Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.
In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already raised its head. It's a problem that is going to get much worse in the months to come, even weeks to come. And that is bots.
This problem has already sort of started becoming apparent on BlueSky. But it is probably not even going to be something that anyone at Twitter or X flinches at, given the nature of the discourse there. You can now create bots that will interact with people completely on their own based on a certain prompt. I recently saw a video by Hank Green who was wondering what this might mean for us in the future about whether the solution to this problem is going to be whitelists or blacklists. And I have a different opinion on this, of course, I will tell you. And my opinion has to do with the fact that Twitter is not the problem. The problem is the format itself. To replace Twitter with another microblogging platform is replacing one disease with another. The very format where people post microscopic text updates and react to other microscopic text updates is not designed for a good, healthy discourse. In fact, it seems to be designed for the exact opposite.
These AI bots that I was talking about are basically, you know, automated accounts, which you can create and you can, uh, get a chat bot to generate responses to particular posts made by people. And you can have the chat bot generate responses that are of a certain variety. The one that Hank Green was talking about has to do with disagreement. So it's a bot that politely but firmly disagrees with whatever you have said. And Hank Green shows a few examples. Uh, there are also other things that it is possible to do with these bots, you know, so in discord it, the problem is the kind of problems you needed a human to create right now in the very near future, it will be possible to have tens of thousands of bought accounts that are creating that manner of problem without anyone actually having to engage or spend time on Twitter.
And there are a few nightmarish scenarios that come to mind that I will refrain from going too deeply into. But imagine what this means. Right now, you are having fights with people on Twitter and you are at least aware that these are human beings, maybe opportunistic human beings, but still human beings who are doing these things. In the near future, you might spend a day fighting with 20 accounts on a microblogging platform and come to the realization later in the day or unfortunately maybe later in the week that none of them were actual people. This is so bizarre, I'm kind of finding myself lacking words to describe it.
Can you imagine a future where in order to deal with these bots, you create bots of your own and then don't engage with anyone on Twitter at all? Your bot responds to messages being generated by other bots. Twitter is full of conversation. None of it is happening among human beings. And for the people outside of Twitter who look at Twitter and consider it some kind of reflection of whatever is happening in actual human society and human discourse, it will be unfortunate because they will come to the conclusion that this is what people are like now. Or maybe they won't come to that conclusion. Maybe it will be something else. Maybe we will all collectively come to the conclusion that social media is inhuman, that it is not people talking to each other and that it's just a lot of machine-generated text going up against each other, agreeing with each other and disagreeing with each other, et cetera.
Can you imagine that kind of a social web? I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up. Maybe Blue Sky will be one of them. Maybe something else will do it. I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up that are of the opinion that no, we are for humans only. No AI bots allowed. Even something as large as Twitter will eventually have to just say we are not in favor of bots or maybe put some kind of a cap on the number of bots any single account is able to create. Although I'm not sure that will help because these seem to be, I'm not a techie, but these seem to be rather simple problems to get around for the enterprising disingenuous mind.
I don't know how things will turn out, but social media is not getting better, is my point. It is only getting worse. It is only becoming more inhuman, more dishonest, and more of the kind of plays that can only survive as a result of rage bait being the primary currency as far as discourse is concerned. So if you still had doubts about whether or not you should stay on social media, maybe look at this very near future projection and make a decision for the sake of your own sanity and perhaps for the betterment of all humanity.
That was it. I'll see you in the next one.
