Why did you sign up for Facebook, or Instagram, or if you’re cool enough, perhaps even TikTok?
It seems like a very straightforward question. Social media is designed for people to connect with one another. This is something that I think should be obvious to everyone regardless of your standpoint: User, creator, business owner, marketer, or even leader within the social network itself. It’s literally in the name in the form of social media. Our current iteration of social media effectively began when Mark Zuckerberg came up with a way for students at Harvard to more conveniently connect with each other over the Internet, identifying a niche in a market occupied by MySpace and Friendster that ended up setting the standard for social networking for nearly a decade.
This is why Meta’s recent announcement as part of its ongoing efforts to tap into AI has been so mystifying. Last year Meta debuted its AI Studio, where users could create their own AI “characters.” They’ve now announced through the Financial Times that they’re leveraging this technology in a way that should raise some eyebrows by planning to turn these AI creations into Facebook and Instagram “users” complete with biographies and profile pictures and the ability to both share “original” content and interact with existing content:
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta.
“They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he added.
Reaction to this has been been mostly confusion, and despite Meta’s proud heralding of this new announcement nobody seems particularly excited. The one prevailing and understandable response can be summed up in a single word: Why?
As much this would seem to fly in the face of what social media is designed to do, there are a number of likely reasons for why Meta is taking this approach. If you know anything about Meta you’ll already suspect correctly that this is far more beneficial to Meta than it is to you or your business.
While the FT article notes that Meta has established some ground rules, namely that AI-generated content will be labeled as such on platforms, note that this doesn’t say anything about the users being identified as AI-driven bots. This is where numerous concerns come into play. Let’s start with something I didn’t think I’d ever have to reiterate: Bots do not take direct action in a way that results in money being earned by business owners.
They may be able to upvote every single post you make and make detailed replies about how awesome you are, but they’ll never call your phone number to make an appointment or place an order. They’ll never drive to your physical storefront, or request a consultation, or donate to your nonprofit. Meta beamingly told FT that users have created “hundreds of thousands of characters” since Meta’s AI Studio launched in July, but that most of them are still private. The prospect of unleashing hundreds of thousands if not millions of automated users into the wild on Facebook does nothing to benefit business owners in a tangible way that results in them making money.
These bots exist solely within the ecosystems of Facebook and Instagram themselves, and the most significant action they could take would be upvoting posts, shorts and reels en masse. The result is that engagement levels will go up. In addition to significantly fluffing up engagement numbers on Facebook and Meta, this would also give unwary page owners or content creators the impression that they’re reaching and impressing far more people than they actually are. Now we’re getting somewhere.
These sorts of bot profiles don’t benefit users looking for actual people to talk to and interact with. They don’t benefit businesses who want to use Facebook and Instagram to drive users to take actions that would result in making money. They certainly don’t benefit social media marketers (ethical ones, at least) who want to drive business to clients on behalf of these platforms. There’s only one chief beneficiary of this plan: Meta.
Meta is a publicly traded company and it relies on increased engagement levels to look good for investors. Meta notably no longer reports daily active users and instead gives a standard figure for what it calls the “family daily active people.” In a general sense, this just means that as long as a user is defined as “active” then it’s contributing to Meta’s overall engagement levels, which it reports to investors. You’re probably figuring out at this point how “AI users” can be effective for the company in this manner.
Or, as tech PR leader and writer Ed Zitron puts it:
This quiet, seemingly innocent change to how Meta reports growth is significant insofar as it will no longer have to report its Daily Active or Monthly active users, meaning that the only source of truth in Meta’s growth story is a vague growth metric that could be manipulated to mean just about anything. Three billion “daily active people” across Meta’s “family” combines WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger (which I’m confident it counts separately), Oculus, and Threads.
In short: Meta is the only entity that stands to benefit from openly admitting to introducing (at minimum) hundreds of thousands of literal fake users.
Keep in mind that there’s prior for Meta artificially inflating its numbers to appeal to target audiences or to just present the appearance of success. I wrote five years ago on this very website about how Facebook essentially fabricated an entire “video marketing” trend in a failed effort to displace Google-owned YouTube as the king of online video. Facebook paid $40 million under a class action lawsuit settlement that accused Facebook of massively fudging data on the time its users spent watching paid advertisements. Originally it was written that Facebook’s metrics had been overstated by between 60 and 80 percent using a groundswell of faulty metrics, but the amended complaint later alleged that viewership metrics had been inflated by 150 to 900 percent.
By fluffing up its video data solely because it wanted to muscle in on YouTube’s territory, Facebook unknowingly caused a cascading effect that faked an entire Internet marketing trend. That trend subsequently badly shook the media industry and convinced a lot of people running small businesses to invest thousands of dollars in video ads that people were never going to see. The “small business video marketing” craze was ultimately derided from Facebook’s desire to compete with YouTube and it ended with lots of money lost and no real accountability.
So back to this plan to roll out AI-generated users, where does this leave the businesses that use Facebook and Instagram on a daily basis?
I wouldn’t be quick to dump Facebook or Instagram entirely, especially if you have an active community presence and can recognizes responses and interactions with demonstrably real people. Many of you run local businesses that do well especially on Instagram, and if the tool works for you, great!
With that said there’s no better time to diversify channels and marketing streams in a way that makes you less reliant not only on Facebook and Instagram, but social media generally. The algorithmic nature of social media means that, while this varies by platform, you generally reach around 4% of your audience on Instagram and 2.6% reach on Facebook. That’s abysmal as far as marketing channels go – for comparison, Constant Contact puts the average E-mail open rate of newsletters at 36.11%.
It would make much more sense to use these platforms proactively. In addition to posting you can connect with individuals, market your business in local groups, use Instagram stories and generally do the type of in-person network that social media was originally meant to augment rather than replace. In some respects it feels like we’re coming full circle – throughout the 2010s broadcasting your business using social media gradually replaced using social media to augment real networking. Now that algorithms have negated the reach of social profiles, a proactive approach may be the course correction people need.
What matters regardless is to not put all of your eggs in one basket when it comes to social media, especially Facebook or Instagram. Meta has proven that it operates at the whims of what it thinks will look good and has a track record of pouring massive amounts of money into dubious projects – remember the “metaverse” from a few years ago? Yeah, me neither.
I’ve said it before, but if Meta issued a press release announcing that the sky was blue, I’d look outside to double check. Take the same grain of salt when dealing with this company given their track record of behavior lately.