A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond.
In a 2022 survey, Americans blamed social media for the coarsening of our political discourse, the spread of misinformation, and the increase in partisan polarization.
Like social media, it has the potential to change the world in many ways, some favorable to democracy.
There is a lot we can learn about social media's unregulated evolution over the past decade that directly applies to AI companies and technologies.
These lessons can help us avoid making the same mistakes with AI that we did with social media.
In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society.
It's the model that social media also relies on, which leads it to prioritize engagement over anything else.
Social media's reliance on advertising as the primary way to monetize websites led to personalization, which led to ever-increasing surveillance.
To convince advertisers that social platforms can tweak ads to be maximally appealing to individual people, the platforms must demonstrate that they can collect as much information about those people as possible.
Social media allows any user to express any idea with the potential for instantaneous global reach.
Those lies could be propelled by social accounts controlled by AI bots, which can share and launder the original misinformation at any scale.
Remarkably powerful AI text generators and autonomous agents are already starting to make their presence felt in social media.
In July, researchers at Indiana University revealed a botnet of more than 1,100 Twitter accounts that appeared to be operated using ChatGPT. AI will help reinforce viral content that emerges from social media.
Social media companies spend a lot of effort making it hard for you to leave their platforms.
Every moment you invest in sharing a memory, reaching out to an acquaintance, or curating your follows on a social platform adds a brick to the wall you'd have to climb over to go to another platform.
This concept of lock-in isn't unique to social media.
Fresh off our experience with the harms wrought by social media, we have all the warning we should need to avoid the same mistakes.
The biggest mistake we made with social media was leaving it as an unregulated space.
The harm social media can do stems from how it affects our communication.
The problem is that this isn't happening now, particularly in the US. And with a looming presidential election, conflict spreading alarmingly across Asia and Europe, and a global climate crisis, it's easy to imagine that we won't get our arms around AI any faster than we have with social media.
This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Tue, 19 Mar 2024 13:13:05 +0000