One place where AI is very likely to punch, and punch hard, is in the domain of social media, which has done plenty of damage to society as it is.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose expertise includes the dynamics of human personality and the sociology of morality, has much to say on both the state of social media today and the dangers of AI boosting its toxicity tomorrow. He and Eric Schmidt (who wrote The Age of AI with Henry Kissinger, see above) published an essay in The Atlantic in May 2023, summarizing those dangers.
Schmidt wistfully recalled his early expectations of what social media would do for society:
“I had an overly rosy view of human nature. Most of us thought that it was inherently good to just connect everybody and everything,” he wrote. “But now I can see that even though most people are good––or, at least, they behave well when interacting with strangers––a small number of trolls, foreign agents, and domestic jerks gain access to the megaphone that is social media, and they can do a lot of damage to trust, truth, and civility.”
The past decade has made other disheartening realities painfully clear:
“I didn’t fully understand human tribalism and the way that social media could supercharge it,” he continued. “All platforms wanted to grow their user bases and increase their engagement, and we all thought that social media was a healthy way to help small communities form and flourish. But as political polarization rose steadily, not just in the USA but in many parts of the world in the 2010s, we discovered that issues of partisanship, identity, and us-versus-them were among the most powerful drivers of engagement.”
AI, they contend, will make it much, much worse.
With generative AI and its potential for deepfake images, vocal audio, and video now so high-quality and freely available, they foresee a wave of invasion by insidious new “influencer” content that will be far more convincing, ubiquitous, and targeted than anything seen on social media thus far.
“AI [is] going to super-empower bad actors by giving them each an army of assistants,” Haidt wrote, “and it [is] going to supercharge intergroup conflict by drowning us all in high-quality video evidence that the other side is worse than Hitler.”
Tech legend Steve Wozniak sees it this way:
“AI is so intelligent it's open to the bad players, the ones that want to trick you about who they are,” Wozniak said in a BBC interview. Because it “sounds so intelligent,” he said, those bad players will be all the more convincing.
John Brandon of Forbes shares these concerns, and has suggested it will play out something like this;
“On a typical day, you might login to LinkedIn or Facebook, scrolling through your feed. You see plenty of comments and lively discussion. But it’s all a ruse. The social media platform has allowed and even enabled the AI accounts to create the discussions (and the comments), and they are geared for you - your interests and proclivities. The chats will always look appealing because the social media networks know what you like and what you usually follow.
“On Instagram and TikTok, bots will know which photos and videos you like the best, but without the human element, it will all become nothing more than a way to grab your attention even more and keep you hooked longer on the apps, showing you ads that are also fine-tuned to your interest. Not to make it all sound too dire, but think of The Matrix and the moment Neo realized he was (spoiler alert for the five people who don’t know this) nothing more than a battery in a tube.
“When we are all surrounded by AI bots acting like humans, looking at content that was not generated by humans and looking at ads powered by algorithms, it will feel about the same as The Matrix,” he concluded. “None of it will seem real. And then one of it will have value.”
Haidt and Schmidt aren’t just sounding an alarm; they’re prescribing some pushback. In their essay, they outline four predictions of what AI will do to social media as generative artificial content proliferates:
AI-enhanced social media will wash ever-larger torrents of garbage into our public conversation.
Personalized super-influencers will make it much easier for companies, criminals, and foreign agents to influence us to do their bidding via social media platforms.
AI will make social media much more addictive for children, thereby accelerating the ongoing teen mental illness epidemic.
AI will change social media in ways that strengthen authoritarian regimes (particularly China) and weaken liberal democracies, particularly polarized ones, such as the USA.
These predictions don’t just seem reasonable; they seem inevitable, based on what we already expect from bad actors on social media.
And, of course, no one in their right mind expects the Mark Zuckerbergs of the social media universe to step up and do the right thing. There’s no curtailing the torrents of garbage that Haidt and Schmidt predict; there is only mitigation of the damage, by way of regulation imposed on the social media industry.
Specifically, they suggest:
Authenticate all users, including bots
Mark AI-generated audio and visual content
Require data transparency with users, government officials, and researchers
Clarify that platforms can sometimes be liable for the choices they make and the content they promote
Raise the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and enforce it
This doesn’t really fix the problem, of course. As with pandemics, the real solution is to truncate the problem at its source. And these measures can’t even really be viewed as ‘cures’ - just masks and distancing and hand sanitizer. Not everyone will be bright enough, well-educated enough, or self-aware enough to join in. But it’s what there is, and kudos to Haidt and Schmidt for taking the problem seriously enough to speak out loudly.
Brandon wraps it up this way:
“With apologies to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, this might be when we reach behind our neck and pull the cord out,” he wrote. “It might be when social media finally loses its grip on us and we realize it was all designed to keep us hooked to their advertising formulas after all. I hope we do wake up before that nightmare occurs.”
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