Ironically, in a memo regarding his social media plans Peretti identifies AI as one of the problems at competitor companies like ByteDance (which owns TikTok) and Meta (which owns Facebook). “Having a job at Meta is beginning to feel like being a UBI recipient, where you are lucky to be a citizen that gets some trickle down compensation from the value- creating AIs,” he writes. Deep learning AI used on current social platforms undermines human agency, Peretti argues, polarizing discourse and causing serious addiction. “People haven’t realized it yet, but the AI-powered platforms have already shipped the dystopian AI future many people are worried might come in the future,” he warns. (Please note the awkward sentence structure here is Peretti’s, not ours.)
Peretti’s assessment of the current state of the Internet is pretty fair, which makes it all the more puzzling that his conclusion is that he needs to make his own AI social platform. (Building a “good AI” to fight a “bad AI” sounds a lot like the plot of one of those AI dystopian future plots he referenced.) His AI-powered platform will “give users agency instead of stealing their agency.” This future BuzzFeed-based social media will be “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.” As a media portfolio, BuzzFeed has long been “beholden to other platforms” in terms of distributing content, like the rest of us. “I’m fed up with giving the platform companies advice about how to fix the internet, if we want this done right, we have to do it ourselves!” Peretti declares. Get ready to welcome another algorithm into your life, we guess.
