Users may not be too excited about Meta’s new AI chatbot, but Meta is releasing it anyway, and now Indian users will get to experience the wonders of Meta’s most advanced AI chatbot tool.
Yes, after testing it with Indian users for the past few months, Meta is rolling out its new AI search element to Indian users, starting with English searches.
Meta began testing its AI chatbot with users in India in April, but postponed its expansion due to the country’s general elections.
But now Meta is expanding access to the tool, and will be rolling out Llama 3-powered chatbots to Facebook’s largest user country, where 378 million people visit the platform every month.
But do people really want that?
Reaction to Meta’s AI chatbot has been mixed, with many users expressing frustration when trying to carry out basic searches within the app.
Part of the problem here is that Facebook’s older user base may be confused about what the new AI search feature actually is and how it works, which could result in their efforts not leading to satisfactory results.
Meta acknowledges that some people aren’t entirely convinced by its new AI search and creation tools, but hopes that in the long run people will be won over.
But I don’t think so, because while the increasing capabilities of AI will open up a whole host of new possibilities, Facebook is probably not a place where we really need them. For example, do we really need all these prompts in Facebook posts that try to guide us through related searches?
Overall, this points to a larger issue with AI in social apps, which is that there really isn’t any clear room for generative AI tools within platforms designed to facilitate human-to-human engagement.
Of course, one could argue that social media apps have evolved beyond this use case and are now as much about entertainment as they are about social connection, but the insertion of generative AI that simulates human reactions and activities still seems pretty intrusive and, while it may have novelty value, it doesn’t seem to provide any additional benefit beyond that.
But since the platforms keep telling us this is the future, this is the next big thing, and this is how we’ll all interact, we’d better get used to it.
Is that an improvement? I don’t know, but it seems irrelevant to much of the broader discussion about AI.
