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Meet The Most Powerful And Convincing Social Media Influencer Ever

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This could change everything on social media.

Unfortunately, the change might not be for the better.

Recently, two really smart technologists wrote about the dangers of artificial intelligence invading social media. Jonathan Haidt is a well-known book author and social psychologist. Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google. They explained how AI could become a powerful force on social media, one that foreign dictators could employ to control citizens on Twitter and spread misinformation on Facebook.

I wrote about a similar topic recently, expressing some real concern that AI bots posting on social media could lead to confusion and chaos.

The authors mention something just as troubling.

“[We see] the widespread, skillful manipulation of people by AI super-influencers — including personalized influencers — rather than by ordinary people and “dumb” bots,” they wrote. My guess about what they meant? The “super-influencer” could be an avatar that looks like a real person, a bot that is automating social media messaging, or some combination of those things.

An AI influencer would know all about our interests and preferences, exploiting them at will. The authors mention a slot machine analogy that is already well known. It was a central part of the The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix from a few years ago. The idea is that a slot machine at a casino, like TikTok, is programmed to keep you hooked as long as possible. An AI would pose as a human or post automated messages designed to make sure you pay attention even more.

What Haidt and Schmidt are hinting at sounds like a social media apocalypse to me. Think of it as the most powerful and convincing influencer ever created, except that this AI creation is designed to directly influence you more than anyone else.

The crazy part about this coming reality, which is already here in some ways, is that we might not even know this influencer is a bot or that the messages were automated. If a real human influencer uses AI to create content, we might not know that, either.

Recently, I mentioned how a social media avatar called Lia looks almost real in some of “her” photos. On Twitter, when Lia posts, there are invariably a few comments from people who want to date her or interact in some way, not realizing the Twitter “user” is an AI robot (even though they clearly identify the bot). You may have already seen AI generated images and avatars countless times and assumed they were real. You may have already been influenced by bots.

How do we know some of the “influencers” currently posting on Instagram and TikTok are humans? The truth is, maybe we don’t want to know.

Social media is already an illusion. The real influencers are not posting photos of themselves taking out the garbage or burning toast. Maybe you’ve seen some of those behind-the-scenes photos of influencers showing how they fabricate their photos. Guess what? Some of them are in their backyard, not at the beach.

An AI would be much smarter and more convincing than a human influencer creating fake photos. Bots also never get tired and can post multiple times per hour. The authors note how an AI influencer could be designed specifically for you. These influencers would know exactly what to post and to manipulate the algorithm in a way that makes you buy products, change viewpoints, or vote in a certain way.

Unregulated, a so-called “super-influencer” could sway entire elections, change political landscapes, and create terror cells in ways we’ve never seen before.

While social media influencers have seemed mostly harmless in the past, AI will empower an entirely new kind of bot that might be impossible to distinguish from the real thing. These bots are already influencing us and we don’t even know it.

Are we prepared for this type of AI influence? I would say, not at all. We’re already hopeless when it comes to humans influencing us. AI bots will have a field day.

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