Do Androids Dream of Electric Tweets?
For today's newsletter, I'll introduce you to an interesting new app available for iPhones called Social AI.
Read it and weave
Hello again everyone. Last week was a successful Arachne reboot! But can we keep the momentum going? Is there enough happening to warrant whole newsletters?
Only time will tell. For today's newsletter, I'll introduce you to an interesting new app available for iPhones called Social AI.
Lots of bots
If you have spent any amount of time on the consumer or social internet, you have interacted with bots. "Bots," for the sake of this newsletter, will encompass any non-human contributor to internet interaction. In the common vernacular of the social internet, bots are typically non-human entities that post, like, comment, and share content often under the guise of being human. Bots generally have a negative connotation on the social web, as they have been used in foreign social media infiltration, as engagement bait for advertisers, and for other reasons in which pretending to be a human is an asset.
But not all bots are bad necessarily. Plenty of emergency services employ computer programs to send automated posts out to free up humans to take more real world action in a crisis. Occasionally a bot can be helpful with customer service tasks and troubleshooting. And plenty of bots are just for fun, like ones that quote movies at you or something.
Yet despite numerous investigations and reports into the nefarious use of bots and social media manipulation over the last few years, there is evidence to suggest that the use of bots has never been higher.
Josh Taylor
While Elon spent precious moments of his life posting “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”, the bots have taken over. This is bad! It erodes the social contract, and calls into question everything we see on the internet. When people "buy followers" to boost their social media pages, what they are buying are bots that are meant to subscribe and engage with the page. This skews the public's sense of who has credibility and who does not. When bad actors looking to sow discord or increase reactionary thinking implement their bots they often share fake news, shout exaggerated opinions, and make hyperbolic assertions about the world.
The entire social web gets muddy. As a user, you have to take everything with a grain of salt, calling into question the veracity of anything you see that you cannot directly validate. This does not a healthy democracy make, let alone a healthy creative industry that relies on social media.
But what if they were all bots?
But consider for moment what your social media experience would be like if the entire feed were bots. Just you and the bots. That's the basic premise of a new app called Social AI from developer Michael Sayman.
Sayman is a longtime app developer who was literally plucked out of his Florida teenager-dom by Mark Zuckerberg to come and work for Facebook about ten years ago. Since then, he's worked on stuff at Instagram, Google, and Roblox and has a stable of his own indie applications.
Here's how Social AI basically works:
After downloading the app and signing in, you get to choose what kind of followers you want to have. Some categories include Supporters, Skeptics, and Fans.
Once you've selected a few, you're ready to start posting. Here is my first post and the first few replies I got:
As you can see, I populated my followers with haters. I selected all the skeptics, critics, and conservatives I could.
And the app follows like that. When you open it, it shows the post field, not a feed like the other apps. Essentially, this app can function as a fake meeting room of friends and enemies who respond to whatever whimsy and observation you wish to share.
For what it is worth, the reaction to the debut of this app, which went viral at least on Twitter and Bluesky, was mixed with incredibly strong feelings. Many used the word dystopian, considering the basic premise to be indicative of something broken in our collective well being. These people see this app as a Black Mirror episode come to life, where everyone gets to be the world's most famous influencer to a unlimited audience of robot followers.
Others see it as a kind of tech art project that forces users to contend with the fact that the social media they know and love is already full of bots.
What do I think and whats the arts/entertainment angle here?
After listening to an episode of The Vergecast and spending some time in the app myself, I have some mixed but ultimately positive thoughts about this.
There are some comments made by Sayman with which I fundamentally disagree. For example, he sees this app as an "interface" for engaging with AI at a higher level than a mere chatbot. He asserts multiple times in this interview that the current AI product model is built off of chatbots that provide "one answer." I am not certain that this is entirely true. If you ask Claude or ChatGPT a question that does not have one clear answer it'll often give you a well summarized, multi-angled answer. I am not certain that Social AI is an "interface" for engaging with AI any more than existing social media is an interface for engaging with human beings.
Sayman also makes an analogy that Social AI may be like a Nicotine patch, essentially saying that Social AI could serve as a tool to get addicted social media users off the apps. I'm not totally certain about this, as the existing network of "real" social media apps have a number of overlapping features, yet people still use them. I see it as more likely that people add Social AI to their fleet of apps than replace.
But generally? I think this is a pretty solid idea. As mentioned in last week's Weft, social media companies profit off of the generated work of its users. While funny Twitter accounts make their funny tweets for free, increasing positive engagement on Twitter, it is Twitter that gets to sell ads around that tweet to make money. The initial tweeter doesn't see that benefit. This is a dying model, and one that cannot sustain itself. I am not saying that Social AI offers a solution for the funny tweeter, but it does disrupt the business model of the titans.
For advertisers whose work is closely intertwined with the entertainment and social media industries, this new app offers exactly the kind of favorable tradeoff you'd want. Social AI could guarantee that ads displayed in the app never showed up next to something objectionable because Social AI turns the dials of what shows up at all. Additionally, advertisers could more directly target consumers, as each instance of the app would just include the data of the one human user, what they've posted about, what they are curious about, etc. While I don't love targeted advertising and the lack of data privacy that comes with it, advertisers like it because they can ensure higher returns on their ad spend than if they do more catchall or segmented advertising to larger user bases.
I believe the real endgame of a product like this is not another place to share your feelings, but another place to give your attention. Each of the social media companies survive by capturing your attention for as long as is possible. They invented infinite scroll and their algorithms promote inflammatory content because they directly earn money off of how much time you spend there. Literally. It is the data they use to sell advertisers on the efficacy of their product to drive traffic.
But what if there existed a place where you could aggregate your news, maybe do a little window shopping, and follow all your favorite sports teams without having to engage with clickbait election headlines or bots literally designed to make you angry? What if you could have a stream like Twitter or TikTok but you could be certain that outside bad actors were not attempting to manipulate you?
There are a number of questions that arise from this. Would we want one company in charge of such a tool? Could we put the AI on enough rails to ensure safety? Should our attention be captured in these ways at all?
I am not totally certain, but if there were a way to keep the useful parts of social media, like raising social awareness for causes, like being entertained, like staying up to date, while jettisoning the bad parts like the democracy destruction, or the rage bait, or the feedback loop of radicalization to extreme ideologies, then I think I would make that trade.
What do you think?
Feel free to send me your thoughts about something like this. Am I being too idealistic about something that doesn't even exist yet? Should I be more critical?
Either way, thanks for reading, and make sure to sign up for my live AI and the Creative Industries session on October 21! Sign up here:
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