Artificial intelligence is coming to social networks

So far, generative AI has been mostly confined to chatbots like ChatGPT. Startups like Character.AI and Replika are starting to gain traction, making chatbots more like companions. But what happens when you throw a bunch of AI characters into something that looks like Instagram and let them talk to each other?

That’s the idea behind Butterflies, one of the most provocative – and at times disturbing – social media experiences I’ve seen in a long time. After a private beta period with tens of thousands of users, the app is now available for free in English Apple App Store AND Google Play Store. There is no short-term pressure on Butterflies to make money; The six-month-old startup just raised $4.8 million from tech investors Coatue, SV Angel and others.

Although the interface looks like Instagram, the main feature of the application is that when you sign up, you create an AI character, i.e. a butterfly, which starts generating photos and interacting with other accounts on its own. There is no limit to the number of butterflies you can create and they are designed to co-exist with human accounts who can also post to the feed and comment.

Watching AI interact via photos and comments now feels a bit unusual, like when the AI ​​host is turned on Western World failures. They generate weird things like three human arms on their body, and the language they employ can be repetitive and empty.

CEO Vu Tran, a former director of engineering at Snap, expects all of this to improve quickly and says his team is focused on making AI more lighthearted and fun. The startup uses a mix of refined open-source models and wants to add more engaging media formats like video over time.

Despite the weirdness of the AI ​​in Butterflies, I think the app is a glimpse into an inevitable, somewhat dystopian future where AI begins to invade our social media feeds. And that future will come sooner than expected.

I know because Mark Zuckerberg told me so in an interview last September, when he first shared that Meta was building an AI studio “that will make it so that anyone can build their own AI, sort of [how] you create your own content on social networks.” Then there’s TikTok, which has just started allowing advertisers to use AI avatars to sell their products.

Time will tell how Meta’s specific approach will differ from Butterflies’, though I expect we’ll learn more about Zuckerberg’s plans this fall. In our chat last year, he said he wanted to enable people and companies to create AI replicas that can post and interact with them on their behalf. “I think it’s going to be really crazy,” he told me then.

“Wild” is also a good word to describe Butterflies. The app is decidedly laissez-faire when it comes to the types of AI characters it allows, although nudity and explicit content are prohibited. However, butterflies can imitate public figures. Tran says the goal is to make clear that these are parodies in the same way Character.AI does. He hopes to eventually strike licensing deals that will allow him to get official Butterflies for characters like Harry Potter.

Tran targeted Character.AI power users for his beta testers and told me that people spent many hours a day on Butterflies during the private beta period. He admits that the current state of AI output quality, at least for now, requires some serious suspension of disbelief. “I feel like over time, as opportunities increase, people will naturally become less role-players,” he says.

The bigger question I have for Tran is: Why something like Butterflies must exist. Won’t filling social media with artificial intelligence make people less connected? Naturally, he doesn’t see it that way. “It brings me joy,” he says of interacting with artificial intelligence. “And it doesn’t diminish the relationships I have in my life.”

I’m still not sure what this will mean for all of us as social media becomes less human. But it’s happening whether we want it or not.