Amid controversies, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal’s recent decision to build digital public infrastructure (DPI) for social media and the future of AI is starting to make a lot more sense, raising questions about online conversations and the impact these advanced AI systems have on users and their opinions.
Citing examples of how UPI democratised payment transactions and ONDC democratised e-commerce, Aggarwal wants to do something similar with online social conversations, where he envisions building a DPI social media framework.
“Why would social media remain in walled gardens in the future of AI and Digital Public Infra,” he asked while appreciating UPI’s disruption of traditional payment methods and ONDC’s opening up of e-commerce walled gardens in a recent tweet.
This idea of decentralising social media is an aftereffect of LinkedIn removing Aggarwal’s post in which he called the networking platform’s usage of non-binary gender pronouns like they/them “pronoun illness” and hoped such Western influence and biases would not reach India.
Social Media is Dead, and AI Rises
There’s no denying the fact that traditional social networking is dying. We have seen the fate of Facebook, the ‘hype death’ of threads, and even Instagram, the longtime sweetheart of Gen Z, losing its lustre because of promotional and influencer content, ads, and pushing users into echo chambers.
The only hope for these companies at the moment is the LLM-based chatbots that are helping users interact and engage with their website content, giving rise to new-age media or what we may call AI media.
X has Grok, Quora has Poe and Stack Overflow once had Overflow AI (now succumbs to OpenAI). Meta is also looking to introduce an AI chatbot for Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meanwhile, Reddit struck a $60 million deal with Google. OpenAI has been busy partnering with media companies and publishing houses, devising more engaging ways to interact with users, and planning to launch an AI voice assistant in the coming days.
Ironically, as former OpenAI board member Helen Toner recently said, the majority of these AI companies might end up like social media companies, fighting for user attention and consolidating power.
“Companies are already building and deploying AI all over the place anyway in ways that affect all of us. Left to their own devices, it looks like AI companies might go in a similar direction to social media companies, spending most of their resources on building web apps and fighting for users’ attention,” she said.
She further said that, by default, the enormous power of more advanced AI systems might remain concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies or even a small number of individuals.
Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun echoed similar views in one of his talks, and said that soon “AI platforms will control what everybody sees” and advocated for it to be open like the Internet.
He also emphasised that we cannot have a small number of AI assistants controlling the entire digital diet of every citizen worldwide, taking a dig at OpenAI and a few other companies without naming them.
“This will be extremely dangerous for diversity of thought, for democracy, for just about everything”, he added.
LeCun said, “Soon, we won’t use search engines. Instead, when it comes to interacting with digital content, we’ll use our AI assistants. We’ll ask them questions, and they’ll provide the answers. They’ll assist us in our everyday lives.”
