What's gonna be the phase 4 after AI tsunami over socials?

AI Tools and Software
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  • Phase 1: “Haha, AI can never do that.”
  • Phase 2: “Wow, I can generate tons of posts/comments with AI, now I am king of social media, ask me anything”
  • Phase 3: “Ooops everyone is generating tons of posts/comments so my content is buried and real people are running away, can someone help?”
  • Phase 4: ???

Obviously, social media owners will not sit down and watch their platforms sink. They can penalize AI content (hard), penalize throwaway accounts (obvious), emphasize real person recognition with tools like face scanning (obvious but shortsighted). But in general, it seems to be an uphill battle.

So what are your thoughts about phase 4: will some new “100% non-AI” social platform emerge? Can we expect a renaissance of offline platforms? Or anything else?

My guess is - and you can already see this happening - that (real) people will develop some pseudo-crypto lingo, in order to distinguish themselves from bots. Things like “OMG bro c8 I gksp thbm f ya?” So we can expect a lot of fun, a lot of consequences, with marketers jumping to that ship.

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The first thing to acknowledge is that it is not just a problem for socials. It is actually a bigger problem for SEO where Google doesn’t seem able to accurately filter out the “let’s dive into the dynamic landscape of revolutionary transformations…” taking top spots in search.

It is a problem for any form of marketing that relies on ‘content’.

I don’t see it impacting the platforms themselves as much as you think. Let’s face it — we all switch off when we see those AI comments and typical AI images, it massively degrades the brand in question. Good brands with proper budgets and a reputation to protect will pay for real authentic and engaging content still. And it is only that kind of content that will actually lead to sales and improve the overall marketing footprint.

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@Mal
It’s not all or nothing though. There’s not a future reality where a brand/business can function competitively without utilizing AI, so if you break every action down point by point the best brands ARE going to be using the most AI, they are just going to be using it where it’s most impactful and not where it’s least impactful/counterproductive. Social media being one of those, as using AI on social media is quite literally the opposite of its intended purpose.

Just for example think of all the elements that go into creatives. No one wants to see AI slop from Midjourney polluting their feed, but a good designer will use AI to generate assets, do animation, create filters, generate color palettes, etc., which is all the kinds of busy work that’s not actually particularly “creative” and is more of a distraction than anything, but also, it makes up 80% of their labor, so even the best graphic designers are going to be creating things with mostly AI, they already are, but it will increase too.

That’s really the best I can forecast right now. Seems to me the people who can best utilize AI to enhance their workflows, whether that be professionally or personally will be the winners. Social media isn’t going away, the quality of social media is about to increase dramatically cause the ability to create quality media is being put into the hands of millions of more people.

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@Nevin
“There’s not a future reality where a brand/business can function competitively without utilizing AI,”

Yes, I entirely agree, though I can see why I may have come across ‘anti-AI’ in the post. To me, it is a given that virtually everyone needs to use AI in this space now as it is impossible to compete on volume otherwise with one’s competitors who are using it.

My thought is more that the AI stuff is just now a bare minimum and has low value since anyone can do it for very little cost. Two years ago you needed to pay a Native English writer to get something usable on a company blog, and each article would take at least a few hours to write. Now? You can rank by paying a VA in South-East Asia $3 per hour to upload chat GPT copypasta, publishing at a rate of 6 articles per hour.

“but a good designer will use AI to generate assets, do animation, create filters, generate color palettes”

True. And given the amount of work for graphic designers that has now been taken by AI, human designers will need to use AI to make the work profitable.

“Seems to me the people who can best utilize AI to enhance their workflows, whether that be professionally or personally will be the winners”

Yes, though let’s be clear what is being “won”. It is virtually a necessity for anyone in an AI-decimated industry like graphic design or SEO content writing to use AI to survive. But they still may be worse off (as we all may be worse off) than they were before AI came on the scene and eliminated all the low-end work.

“Social media isn’t going away, the quality of social media is about to increase dramatically”

Perhaps, I’m not sure. Because most people will take the easy option and use the AI slop over customizing it appropriately. Take the example I gave of SEO content. It is very easy to alter the prompt to take out the “tell” words I mentioned. Yet virtually no one does it, as it is one step ‘extra’ and it is not necessary to rank. So even those creating good content will be somewhat crowded out in the feed by the bots.

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@Mal
I mostly agree with you, but I think there’s going to be pretty clear cut difference between people who know how to use AI to create quality, and people who use AI to make slop, I think it’s going to be not really that hard to tell the difference, and people already have a pretty low tolerance for AI slop, it will only get worse. I guess we’ll see what the future holds but we could just be in a nadir before these tools reach their large audience. In the future of SEO as an example, I’m confident google will find a way to not nuke their golden goose and whatever SEO looks like in the future will still involve humans creating content, and that high quality SEO content will be more accessible to average people to create now, not just the richest publishers who can afford several copywriters and developers, so it’s possible there will be more “SEO” jobs in the future. Not the same SEO jobs of today, but a different version with more people competing in the market, and thus a larger need for help. Just like the internet made the need for copywriters to explode before it consolidated again.

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I curious about this as well.