It’s been three years since one of the most blatant PR rush-jobs in Big Tech history: when the Mark Zuckerberg splashily debuted his “metaverse”, changing his company’s name from Facebook to Meta, following the Facebook Papers scandal. The metaverse was launched with a slick visualisation of what this virtual reality world – which Zuckerberg said was the future of work, relationships and design, and all to be accessed via expensive headsets – would look like. It was only briefly mentioned that this was merely an idea of what the metaverse could ultimately become. The project was nowhere close to this stage.
The announcement drew more ire than admiration and was critically panned not only for its grim vision of the world – best experienced in isolation, through a computer – but also for its obvious use as a distraction from bad press. This was compounded with every update on the metaverse’s progress, each more laughably pathetic than the last (such as launches in France and Spain celebrated with Minecraft-quality graphics of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada Familia or the ground-breaking news that metaverse avatars would soon have legs). It was a tech billionaire’s dream that could only appeal to someone quite as detached from reality as a tech billionaire.
Despite the push the metaverse was given – and the fact the entire company was re-branded around it – the project was quietly shelved fewer than 18 months later, in February 2023, after Zuckerberg reportedly tired of it. It was put aside in favour of pursuing his new obsession: AI innovations.
Now, the results of that pivot are beginning to appear. Last week, Meta rolled out AI chatbots for Instagram and Facebook in the UK (following launches in the US and Australia). Users can now ask chatbots to help them “get answers to their questions, brainstorm content and bring their ideas to life”. The tool can be accessed via Instagram and Facebook – or users can pay £299 for Ray-Ban-branded Meta eyeglasses where it can be accessed via voice-command. It comes just a month after Zuckerberg said that the biggest mistake of his career so far was taking too much responsibility for the social problems Facebook has been accused of sowing – arguing that he shouldn’t have let Facebook take the blame for things like misinformation or the results of the 2016 US presidential election – and that his “days of apologising are over”.
As with the metaverse, it’s difficult to pinpoint who exactly wants or needs this new feature (and who would be eager to shell out hundreds of pounds for a wearable to use it). Not only is there no evidence of interest; there is growing evidence of the opposite – this announcement comes just weeks after the viral “Goodbye Meta AI” Instagram graphic was shared over 600,000 times (and by many famous people), with users falling for the notion that sharing it would mean their data would not be used by Meta’s AI training models. Though ineffective, the popularity of this graphic illustrates a major resistance to AI from Meta’s user base.
And there’s another parallel with the metaverse: the dramatic difference between this idea of what the tool will accomplish versus its current reality. Meta’s AI tool is being sold as revolutionary, something that will supposedly enhance our posts and creativity. But the reality will inevitably be something stupider: influencers, tech bros, and bots outsourcing noticeably fake images and accompanying captions. It will likely go unused and unnoticed by those of us who are not content creators – except when we spot those obviously AI-generated posts in our own feeds.
What’s the point of pouring tens of millions of dollars into another project that pushes billions of people towards something they never asked for? Perhaps the answer lies in Zuckerberg’s delusional and pessimistic view of his company’s purpose. Most of us are logging in to Instagram or Facebook to see “authentic” posts from the people we know and follow, even if we know we are seeing a self-conscious, curated version of their lives. And social media can still be a space for real connection and creativity. But Zuckerberg is moving in the opposite direction, creating a version of social media where creativity and humanity are outsourced to technology, in the name of “innovation”. Whether that results in a virtual world where avatars of people hang out in online simulacrums of real-world spaces, or a dystopian digital landscape of AI-written posts bearing the names of people who didn’t create them, what little good we can still find on these platforms is lost.
It’s unlikely that Zuckerberg’s AI vision will be ditched as quickly as the metaverse. (For one thing, AI’s rise and dominance is far more widespread compared to Zuckerberg’s relatively singular interest in the virtual worlds.) But this doesn’t mean that the AI boom isn’t a bubble, nor that Zuckerberg is taking us somewhere anyone wants to go. AI chatbots are the beginning of what will likely become an era of social media obsessed with AI for the sake of it, at the cost of what anyone still enjoys about being online. We can only hope that, as with the metaverse, it doesn’t become social media’s future.
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