How Is Social Media Adopting Generative AI?
AI has become an important part of everyday activities. According to a recent article (Nasdaq, by Terry Hu), generative AI combined with other technologies can add up to 3.3 percentage points to productivity growth.
The social media market is estimated to grow by ~1 billion users till 2027 globally, which means there is still a high opportunity for growth, and now it is a matter of time for social media companies to act on it.
Recently, after WhatsApp, Meta has started rolling out its free artificial intelligence assistant Meta AI across its other social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Meta AI can answer questions, generate high quality images, and create images such that if you’re bored during flight and only have “free texting”, you can learn a lot from Meta AI using WhatsApp.
This has been an interesting development on Meta’s side, but how is social media in general leveraging the power of Generative AI? Let’s look at it together.
Potential Application Areas of Generative AI
Social media companies can use Generative AI for more personalized and engaging experiences and to optimize platform functionality. Some potential areas include:
Content Creation: AI algorithms can be used to track and analyze user data, identify user preferences using browsing history, demographics and generate personalized, tailored content and social media update. Generative AI can also be used to create matching and compelling visuals for social media platforms. It is expected that generative AI will drive the innovation and creativity. This can also be seen in the sharp rise in the use of AI-generated content from businesses, influencers, marketers, and basically everyday users. Generative AI enables businesses to significantly reduce the time and cost spent on content creation.
Content Moderation: AI models can be used to analyze patterns, identify content, and assist for content moderation by filtering out inappropriate content.
Avatar and Character Creation: The popularity of avatar and character creation might have started with Snapchat, but it is going viral now. Social media platforms can leverage AI to generate custom avatars.
Virtual Assistants: Generative AI can be used to develop chatbots to answer questions of customers and help with their concerns.
Generative AI can also be used for content translation and localization, realistic simulation, and dynamic content generation on social media platforms.
Challenges
As in everything, the biggest challenge of using generative AI on social media is the risk of misinformation. There is always a risk of generating misleading information when the model is not properly trained.
Second biggest concern is bias and fairness. Garbage in garbage out principle also works here. If the data that is used to train the models is biased, the model results will also be biased. Ensuring fairness and mitigating the bias is a crucial concern for social media platforms.
Building trust for AI generated content is another challenge. Especially if users faced misleading information before, it would be harder to develop the trust towards AI generated content again.
Authenticity is also under the question. According to a recent report of Deloitte, some providers are building synthetic versions of famous celebrities and deploying them into social media platforms. It doesn’t take for a language learning model to create a fake personality. As the outputs become more refined, the “humanness” of social media could come under pressure.
The Future
Even though there are some challenges to be solved, it seems like Generative AI will play a very important role in the future of social media. With advancements in natural language processing models, vector-based data bases, and computer vision, AI will get even better and the results would look even more promising. Especially with the continuing investment on AR/VR technologies, social media experiences can get more immersive. I believe the success of the technologies lies behind the right balance and user education (both of content providers and consumers).
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