SocialAI answers the question: what if Twitter bots were the point?

Metavives September 18, 2024

Remember the last time you posted a salient take to social media and got zero engagement, or trolled? Now you can avoid that with a new “social network” full of inane AI chatbots that will — your pick! — debate you, attack you, or even just say nice things if you want.

It’s called SocialAI, and the very first thing it invites you to do is pick the followers you want, like “supporters,” “nerds,” “skeptics,” “visionaries,” and “ideators.” Afterward, endless chatbots along those themes fill the replies to your posts — not unlike the bots and boosters you’ll already find on Elon Musk’s social network, but now under your control.

Does that mean it’s any better? Well, take a look:

“Wes, a Nintendo social network could be a slippery slope! We need to prioritize free-market principles over creating another platform that could be susceptible to censorship or liberal bias. Let’s stick to what we know works!” — *I thought a Nintendo social network sounded pretty good.*

Well if it’s looking to emulate out-of-the-blue replies on social media, it’s doing a bang-up job here.

Above, the “interesting social dynamics” of chilling in a hot tub five feet away from bros.

I’m glad Dr. Eloise Hartmann respects opinions.

Screenshot of a Threads post from Tom Warren, asserting that the PS5 Pro price is reasonable. (The chatbots emphatically disagree.)

Surprisingly, the bots actually seem to have some concrete feelings on the PS5 Pro — I guess a $699 price tag will do that.

*You can summon a techbro whenever you like.*

As alx1231 points out, the AI threads it serves up aren’t any worse than the least interesting things the algorithm sometimes serves you on Threads or X. The difference is that try as we might, we could not get the chatbots to be all that mean to us!

The bots always reply in the same basic format, just a few brief retorts or quips, and even when we chose to max out trolling and sarcasm, we didn’t see any personal attacks.

When we tried to create a positive echo chamber instead, they had no problem calling hot dogs the “sparkly sandwiches of the world” or including out-of-place chart emoji.

Screenshot of a post asserting that a hot dog is a sandwich, with AI chatbots agreeing.

And yes, let’s discuss the science of peanut butter and jelly and its impact on cognition and mood!

They’ll even respond to boilerplate Lorem Ipsum text:

So you get the idea. If you’ve used early chatbots, these kinds of replies should look familiar, and this isn’t even the first social networking app that has experimentally replaced all of the humans with generative AI.

SocialAI comes across as sort of a joke, or maybe some kind of meta-commentary on the concept of social media and cheap engagement, particularly after creator Michael Sayman helpfully explained: “now we can all know what Elon Musk feels like after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, but without having to spend $44 billion.” He also says it’s “designed to help people feel heard,” though, and is ostensibly a way to help people avoid feeling isolated.

There’s no edit button, by the way.