scrolling through a post, we first see photos and videos, and then the text. In general, business, as always, is just business and nothing personal.