If you thought that 2024 was a big year for social platforms pushing AI elements into their apps, you ain’t seen nothing yet, with Meta looking to bring even more AI to your feeds over the next year.How is it going to do that? Well, aside from injecting AI chatbots into every aspect that it can, Meta’s next plan is to deploy millions of generative AI characters and have them pose as actual users on Facebook and Instagram.According to Connor Hayes, Meta’s VP of product for gen AI, soon, there’ll be a whole range of new AI profiles activated within its apps.As per Hayes (via The Financial Times): “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”Which is not overly surprising. In an interview back in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that:“Every part of what we do is going to get changed in some way [by AI]. [For example] feeds are going to go from – you know, it was already friend content, and now it’s largely creators. In the future, a lot of it is going to be AI generated.”That seemed to suggest that Zuckerberg was anticipating that more and more people would eventually start using Meta’s gen AI tools to create images and posts, but shortly after this, Meta hired app developer Michael Sayman, who had just created Social.ai, an app that enables you to interact with millions of AI bots, each with their own personality and focus.As such, the pathway seems pretty clear, with Meta looking to incorporate elements of Social.ai into its core social experiences, thereby showcasing the evolving capacity of its AI models, while also providing new ways to engage within its apps.Which, frankly, sounds horrible, and the reaction online has been strongly against the integration of more bots in social apps.But then again, most social media users instinctively reject change, and the real question then is: “Will it work?”If Meta does unleash millions of AI profiles on Facebook and IG, each with their own custom personality, focused on a certain topic and/or interest area, could that actually boost app usage and engagement?And the answer, whether you like it or not, is probably yes.Take, for example, the recent backlash on Threads regarding the difficulty that users have had in growing their following in the app. On Bluesky, which enables users to default to the “Following” feed (as opposed to the algorithm-defined “For You” stream), many creators have claimed that it’s much easier to gain followers, and build an audience of your own, as opposed to Threads, where follower growth seems to plateau pretty fast.Spooked by the sudden rise of Bluesky, Threads then sought to address this, by updating its algorithm to put more emphasis on content from profiles that you follow in the feed. But really, you’re never going to gain followers like you did on
Ven. Gen 10th, 2025
