100 Interesting Things 6-10: The Synthetic Social Network

This post is part of a series I started after reading Russell Davies “Notice, Collect, Share",.’ I’m more inspired than ever to get back into the habit of…noticing, collecting and sharing. As part of that return to habit I’m going to try and find five things that interest me every week, and share them here on my blog. 5 things per week, for 20 weeks, equals 100 Interesting things. Maybe one of these things will inspire you. Maybe one of them will inspire me. We’ll all learn something along the way.

A few weeks ago I read an older article from Casey Newton about how The Synthetic Social Network Is Coming, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking bout it.

1.) Lonely Teens Are Making Friends With AI - And the article says that users are spending 2+ hours a day on it.

2.) We’re going to see more and more Customer Service agents replaced by AI Agents, and although this feels like the second time around for this (weren’t Chatbots the next big thing like 8 years ago?), the technology is here to make them work. Well, almost work.

I strongly believe that using more AI tools in our workplace will signal a lack of effort. Premium brands and organizations will continue to rely on real humans for their public-facing interactions.

In the same way that sending someone a greeting card without having written a personal note in it sends the message that you don’t care, pushing someone to deal with your AI agent sends the message that you don’t care about them as a customer.

3.) Bumble’s founder says that AI Personas are the future of dating. And I don’t know if more needs to be said about that headline.

4.) Katy Perry’s Mom Thought AI pictures of her daughter at the Meta Gala were real - And if a mom can’t tell if a photo of their own child is fake, what hope do the rest of us have? The more interesting part of this story is that there is almost an entire fictional realty created by fans and brought to life with AI of Katy Perry and Rihanna meeting at the event. While that kind of

5.) Ryan Broderick is the last great journalist on the internet and I’ve really enjoyed his Garbage Day diggings into how weird and increasingly AI-driven our social web is.

This week’s image is “The 37 Cluster’ from the NASA photo of the day.