> At the moment, I'm having a hard time imagining how this all does not terminate in people returning to more direct human engagements, and limiting interaction online to people we've physically met and validated.
That's hard to do if you're in a small town, or if your interests are rare in person, but have online watering holes.
These applications lower the cost of radicalization by a lot. Instead of imposing human moderation to ensure discussion (by other humans) is "on track" on current platforms, you can now drop the human moderator and contributors, and have various, always-on AI personas interacting with your mark. Bonus marks if you fine-tune with the marks interests (e.g. WWE, Minecraft & K-Pop).
I also expect Reddit astroturfing by all sorts of actors (marketers, political operatives, "reputation managers") to go up by a lot by boosting desired ideas and/or throwing FUD on undesired ones.
"That's hard to do if you're in a small town, or if your interests are rare in person, but have online watering holes."
By no means am I presenting this as a good thing. For myself, I can get "generalized socialization" in person no problem but I have a lot of specialized online stuff, including yea verily this very conversation we're having right now. I've got the financial wherewithal to buy into communities as they start going closed and for pay, but not everyone will.
That's hard to do if you're in a small town, or if your interests are rare in person, but have online watering holes.
These applications lower the cost of radicalization by a lot. Instead of imposing human moderation to ensure discussion (by other humans) is "on track" on current platforms, you can now drop the human moderator and contributors, and have various, always-on AI personas interacting with your mark. Bonus marks if you fine-tune with the marks interests (e.g. WWE, Minecraft & K-Pop).
I also expect Reddit astroturfing by all sorts of actors (marketers, political operatives, "reputation managers") to go up by a lot by boosting desired ideas and/or throwing FUD on undesired ones.