A bot apocalypse is coming to social media

12/30/24 • 6 min

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already raised its head. It's a problem that is going to get much worse in the months to come, even weeks to come. And that is bots.

This problem has already sort of started becoming apparent on BlueSky. But it is probably not even going to be something that anyone at Twitter or X flinches at, given the nature of the discourse there. You can now create bots that will interact with people completely on their own based on a certain prompt. I recently saw a video by Hank Green who was wondering what this might mean for us in the future about whether the solution to this problem is going to be whitelists or blacklists. And I have a different opinion on this, of course, I will tell you. And my opinion has to do with the fact that Twitter is not the problem. The problem is the format itself. To replace Twitter with another microblogging platform is replacing one disease with another. The very format where people post microscopic text updates and react to other microscopic text updates is not designed for a good, healthy discourse. In fact, it seems to be designed for the exact opposite.

These AI bots that I was talking about are basically, you know, automated accounts, which you can create and you can, uh, get a chat bot to generate responses to particular posts made by people. And you can have the chat bot generate responses that are of a certain variety. The one that Hank Green was talking about has to do with disagreement. So it's a bot that politely but firmly disagrees with whatever you have said. And Hank Green shows a few examples. Uh, there are also other things that it is possible to do with these bots, you know, so in discord it, the problem is the kind of problems you needed a human to create right now in the very near future, it will be possible to have tens of thousands of bought accounts that are creating that manner of problem without anyone actually having to engage or spend time on Twitter.

And there are a few nightmarish scenarios that come to mind that I will refrain from going too deeply into. But imagine what this means. Right now, you are having fights with people on Twitter and you are at least aware that these are human beings, maybe opportunistic human beings, but still human beings who are doing these things. In the near future, you might spend a day fighting with 20 accounts on a microblogging platform and come to the realization later in the day or unfortunately maybe later in the week that none of them were actual people. This is so bizarre, I'm kind of finding myself lacking words to describe it.

Can you imagine a future where in order to deal with these bots, you create bots of your own and then don't engage with anyone on Twitter at all? Your bot responds to messages being generated by other bots. Twitter is full of conversation. None of it is happening among human beings. And for the people outside of Twitter who look at Twitter and consider it some kind of reflection of whatever is happening in actual human society and human discourse, it will be unfortunate because they will come to the conclusion that this is what people are like now. Or maybe they won't come to that conclusion. Maybe it will be something else. Maybe we will all collectively come to the conclusion that social media is inhuman, that it is not people talking to each other and that it's just a lot of machine-generated text going up against each other, agreeing with each other and disagreeing with each other, et cetera.

Can you imagine that kind of a social web? I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up. Maybe Blue Sky will be one of them. Maybe something else will do it. I'm pretty sure there will be platforms that come up that are of the opinion that no, we are for humans only. No AI bots allowed. Even something as large as Twitter will eventually have to just say we are not in favor of bots or maybe put some kind of a cap on the number of bots any single account is able to create. Although I'm not sure that will help because these seem to be, I'm not a techie, but these seem to be rather simple problems to get around for the enterprising disingenuous mind.

I don't know how things will turn out, but social media is not getting better, is my point. It is only getting worse. It is only becoming more inhuman, more dishonest, and more of the kind of plays that can only survive as a result of rage bait being the primary currency as far as discourse is concerned. So if you sti...

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast.

Previous Episode

Dynamics of the Baba Economy

If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.

Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.

Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.

Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases.

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25% of the 21st century is over

Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language.

Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.

But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.

So 2024, as far as my personal, as far as the things that I can affect in my own life, I did okay, I think. But then there comes another year and you think, what other changes do I need to make? Do I need to make any changes at all? And the answer to that is usually yes, because we are never satisfied. But I was looking at the year and it is 2025. And what struck me about it is that I grew up in the 90s, where the 21st century looked like a very optimistic place to be. A great, nice period of time where a lot of problems will be gone. We were optimistic about the future, even as far back as the 60s and 70s. Science fiction used to imagine the 21st century as the promised land of some sort, where when we get there, it'll all be great. And of course, things are not great, but also things could be worse. And maybe that worse is yet to come. Maybe it is still in our future and we are not there yet, but we are heading there and we will get there. Who knows?

But what struck me about 2025 is that we are almost 25 years into the 21st century. That's one-fourth of the 21st century. That's 25% of the 21st century. That's where we are right now. There is only three fourths of the 21st century left. I was looking at our lifespans, like, you know, 70, 75, 80 years. And with some help, maybe a hundred years. I was looking at our lifespans and wondering why we pay the century so much importance. I think it's because it is the closest round number that can correspond to our, to our idea of a lifespan.

But if we lived for as long as a fruit fly does, our youngest people, our most enthusiastic hormonal teenagers, for lack of a better word, adolescents, will have been born this morning. And our most respected elders, the champions of our community, the thought leaders, the kings and the emperors, etc., will have been born last Friday. And then maybe every weekend would be a time when we wonder if we have lived our lives in a virtuous manner. Maybe every weekend would be a time for us to leave lessons for future generations. It's Saturday. I'm about to die. I hope that people who were born this morning are kind to each other, that are people who will grow up by Monday to be good, humane beings and that they will contribute meaningfully to our society and that our society will continue to live on and prosper. And by society, of course, they mean the little group of larva that is in a puddle of water by the corner of a algae-covered pond much as we do.

For us, that algae-covered pond is a planet and we have dreams of reaching out to the edge of the solar system and beyond, maybe. But for the most part, as far as reality is concerned, we are only concerned with this little rock on which we live. And it's not even like we don't think about the weekend. We do think about the weekend. Half our life, if you are an urban professional keyboard worker of some sort, then your life is spent waiting for the weekend. Even during the week when you are working, you are thinking about the weekend. You are thinking about how nice it would feel to have a day or two in a seven day week when you can do whatever you want. When you can not work, when you don't have to reply to office emails, when you don't have to give details of your work done that day to your superior and you can just spend it sitting quietly or reading or drinking or traveling.

Of course, the weekend is only two days, if that, and it is not sufficient time to do anything, really. Anything meaningful, that is. I've spoken before about how we assign ...