Artificial Intelligence and Social Media

Many people think of artificial intelligence in terms of human-like robots who have the ability to act like the people who created them. There have been countless movies made about how artificial intelligence destroys humankind. Ex Machina, I Robot, and even childrens' films like Disney's G-Force depict artificial intelligence taking over the world.

Many people don't know that artificial intelligence is taking over the world, but not with guns and weapons. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is integrated in many of the things we do every day. One of these is social media. People are surprised to learn what an active role AI plays on their favorite social media platforms.

Facebook uses AI for facial recognition, personalized searches, and discovering what users want to see on their newsfeed the most. Next time you post a photo of a friend on Facebook, try mousing over their face. It will give you the option to tag someone, and odds are your friend will be first on the list. This is all thanks to AI recognizing their facial features. Facebook hired 170 AI specialists just last year to focus on making the website even more centered around AI.

Twitter also uses AI to enhance user experience. For example, AI is used to determine what tweets to show on each user's Twitter feed. It scans thousands of tweets per second to determine what tweets each user would prefer to see. Twitter also uses AI to detect offensive accounts and content. In the first 6 months of 2017 over 300,000 terrorist Twitter accounts were removed from the site. All of them were discovered because of AI. Twitter is also using AI to automatically crop photos so that they will be more appealing.

AI is also used to create social media content for companies. Have you ever had a tweet or Instagram post featured on a company website? More than likely, your post was selected by AI and not an actual person. Many businesses now rely on AI to find the best user generated content to display on their social media platforms. Have you ever wondered how companies are able to respond to so many people who mention them on social media? Most of the responses are thanks to AI. These responses often seem so real and personalized that people think they're talking to another person. AI doesn't have to be scary. In face it's quite the opposite. Many of the fantastic features we enjoy on social media are only possible because of AI - and it's only going to keep growing.

Thanks to:

Forbes - https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnellett/2017/07/27/new-ai-based-tools-are-transforming-social-media-marketing/#2658f5a969a2

Bernard Marr & Co. - https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1373

Martech Advisor - https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/machine-learning-amp-ai/the-impact-of-artificial-intelligence-on-social-media/