Content creators are busy people. Most spend more than 20 hours a week creating new content for their respective corners of the web. That leaves little time for audience engagement. But Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, thinks AI can solve this problem.
In an interview with Internet personality Rowan Chung, Zuckerberg outlined his vision for a future where creators would have a kind of bot that captures their personality and “business goals.” Zuckerberg says creators would delegate some community activities to these bots, freeing up time for other, perhaps more important, tasks.
“I think there’s going to be a huge unlock if basically any creator can pull all that information from social media and train this system to reflect their values and their goals and what they’re trying to do, and then people can interact with it,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s almost like a piece of art that the creator has created that people can interact with in a variety of ways.”
Zuckerberg’s thinking is common in many techno-optimist circles: that AI is inherently a good thing because it promises to vastly expand the impact a person (or an organization) can have. (Google has also released AI-powered tools for creators.) But should creators, whose audiences value authenticity, actually embrace generative AI when productivity comes at the expense of personal touch?
Not helping Zuckerberg's argument, Meta didn't have a very strong sales strategy.
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 into many of the pitfalls of today’s generative AI technology, especially hallucinations. The Associated Press observed one bot interjecting into a Facebook group conversation for Manhattan moms, claiming that its children were in NYC school districts. Another bot offered nonexistent cameras and air conditioners on a forum for free items near Boston.
To be fair, Meta’s AI is improving. At least that’s what the company claims. The latest release, the Llama 3.1 family of models, powers a number of features across the tech giant’s platforms, and is Meta’s most sophisticated offering to date, judging by benchmarks. But hallucinations and common mistakes in planning and reasoning are still unsolved problems in generative AI, and Meta doesn’t offer groundbreaking research in that area.
It’s hard to imagine creators putting their trust in a flawed AI bot to communicate with their fans. In the interview, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Meta should “alleviate some of the concerns” about using generative AI and earn users’ trust in the long run, especially since some of Meta’s AI training practices are actively pushing creators off the platform.
