AI is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic

Twenty years ago, we thought social media would be a force for connecting people. Today, social media is contributing to a mental health epidemic among young people and undermining the pillars of our democracy. And it’s only getting worse.

I wrote an article with psychologist Jonathan Haidt , author of The Righteous Mind, about how the AI revolution threatens to supercharge the dangers of social media - and what we can do about it.

Think of the problems accelerated by social media today — polarization, misinformation, manipulation — and then multiply that by a hundred. This is what AI will do to social media. We have identified four challenges posed by artificial intelligence:

(1) Manipulating young people. Studies have shown that, when Facebook arrived at a college campus, rates of depression soared. Gen Z has grown up with social media, and now has much higher rates of anxiety and depression than the generations before it. With the advent of AI, the algorithms are only getting better at making users addicted.

(2) Flooding the zone. Political strategist Steve Bannon espoused a pernicious model of political media influence, captured in his formula, “flood the zone with shit.” Misinformation doesn’t have to be persuasive, it just has to be engaging enough to keep citizens disoriented and distrustful. Large language models like ChatGPT will make this even easier.

(3) Targeting individuals. Bad actors will be able to create personally targeted ads based on an exhaustive profile of that person’s sexual, aesthetic, and political preferences. We will all be like Ulysses surrounded by personally designed sirens.

(4) Suppressing freedom. AI will become part of the toolbox that autocrats can use to manipulate public opinion. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is doing this already.?

AI holds tremendous promise, from scientific discovery to national defense. But we need to act now to address its potential harms. In our article, we offer five ideas for reforming social media platforms while preserving our fundamental freedoms.?

For more, read the article Jonathan and I wrote for The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/generative-ai-social-media-integration-dangers-disinformation-addiction/673940/?