Social media is based on sociology and psychology rather than technology. The evolution from a communication platform to a medium of mass entertainment, branding, advertising and news can be attributed to social media’s understanding of social and personal psychology. Today they have become ubiquitous, with universal functions that give them immense power over society and individuals. Moreover, fine-tuning of algorithms can cause large ripple effects downstream, demonstrating the proverbial butterfly effect. Now that generative AI is all the rage these days and social media regulation is also hotly debated, research on both convergence can help us see how the situation is poised to change. prize. Social Media and Generative AI Social media is the first public exposure to AI. And it was, broadly speaking, an outfit that could be described as “selected AI”. Over a decade and a half of work, algorithms have curated feeds based on known interests and browsing patterns. It was optimized for consumer engagement and ultimately led to the birth of the attention economy. However, now, second contact with AI, which can be called “creative AI,” is occurring. This form of AI is easy to use, customizable, and easy to integrate with other platforms. For this reason, it is being introduced at a furious pace, beating its competitors to the brim. As such, many subsectors will be directly affected. Some of the areas where the impact is most noticeable are discussed below. Entertainment: Influencers, the rise of AI The first sub-sector is entertainment. It has grown to be a major feature of social media and is the reason why the influencer industry is thriving. Virality is essential if you want to have a presence in this space. Therefore, having an intuitive understanding of algorithms, people’s interests, topics to cover, etc. was essential to increasing my presence. But now generative AI destroys these equations. Currently in its infancy, features can perform many of the above analyzes and generate templates for content in any format. ChatGPT can script any video you want, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion provide images, and Canva’s Magic Write provides marketing materials. Coca-Cola’s recent Masterpiece Ad offers insight into how these new AI capabilities can be leveraged to create highly engaging video ads. So, as the skill gap between celebrity and novice narrows and more creative work becomes AI-driven for him, a new explosion on social media could be on the horizon. News Media: Opportunities and Concerns Social media dominates the news space, with nearly half of US adults getting their news from social media, most of them from Facebook, according to a Pew survey. Generative AI impacts this area in at least two key ways. The first concerns news media. With generative AI, news agencies will be able to convert any news article into another media format with minimal cost and effort. Tools such as Runway’s Gen-2 AI Model and Alibaba’s Modelscope allow you to create seconds-long video clips containing simple text prompts. This should improve dramatically soon. Similarly, OpenAI’s Whisper and ChatGPT offer state-of-the-art text transcription capabilities from audio and video. All of this will make producing multi-format news much easier and cheaper, even for smaller publishers. This will greatly expand the scale of content generation and close the gap between smaller operators and incumbent operators. The second impact in the news is related to revenue. When AI tools are integrated into social media platforms like Quora’s new chatbot, people will switch to AI tools for news. This reduces traffic to news websites, which in turn reduces advertising traffic and revenue to news websites. The archaic revenue-sharing model currently in place could put news organizations in serious financial jeopardy. This is an enviable situation, as many people have yet to cope with the transition to digital. Advertising: The end of one-size-fits-all advertising Third is advertising. It is one of the biggest revenue streams for social media platforms and a vicious playing field. There is already a feverish effort to integrate generative AI into the advertising business to capture an additional few percent of market share and maximize the effectiveness of advertising. In 2019, Google generated over 100,000 unique ads for Garnier using the Ads Creative Studio tool. This increased engagement and significantly reduced the creative development time required. Similarly, both Google and Meta recently announced generative advertising capabilities that can generate anything from backgrounds, brand logos, images, narration, resizing videos for different aspect ratios, and more. Thus, the era of universal one-size-fits-all has arrived. Advertising seems to be dead, and there is clearly more customizability and personalization ahead. Lessons learned in this area will have implications for branding and promotional efforts, as well as disruptive. There’s Danger Ahead Finally, there’s fraud. Nuisance in this sector has diversified over the years. Unregulated generative AI will be the wind in the sails of this space. Now, as his VALL-E tool from Microsoft demonstrates, the AI can take as little as a three-second audio clip as input and produce a passable speech representation. Similarly, advances in video generation by Nvidia and Epic Games’ efforts (Unreal Engine) show that fully photorealistic fake videos will soon be possible. Such audio and video hoaxes can break the authentication itself and open a Pandora’s box. Scammers will be surprised at what’s to come. Thus, great change is upon us. Radical technology in the form of AI is already built on a strong platform, with few concerns other than stakeholder interests guiding integration. Surveillance is also minimal as many domestic laws like India have safe harbor provisions. So there is a lot of work to be done to contain this genie out of the lamp. The upcoming Digital India Act will impose some very big obligations. Srimant Mishra is a computer his science his engineer from his VIT university in Vellore and has a deep interest in the field of artificial intelligence. He is currently completing his law degree from Utkar University, Bhubaneswar. His views are personal and do not represent the position of this publication.
