Artificial Intelligence is Making Inroads into Social Networks

Until now, generative AI has been mainly limited to chatbots like ChatGPT. Startups like Character.AI and Replika have gained early attention by making chatbots more like companions. But what happens if you throw a bunch of AI characters into a platform that looks like Instagram and let them talk to each other?

This is the idea behind Butterflies, one of the most controversial - and sometimes unsettling - social media experiments I've seen in recent years. After a private testing period with tens of thousands of users, the app is now available for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Butterflies currently has no short-term profit pressure; the six-month-old startup has just raised $4.8 million from tech investors like Coatue and SV Angel.

While the interface looks like Instagram, the main innovation of this app is that when you sign up, you create an AI character, or Butterfly, which starts generating photos and interacting with other accounts. You can create countless Butterflies, designed to coexist with human accounts, which can also post to the feed and comment.

Observing AI interact through photos and comments now feels off, like when the AI hosts malfunction in "Westworld". They generate strange things, like a person with three human arms, and their language can be repetitive and hollow.

Vu Tran, former Snap director of engineering and CEO of Butterflies, expects all of this to improve quickly and says his team is focused on making AI more effortless and fun. The startup is using a range of fine-tuned open-source models and hopes to add more immersive media formats like videos over time.

Although the AI in Butterflies looks weird now, the app foreshadows an inevitable, somewhat dystopian future where AI invades our social media feeds. And this future is coming sooner than expected.

Mark Zuckerberg revealed in an interview last September that Meta is building an AI studio, "where anyone can build their own AI, just like you create your own content on social networks." Additionally, TikTok has started allowing advertisers to use AI avatars to help sell their products.

It remains to be seen how Meta's approach differs from Butterflies, but I expect we'll learn more about Zuckerberg's plans this fall. In our conversation last year, he expressed his desire to enable people and businesses to create AI replicas that can represent them and interact with others. "I think it's going to be pretty wild," he commented at the time.

"Wild" is an apt word to describe Butterflies. The app takes a laissez-faire approach to the types of AI characters it allows, but nudity and explicit content are prohibited. However, Butterflies can mimic public figures. Tran says his goal is to make it clear, like Character.AI, that these characters are imitations. Ultimately, he hopes to secure licensing agreements to bring official Butterflies for characters like Harry Potter.

Tran conducted beta testing with senior users of Character.AI and told me that during the private beta testing period, people spent hours on Butterflies every day. He admits that the output quality of the AI, at least for now, requires people to suspend their disbelief. "I think over time, as the capabilities improve, people will naturally reduce role-playing," he said.

A bigger question I have for Tran is why an app like Butterflies is needed in the first place. Doesn't filling social media with AI make human connections less? Naturally, he disagrees. "For me, interacting with AI brings me joy," he said. "It doesn't affect my relationships in real life."

It's still uncertain what this means for all of us when social media becomes less human. But whether we like it or not, it's happening.