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.
A TikTok account hosting videos of AI-generated explosions that others claimed were in Ukraine was removed from the platform following inquiries from the CBC News visual investigations team. The account shows how low-quality content made with generative AI — known as ‘AI slop’ — can warp perceptions and fuel misinformation.
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.
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