Social media is more about sociology and psychology than technology. Their evolution from communication platforms to vehicles for mass entertainment, branding, advertising, news and more can be ascribed to social media’s understanding of social and individual psyche. Today, they have become ubiquitous and possess all-purpose functionality giving them immense power over society and the individual.
Moreover, minute tinkering in their algorithms can cause major ripple effects downstream, demonstrating the proverbial butterfly effect. Now, with generative AI being all the craze recently, and social media regulation also being intensely debated, a study of convergences in both would be useful to see how the landscape is poised to change.
Social Media And Generative AI
Social media is the first contact that the masses had with AI. And it was in a guise that could broadly be described as “curated AI”. In this engagement, spanning over a decade and a half, algorithms curated your feed based on known interests and browsing patterns. It optimised for consumer engagement, and eventually led to the birth of the attention economy.
Currently, however, the second contact with AI is occurring, in the guise of what can be described as “creative AI”. This form of AI is simple to use, customisable, and easy to integrate with other platforms. Due to this there is a mad rush to incorporate it, beating the competition to the punch.
Many sub-sectors are going to be directly affected because of this. A few areas where its impact will be most discernible, are explored below.
Entertainment: Influencers, here comes AI
The first sub-sector is entertainment. This has grown into a primary function of social media and is the reason why a thriving influencer industry exists. If one wants to make a presence in this space, virality is essential. Thus, an intuitive understanding of algorithms, people’s interests, topics to cover, etc. was crucial to growing one’s presence.
Now, however, generative AI disrupts these equations. Even with its current nascent capabilities, it can do much of the above analysis for you and generate a template for your content, in any format. ChatGPT could write a script for any video you wanted, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion could give you the images, and Canva’s Magic Write could give you the marketing material.
Coca-Cola’s recent Masterpiece ad gives some insight into how these emergent capabilities of AI could be leveraged to create a very engaging video ad. Therefore, as the skill differential between established names and newbies shrinks, and more creative work gets AI driven, a new efflorescence on social media could be round the corner.
News Media: Possibilities And Worries
Social media dominates the news space and Pew Research shows that nearly half of US adults get their news from social media, mostly Facebook. Generative AI will impact this sector in at least two major ways.
The first is related to the medium of the news. Using generative AI, news agencies will be able to convert any news piece to a different media format with minimal cost and friction. Tools like Runway’s Gen-2 AI Model and Alibaba’s Modelscope already allow the creation of a few seconds worth of video clips with simple text prompts. This is bound to improve dramatically soon. Similarly, Whisper and ChatGPT by OpenAI give cutting edge text transcription abilities from audio and video.
Leveraging all this, the creation of multi-format news, even by small publishers, will become much easier and more inexpensive. This will immensely increase the scale of content generation, and reduce the gap between small news agencies and established houses.
The second impact within news is related to revenue. As AI tools get integrated into social media platforms, like Quora’s new chatbot, people will switch to them to get their news. This will decrease traffic going to the news websites, and consequently create less ad traffic and revenue for them. The archaic revenue sharing models in place currently could land news agencies in deep financial peril. It is an unenviable position to be in, as many still haven’t even coped with the switch to digital yet.
Advertising: End Of One-Size-Fits-All Ads
Third, advertising. This has been one the largest money makers for social media platforms and is a space of vicious competition. To gain those extra few percentage points of market share and maximise the impact of their ads, there is already a feverish pitch to integrate generative AI into their ads businesses.
In 2019, Google used its Ads Creative Studio tool to generate over 100,000 unique ads for Garnier. This improved engagement and needed much less creative development time. Similarly, recently, both Google and Meta unveiled generative ads features which can generate everything from backgrounds, brand logos, images, voice-overs, resize videos for different aspect ratios, etc.
Therefore, the age of generic one-size-fits-all ads seems to be at an end, with greater customisability and personalisation clearly lying ahead. The lessons learnt in this space here will also impact branding and promotion activities, causing seismic shifts in them as well.
There’s Danger Ahead
Finally, scamming. This nuisance of a sector has grown manifold over the years. Generative AI, unregulated, will be the wind in the sails of this sector. Today, AI can do a passable rendition of a voice with only a three second audio clip as input, as demonstrated by Microsoft’s VALL-E tool.
Similarly, advances coming in video generation, due to Nvidia and Epic Games efforts (Unreal Engine) demonstrate that soon, perfectly photorealistic fake videos would be possible. With such fabrications in audio and video, authentication itself could break, opening a pandora’s box. Scammers will be licking their lips at the possibilities that lie ahead.
Thus, a sea change is upon us. Radical technology, in the form of AI, is building on already imperious platforms, with few concerns beyond stakeholder return guiding the integration. Scrutiny is also minimal due to safe harbour provisions in many national legislations, like that of India. Thus, there is much work that needs doing if we are to contain this genie that we have let out of the lamp. The upcoming Digital India Act will have some very big shoes to fill.
Srimant Mishra is a computer science engineer from VIT university, Vellore, with a deep interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He is currently pursuing a law degree at Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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