People believe that social media started when the internet and smartphones became a bigger part of communication. This hasn’t always been the case, social media was not always digitally based, before the Internet became as widespread as it is social media was an analog system. When I say analog system, I mean, people met face-to-face, there was written communication through letters and postcards. Widespread announcements were posted through newspapers and bulletin boards. Rumors, lies and fake news got spread around through word of mouth from people telling stories or gossiping with their friends. Social media before technology was an analog system and now with technology, it has become a digital platform that has many different aspects to it, but it has a basis of the ways of analog social media. Communication between people is the basis for any type of social media, but now it can be spread around the world. Since social media is on the internet there are many different ways for people to include other types of content that is not always human generated, which is AI generated content and input into internet sites.
Over the past few years AI has been one piece of technology that has enforced social media to be a digital based system now. With social media switching from analog to digital it still comes with pros and cons, just like when communication was solely analog. AI in social media has a few main purposes, it wants to create a better user experience by enabling data, driven decisions, simplifying, market procedures, and generating nonhuman content.
AI has affected social media. There are tools that have come out on social media apps, like suggesting behavior based content, which uses information that was gained by user activity to show the user what they want to be shown. Shown in one of the pictures below is an ad for how to wear a graduation cap, which was given specifically to me because of interest in graduation activities. Other ways AI has affected social media is that there are now AI generated captions, which take what the video you may be watching is saying, and create captions on the video for the user to read. An example of this is shown in the picture below to the right.
AI generated filters are also a big part of social media in the present day, as it creates funny images for people to post to their friends. Similar to this, people are using AI to generate images of highly ranked people in society, doing, wearing, or being with other people that they would not have actually been doing to create a stir in social media and create rumors. Memes are also being made by AI,it can take a person’s idea of a joke and create it into a picture.
Chatbots are used on websites in order for users to have 24 hour messaging services. They are also used similarly to ChatGPT for example, to give users basic information about certain topics without having to do the research themselves. They can assist you with educational help, travel help like planning a trips itinerary or local recommendations, or regular conversation entertainment.
Social media in the analog sense is still widely used to get information to people that are close to one specific area, but it is now being used in the digital sense to get information across the world. It also now has different aspects incorporated into it to make it user friendly and more entertaining.