Earlier today, I had my usual weekly catch-up with a friend to talk about social media marketing. We started out with basic stuff: how to run ads, studying analytics, and writing scripts. But during our session, we started exploring how deeply AI is already integrating into advertising and distribution.
We were testing how automated bots can explore feeds, craft contextual replies, and schedule posts across platforms like Threads. My immediate reaction was a mix of awe and dread: "What the hell?"
On one hand, as an engineer, delegating planning, drafting, and engagement is amazing. But then the darker reality hit me: If I can set this up in a single afternoon, so can everyone else. What happens when this becomes the default?
Take Indonesia as an example. We already have a massive "buzzer" ecosystem—armies of paid accounts hired by high-profile organizations or politicians to hijack public discourse and steer narratives. Even with real people behind keyboards, those buzzer campaigns are loud and disruptive.
Now, imagine what happens when those same groups plug in autonomous LLMs. Swarms of bots generating hyper-personalized, context-aware comments that sound 100% human. It will be literally impossible to tell genuine public sentiment apart from synthetic propaganda.
Combine that with tools like Higgsfield and AI video generators pumping out automated Reels that rack up millions of views in days. What does social media even become at that point?
It becomes an automated wasteland: AI-generated videos, watched by AI scrapers, liked by AI bot farms, and debated by AI commenters in the replies. Bots talking to bots, simulating human culture. What is even the point of "social" media if none of it is social anymore? How do you know the person responding to you in a comment thread isn't just an API call?
It sounds extreme, but the transition is already happening in plain sight. If you open an incognito browser window and go to YouTube without logging in, look at the default recommendations. An alarming amount of it is already synthetic slop: AI drama, AI voiceover recaps, AI romance stories. Instagram, TikTok, and X are heading down the exact same road.
If this keeps accelerating, I genuinely believe we’re heading toward a weird economic flip: a world where human creation becomes a luxury good.
Just like people pay a premium for organic, handmade food over mass-produced factory items, we might soon see subscription tiers that charge extra for "verified human-created content." A movie written and acted entirely by real people might cost double the price of an algorithmic AI production.
I don’t hate AI. I use it every single day, and it helps me learn faster than ever before. But technology is only as good as the incentives driving it. When the easiest way to make money is flooding the internet with synthetic noise, the real casualty is our shared reality.
Maybe this is a wake-up call to stop treating social media as a genuine reflection of the world, and to protect our attention before it gets completely hijacked.