• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, January 10, 2025

I might be getting too old to offer punditry about social media.

Exhibit A: I cannot fathom having an AI boyfriend or AI companion. Yet Replika, a generative AI chatbot, has more than 30 million users, with around a quarter of them paying subscribers.

If you are one of those people, good on you! I’m not here to judge. I just can’t imagine it for myself. But I do understand how some people would find it appealing.

I even understand “influencers” like “Lil Miquela,” a “21-year-old Robot living in LA.”

What I can’t understand is how anyone would find it appealing to have AI “friends” on Facebook.

But Meta can. In October, Mark Zuckerberg said he was excited for the “opportunity for AI to help people create content that just makes people’s feed experiences better.”

Last week, Meta executive Connor Hayes said AI characters will soon exist on Instagram and Facebook, “kind of in the same way that accounts do … they’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”

Almost immediately after Hayes’ comment, Netizens found AI-generated Facebook accounts -- awful caricatures like “Mama Liv,” a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller, your realest source of life’s ups & downs,” or “Grandpa Brian,” a Black “retired textile businessman who is always learning.”

As it happens, these profiles were from September 2023 and hadn’t posted since April last year. It’s genuinely not worth your time to be shocked about how truly, truly awful they are. But -- if you care about Facebook or Instagram at all -- it is worth your time to think about the trajectory of gen AI on social.

These particular characters were a complete failure. But here we are almost a year and a half later with the company continuing to say that AI-generated characters -- or at least a better version of them -- are the future.

Meanwhile, over on Instagram, a user who tested the “Imagine” AI image generation feature started receiving automatically generated images of himself in his feed. “Used Meta AI to edit a selfie, now Instagram is using my face on ads targeted at me.”

Hugh’s Law says, “All online social networks eventually turn into a swampy mush of spam.”

The man who coined the law, Hugh MacLeod, argued that this law is why, “early adopters are always fleeing online social networks [e.g. LinkedIn], only to join a new one [e.g. Facebook]. They’re fleeing the spam.”

Six years ago, I wrote about the way Facebook had thus far managed to avoid Hugh’s fate: “Zuckerberg and his team were smart enough to realize that spam was driving people away -- quickly enough to do something about it. And they were smart enough to realize that reducing revenue in the short term was well worth it if it meant continuing to grow the user base.”

That was then. But now, the swampy mush of AI spam is being generated from inside the house.

Replika is designed for me to secure the exact AI companion I want, for myself. Lil Miquela is effectively an art project, managed by humans (her manager, Sara Giusto, spoke at TED last year).

But in the Facebook future they’re imagining, I log in and get fake updates pushed on me from my fake friends about their fake families and their fake lives.

In the Instagram future they’re imagining, I log in and get fake updates pushed on me from… myself.

I don’t get it. Can anyone out there explain it to me like I’m a six-year-old -- or like I’m someone getting too old to offer punditry about social media?