The synthetic social network is coming - The Verge

Now that we have AI that can create new content, including images, intelligently it seems obvious that social networks will be filled with more advanced AI's pretending to be people. If you launched a social network today, with a good enough budget, you could have 100,000 bot users in there immediately so even the first user would feel like there were a lot of other people here. Only they aren't people, they are AIs.

More significantly, I think, is the idea that Meta plans to place its AI characters on every major surface of its products. They have Facebook pages and Instagram accounts; you will message them in the same inbox that you message your friends and family. Soon, I imagine they will be making Reels.

And when that happens, feeds that were once defined by the connections they enabled between human beings will have become something else: a partially synthetic social network.

This seems obvious. Game networks have done this for a while. If you have a multiplayer game you need to have an option for people that want to play when everyone else is sleeping. Bot players serve that purpose well. Of course having a bot play a game is entirely different than a conversational AI with a profile, history, photos, and everything else that could go with it.

This is one of the risks Ian Bremmer highlighted in Weapons of Mass Disruption. Where this goes is anybody's guess.

Also see Introducing New AI Experiences Across Our Family of Apps and Devices where Facebook highlights the 28 more AI characters. I had to temporarily turn off my content blocker to read that one. 😏