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A new dystopian AI 'phone bot farm' has given many a look behind the curtain of what drives social media today and in the future, as it has now also received a $1 million cash injection from a powerful American billionaire.
Bots and spam accounts have been something that social media platforms have had to contend with for over a decade now, and it even played a key role in discussions between Elon Musk and Twitter before he was forced to buy the company back in 2022.
However, with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence technology these bots have only become more prevalent, and it has seemingly also allowed certain tech entrepreneurs to take advantage of a new gap in the market.
As reported by Futurism, one startup known as Doublespeed is now proudly boasting it's AI-powered 'phone farms' on X, showing off its ability to flood social media with fake posts for its clients.
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Shared by the company's co-founder Zuhair Lakhani, the post shows pictures of the phone farm itself – featuring what looks to be hundreds of devices hooked up to a central server – alongside images of the AI-generated content these phones are producing round the clock.
"At first, it was to tackle the first evolution of AI on socials: replacing human creators with AI, mainly used for marketing," Lakhani explains, before going on to outline a new feature they have managed to achieve.
"A couple of weeks ago, we gave the agents access to DM. The AI creator was DM-ing viewers based on their comments. 'Sorry to hear you're experiencing x, you should try y.' AND IT WORKED. This was for an ecommerce brand — out of 130 DMs sent, 15 pointed to a conversion."
Effectively, this phone farm is not only using AI to create false 'influencers' that are mostly selling products to viewers, but it is also able to infiltrate the private messages of people watching the videos to further advertise products to them.
While this is almost definitely against the rules of pretty much every social media platform out there, falling under rules that prohibit spam content, Doublespeed's AI agents appear to be unaffected and growing ever stronger, and the company has even received a hefty investment from an American billionaire.
Venture capitalist firm a16z, otherwise known as Andreessen Horowitz, recently injected $1 million into Doublespeed, showing that it has the financial backing of some of America's wealthiest individuals, suggesting that it's here to stay.
If this all sounds a bit too much like the dead internet theory then you're probably right, as even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes in the dystopian trend, but while it might be going great for Doublespeed right now when there's still humans on social media to influence, when the internet leans towards a bot-driven majority those 'conversations' might suddenly dry up. Bots can't buy products after all.
