Three Ways AI Could Change Social Products

Jiang Wu · 2024-09-19

*Originally published in Chinese on September 19, 2024.*

Social products today

Social products in China and abroad follow different patterns and types. Some have a clear social purpose and positioning. Others are general-purpose tools that carry social features.

Some products cannot be defined as any one type and are still used for socializing.

To a degree, the types of social products are a collision of tools with tools, not of people with people. What a product's attributes and category are does not clearly define the nature of socializing. Connections between people are built on tools, but the tool was not necessarily created for socializing in the first place.

Products clearly defined for social scenarios do, to a degree, break some users' assumptions about tools and help build new connections.

New possibilities for socializing in the AI era

In the AI era nothing has fundamentally changed. There are only some new possibilities.

AI helps people build relationships with each other

Data. AI works purely as a tool to help people connect. It can analyze personality, build profiles, analyze hobbies, judge intent more precisely, and sort people into groups.

Tools. It can assist communication with better communication tools and settings.

Services. It can act as a matchmaker or as a gamified NPC, create emotional connection and a warm space, and help people find common topics.

AI builds relationships with people

A large part of what people want to communicate cannot be fulfilled by anyone in real life. So an AI with strong logical ability can build a relationship with a person. The relationship can grow into a tool, socializing, a service, or any type.

In fact, most contacts or friends on a social network could be AI NPCs. You may never meet them or have day-to-day dealings with them in your whole life, never form a connection with them in the real world, and for you that is no different from an AI.

AI builds relationships with AI

Connections between AI and AI are a direction worth trying. Exchanges between different models, and between different model-based products, are where endless possibilities may come from.

Exchanges between people are limited by their different backgrounds, careers, knowledge, and understanding, along with innate limits in how they express themselves, which yield limited feedback of different types.

Between AI and AI it is different. They can have similar knowledge, different backgrounds of experience, and even different abilities as defined for them. To a degree, the value of this kind of connection is greater than an exchange between people, even among the most outstanding human individuals.

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