What Happens to Our Human Values When AI Intersects With Social Media?

February 29, 2024—I spend a lot of time thinking about how generative AI will impact social media in the future. We’re already witnessing some early examples, such as Meta’s AI avatars and its generative AI content creation tools for advertisers and creators, or Snap’s My AI chatbot. There are also some big negatives, including the horribly invasive and disgusting deepfakes of celebrities that have spread around X and other platforms, and the examples of bad actors using AI to create fake profiles and distribute false news stories and images.

Today I joined Paula Rosecky, a CX expert and qualitative researcher (and fellow member of the Puget Sound Research Forum) to discuss how AI changes our relationship with social media. I’m planning to write a longer think piece on this topic, but for now, here are a few things I think marketers, agencies and social platforms absolutely need to keep in mind.

Keep humanity at the core of the social media experience. Social media is, at its roots, a human to human connection. AI is an adjunct and a partner to social media, but certainly not the whole experience.

Use AI tools to improve human connections, not disrupt them. AI can help you do your job better and more efficiently. That allows more room for you to do what humans do really well: be creative, think big thoughts and show amazing empathy and compassion for each other.

Focus on how AI can make social media better, not worse. I hope the social platforms can figure out how to make AI is a benefit to people who use social media and not a technology that is exploited for negativity, disinformation and misinformation.

If these things are as important to you as they are to me, I hope you will take time to watch our entire conversation on LinkedIn Live.