If you’ve ever been on Elon Musk’s degraded, hellscape version of X that’s littered with bots and thought, “I’d like social media a lot more if it were only bots, and they existed solely to be yes-men, without a shred of the brilliance and creativity present even in X’s dilapidated state,” then SocialAI is the app for you. It’s like X without all the pesky humans.
On SocialAI, besides your posts, it’s 100% bots. On purpose. This would be a good time to read an article from Edward Ongweso Jr. titled “Social Media Is Dead.”
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Developed by a guy named Michael Sayman, SocialAI looks a bit like X. You post brief messages, and each post will generate responses from AI-driven characters. The characters all fall into specific archetypes that you would encounter on social media, and you can choose which archetypes will follow you. You have some who are ass-kissers and others who are trolls. There’s “Liberals” and “Conservatives.” It’s more like an immersive video game than an actual attempt at creating a new type of social media.
Altogether, SocialAI’s elements combine to create an online environment where the user is either being heaped with fake praise or being critiqued by fake trolls who wouldn’t be nearly as aggressive and cruel as they would be in real life. It’s the social media app for people who don’t actually want to be judged for anything they say, even if they absolutely should be for some of the things they believe. It’s all the window dressing of X without a shred of the brilliance and creativity you’d actually find on there, even today in its dilapidated state after a lot of its best and funniest minds have fled.
Sayman says SocialAI is a tool for reflection, a place where people can feel free to explore whatever wild thought they’ve got without fear of real-world repercussions. You won’t get canceled on SocialAI because no one outside of a few algorithms masquerading as people will ever see your insane views on race and gender or whatever. In that sense, it kind of sounds like Baby’s First Social Media Account—like a Playskool version of X that could come loaded onto a chunky plastic bright pink smartphone toy.
But maybe SocialAI is the exact social media app a lot of people are looking for nowadays. A place where they can get the exact social interaction they’ve been looking for because they’ve been shunned from every other corner of society. A place where even if they are told they are wrong, it’s what they wanted to happen, done with the caring hand of an algorithm that knows it can’t piss them off too much or they’ll flee this digital Truman Show, too.
