'SocialAI' Creates A Bot-Driven Social Media To Give Humans A Safer Place And Imaginary Friends

Social media platforms are places where people can socialize, but instead of meeting each other in person, they can do so through the internet.

Fast forward, interactions through social media platforms have been enhanced with a lot of perks, and more or less to an increasing number of people, socializing through the internet is becoming a substitute to real-life engagements.

But for this so many years, pretty much all social media platforms have one common enemy, they call bots, and that they're plaguing their systems by consuming more resources than they provide benefits.

Only a few befriend bots, but the rest despise them.

'SocialAI' on the other hand, is not some ordinary social media platforms.

Built from the ground up, it's not meant to be for humans.

Unlike traditional social media that tends to avoid bots, blaming them for creating toxicity and spam, SocialAI embraces them.

The approach is that, SocialAI replaces human-to-human interactions with multiple AI bots.

Upon registering, there are many types of bots that people can choose from such as, 'supporters', 'nerds', 'brutally honest', 'haters', 'doomers', 'skeptics', 'ideators', 'visionaries', and so forth. They act based on user preference. This would be something like "Rita Realist" would provide users with facts while "Tina Troubleshooter" would help them with problem-solving.

Whenever users create a post, each post will generate responses from AI-driven characters that users previously chose and expect to encounter on the social media.

Users can also choose which archetypes that will follow them.

At first glance, SocialAI offers a look-and-feel that is familiar to X, and that in it, users have been posting their updates and have AI bots replying to these postings.

In essence, every human user on SocialAI will only see their own post, and the rest is 100% bots.

Altogether, SocialAI’s combines an online environment where its human users are either being heaped with AI-made praises, or being criticized by AI-made trolls.

The approach is that, unlike bots on other platforms, SocialAIbots aren't designed to be insulting or to make personal attacks.

The AIs at SocialAI aren't as aggressive and cruel as they would be in real life.

As a result, the overall experience and interactions with the AIs can be much more pleasant than other most social networking sites.

SocialAI, which makes its debut on iOS, invites people to experience a social media environment wherein all conversations are guided by thoughtful, programmed responses rather than by unpredictable human behavior.

It invites those those who are tired of the nastiness and the cruelness of social media, or to those who seek engagements on their posts, but couldn't successfully achieve that on major platforms.

Here, SocialAI breathes fresh air for those who seek alternate ways of participation.

Essentially a refuge from negativity, SocialAI balances innovation with ethical consideration, and it does this by creating a place where friendly bots swarm and can be interacted with.

The more human users SocialAI attracts, the more connections can be made through advanced AI interactions.

The idea is to create a social media that reinvents a new paradigm of digital interactions.

However, by exclusively populating a social media platform has stoked a wider debate about the purpose and value of online communication.

A lot of early users and reviewers said that the approach is an ideal recipe for a a flattery machine.

Because no human user can interact with other human user, SocialAI is like giving its human users their own personal echo chamber.

Many suggest that SocialAI is a joke, and that the experience is similar to an online diary, an personal note, or having imaginary friends.

According to its founder, Michael Sayman, he created the app because he pined for the time when he could chat on social media with a small circle of friends, get advice and meet new people.

As he gained more followers, Sayman says, "I felt tremendous pressure on social media to conform, to fit in, to get the likes, to be whatever the algorithm of that social media site wanted me to be."

Sayman also noticed that people often try to work out their personal problems publicly online.

"Someone's in a fight in a relationship, and they'll go on social media and post about it and complain about what's going on."

If this is done on a wide-open platform, that can cause grief.

His vision of having a safer social media was only made possible until Large Language Models grew advanced enough to create human-like chatbots.

Through the arms race that followed the revelation of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Sayman began to experiment and fiddle with AI-powered chatbots, and realized that he could create an app that combines some of the best aspects of early social media with the best capabilities of bots.

Sayman, a former software engineer at Facebook, before becoming a product manager at Google and Roblox before founding Friendly Apps, which makes SocialAI, said that he created SocialAI on his own.

He went to explain that SocialAI runs OpenAI's API and a few other models, and what that means, the privacy of users' data depends on the policies of those models' makers.

While the idea is to create a friendlier and safer social media, Sayman is quick to say that he doesn't see his SocialAI or any of the generative AI experience as a replacement for interaction between actual people.

"I think human people know each other best," he said.

It's only that friends aren't always available at all times to listen, and this is where SocialAI can be their substitute.

SocialAI can be their AI-based emotional-support app.

Sayman said that SocialAI is a tool for reflection, a place where people can feel free to explore whatever wild thought they have, but without having to fear real-world repercussions.