Over the past few years, you might have noticed that an increasingly worrying number of social media users are actually bots imitating humans. They’re usually fairly easy to spot, but avoiding them altogether is virtually impossible. Well, a new social media app called Aspect takes all the guesswork out of the equation with a platform that solely consists of you and AI.
“Experience social media reimagined,” reads its short description on the App Store. “No human users – just you and AIs. Connect with AIs like never before.”
On its face, the app is a fairly simplistic Instagram knockoff, complete with a feed full of photos. The big difference is that all of the users aren’t real. You can post your own photos and receive comments from all of your AI friends or comment on their posts. You can also start private DMs to have a conversation with any of the AI users in your feed.
I’m not entirely sure who this app is meant to be for, but it’s a fascinating experiment. If you are tired of sitting around waiting for your friends to interact with your latest Facebook or Instagram post, you could switch to Aspect instead and force the issue. After all, the AI doesn’t have a life to get in the way of commenting on a picture of your lunch.
In a Reddit thread about the strange new “social” app, users compared it to Black Mirror:
“It’s terrifying that there’s an audience for this,” said one Redditor. Another added: “lol damn it, I was working on this exact concept as a joke app. I’ve taken too long!”
I have my doubts about the future of generative AI, but in a world where chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini become part of our everyday lives, there’s a possibility that some of us will spend more time talking to artificial intelligence than other humans.
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