As a heavy social media user, I spent many hours on various social media platforms, including Instagram and Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), which is sometimes referred to as “Chinese Instagram”. Compared to Instagram that I use as a media platform to connect with my friends and get to know about their recent updates, Xiaohongshu is more like a search engine for me. For instance, if I like to learn if a beauty product is worth purchasing, I will search it on Xiaohongshu to check ordinary people or beauty bloggers’ reviews on it. It’s interesting to see that since I do more searches like this on it, the AI algorithm learns my preference and continues to show me similar posts that I may like. The recommendation system is one of the mechanisms that makes its users become so addicted to it. In terms of the AI base recommendation, Xiaohongshu is quite similar to TikTok since the former one also contains numerous short videos. As Ben Smith indicates in his article “How TikTok Reads Your Mind:”
TikTok has publicly shared the broad outlines of its recommendation system, saying it takes into account factors including likes and comments as well as video information like captions, sounds and hashtags. Outside analysts have also sought to crack its code. A recent Wall Street Journal report demonstrated how TikTok relies heavily on how much time you spend watching each video to steer you toward more videos that will keep you scrolling, and that process can sometimes lead young viewers down dangerous rabbit holes.
As we have discussed in class, the AI algorithm being used in social media platforms may cause many problems, such as privacy issues and enforced biased content. For the privacy issue, I do not think we have much control over it as long as we use it or post pictures on it. Even though I click “do not track me on other apps” all the time, I don’t think it actually helps: contents that I am interested in just pop up to me when I clip these social media apps on my phone. For the biased or custom content, I think it’s a really interesting one, especially for Xiaohongshu. A fun fact about Xiaohongshu is that almost ninety percent of the users are young females. Thus, not only most of the content is created by and for females, but also the discussions below posts are written by womens. And that explains why my male friends are less interested than my female friends. I think the potential issues about it is that we are trapped in the content that aligns with our opinions. The AI based algorithm keeps its users exposed to the content they like or agree on, and it results in reinforcing people’s ideas that may contain bias.
To learn more about Xiaohongshu:
https://www.chinafy.com/blog/the-rise-of-xiaohongshu-chinas-hottest-social-commerce-platform
https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/events/xiaohongshu-the-new-frontier-for-digital-success-in-china
Besides the AI based recommendation system in social media platforms, another issue about AI in social media is that the AI generated content is harmful to our culture. According to the article written by Jim Stoten, “A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture:”
There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content becomes ever more stereotyped and predictable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/opinion/ai-internet-x-youtube.html?searchResultPosition=17
It indicates the trend that more and more low quality AI generated content posted on the internet are polluting our culture. As the article mentions, many of these AI generated content on social media are used for economic interests: “Short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality”. As social media users, our thinking and perspectives are shaped by the content and information we have learned everyday. I was surprised by the harmful impacts of AI content on social media and the fact that AI mechanisms are shaping its users’ behavior in a toxic way.
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