CASE STUDY A new AI social media?

Social media is the new public square, where stories and ideas are discussed and decided in the court of public opinion. Today, billions of people create and consume content daily. But AI could soon generate the entirety of every creator’s content in seconds.

AI’s dominance in social media would not only be unbelievably addictive but also capable of engineering and distributing the most viral memes ever experienced, constructed as true mental viruses.

The term “meme” was coined almost 50 years ago by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who explained a meme as a living idea that spreads from person to person, self-replicating, mutating, and responding to outside pressures.

What happens when our viral memes are created by an AI in real-time? When AI-generated influencers post videos of engineered ideas that stick into our unconscious and influence our perception?

How does the digital public square of ideas continue to be the place where humans freely debate if we all transition from thinkers and creators to content addicts? How do we continue to find ourselves in this online maze?