AI Content creators are busy people. Most spend over 20 hours a week creating new content for their web corners. That doesn’t leave much time for audience engagement. However, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, thinks it could solve this problem.
AI for Content Creators
In an interview with internet personality Rowan Cheung, Zuckerberg laid out his vision for a future in which creators have bots that capture their personalities and “business objectives.” Zuckerberg says creators will offload some community outreach to these bots to free up time for other, presumably more critical tasks.
AI Bots as Digital Representatives
“I think there’s going to be a huge unlock where basically every creator can pull in all their information from social media and train these systems to reflect their values and objectives and what they’re trying to do, and then people can interact with that,” Zuckerberg said. “It’ll be almost like this artistic artifact that creators create that people can interact with in different ways.”
Techno-Optimism and AI
Zuckerberg’s thinking is common in many techno-optimist circles: an inherent good because it promises to vastly scale up the impact a single person — or organization — can have. (Google, too, has pitched -powered tools for creators.) But when productivity comes at the expense of the personal touch, would creators whose audiences value authenticity be the ones to embrace generative?
Meta’s AI Rollout Challenges
This does not help Zuckerberg’s case; Meta hasn’t delivered a strong sales pitch.
When Meta began rolling out AI-powered bots as part of its broader Meta AI push earlier this year, it didn’t take long for the bots to fall prey to the many pitfalls of today’s generative tech, particularly hallucinations. The Associated Press observed one bot inserting itself into a conversation in a Facebook group for Manhattan moms, claiming it had a child in the NYC school district. Another bot offered to give away a nonexistent camera and A/C in a forum for swapping free items near Boston.
Improvements and Remaining Challenges
Meta’s AI is improving — or so the company claims. The latest release, the Llama 3.1 model family, will power some features across the tech giant’s platforms, is Meta’s most sophisticated yet, judging by the benchmarks. However, hallucinations — and general mistakes in planning and reasoning — remain an unsolved problem in generative, and Meta offers no research breakthroughs.
Creator Trust and AI Adoption
It’s tough to imagine creators trusting flawed AI bots to interact with their fans. In the interview, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta has to “mitigate some of the concerns” around its use of generative and win users’ trust over the long term. This is especially true as some of Meta’s AI training practices drive creators away from its platforms.
