AI Involvement in Social Networks
Article Source: https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/15/the-unforeseen-consequences-of-an-ai-built-social-network/
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a quickly growing field in the tech industry; in 2017 alone, investments in AI are predicted to increase by 300 percent. In social networks, AI helps with a multitude of things, such as filtering out spam content and answering customer questions in the form of “chatbots”. Social networks have become so large and complex that without AI they would become nearly unmanageable. The shift towards AI replacing human labor is still a controversial topic, but it is a fact that computers can do things more quickly and efficiently than most human workers. With increased investments in artificial intelligence, AI is becoming more sophisticated in doing things still thought to be more efficiently done through human workers, such as processing language and speech patterns. The question becomes, as AI evolves and gets more intelligent, can they create their own social networks? Recently, Facebook’s AI chatbots were able to hold a conversation with each other. It was in English of course, as they were programmed to do, but what if they were able to create a language of their own? The outcomes could be problematic. AI could begin doing things unintended by programmers. There could even be some sort of robot anarchy, where humans become overthrown by the faster and smarter AI robots, who could communicate in a language indecipherable to human minds. A network of machines could easily overpower a network of human beings.
Would AI have networks like ours, one connected by negative or positive edges? Could they gain the human characteristic of following properties of balanced triangles within their networks? Perhaps they could make their network completely balanced, and therefore much stronger than the human social network.
In the near future? Something like this seems a little far-fetched. But it’s interesting to think about how networks have the capacity for such large-scale change. Today, Facebook ranks the most popular network at 1.9 billion users, but giants such as YouTube and Instagram don’t fall far behind. Without AI or spam finders, there simply wouldn’t be enough human workers at Facebook, or any other social media platform, to help this many users at once. Technology to fight spam accounts and posters is vital to protecting social network users. This technology for identifying spam accounts includes using properties of Strong Triadic Closure to identify if any users aren’t connected the way that social groups usually connect.
In the end, it’s important for companies to exercise care in their implementation of AI. While AI has the potential to become greater than us humans can imagine, social networks were made for humans after all. As long as they continue to be programmed for bettering human endeavors, AI will prove very useful for the future of social media.