Generative AI vs Social Media

The unobvious way out

One of the biggest scares in our new AI world is that we’ll lose the human factor. On social media it would remove the social aspect from it completely. I guess that would make it “the media”.

The main fear, is that AI will make social media posts, and then others will use AI to reply to them. Creating a kind of a crap-content loop, slowly pushing real humans out.

We may be better off using less social media.

I get it.

The deterring effect of AI slop can be a net positive for humanity. I’m already seeing less interest in scrolling X myself.

That’s because even if the content is not AI-generated, it’s “made to perform”. Engagement farming is so obvious on most socials now, it makes me want to avoid the feed in the first place.

But I don’t want to give up without a fight

Sharing ideas on social media is what got me interested in writing here, on Medium. It got me into exploring my first YouTube videos, and engaging discussions elsewhere.

And ever since AI became viable for anything serious I wanted to explore how it could speed up some parts of my content creation process.

Full disclosure.

I am launching a startup. It’s been over a year of hard work and I’m both anxious and excited. This article talks about the startup, the idea that led to it and my generative AI fears.

It’s not an advertisement though.

You can check it out if you want, but you can also just read this through and tell me whether you believe in a similar future. It shows my WHY behind the work.

How to grow on social media

I grew my Instagram account to 53 thousand followers.

Organically.

What it means is that I never purchased any followers.

It’s unique on the platform as many people want to reach the first 100K by any means necessary. Then you notice much lower engagement under their posts.

Yeah, the truth always comes out. It’s clear as day, yet almost everyone does it. I decided to stay true and honest.

A smaller group of followers with no bots just feels better.

Growing on social media is not all virality and glamour though. I know everyone thinks going viral is the path. Don’t count on going viral.

Count on showing up with value every day.

Most followers coming from viral content “auto-follow” people just in case. They likely aren’t as aligned to you as you’d hope and they’re not going to engage much.

It’s in the grind

The way to grow a social media account (at least in education) is to provide value and do it often. Preferably daily, because sure — you get fans. But they forget about you quickly when you’re inactive. There’s plenty of other content to engage them.

That’s the reality.

Most of my Instagram and LinkedIn growth happened from posting daily design tips. That meant I had to come up with an idea and do the design.

That added up to an average of an hour or even 90 minutes per day. That’s between 7–10 hours every week.

Just to create content.

How AI can help?

Most lazy people naturally assume the solution is an AI bot that just posts for you. You feed it some posts by other people and it does its thing.

Totally on autopilot, averaging the internet once again. Which is especially visible on LinkedIn right now.

What I’ve noticed is that it actually pushes high-ticket potential clients AWAY from you. They don’t engage or even scroll social media content as much anymore.

We cannot automate everything

Automating communication will result in the same effect, like calling a doctors office, just to be faced by an AI on the other end.

Welcome to our Hospital! Press ONE to book a visit. Press TWO if you’re dying. Press THREE for Spanish.

Most people get frustrated and annoyed by this. As soon as they can they’d rather switch to a low-paid intern, who may have less knowledge than the bot. But at least they’re real.

Connecting dots

I started looking for patterns in my social media posts. What are the things that are similarly done. I realized most good Instagram carousels I’ve done aren’t overwhelming visually.

They have a nice, engaging cover, but the rest is all about clarity and message.

Then it hit me!

Reactable

Generative AI is the wrong approach. We don’t want AI to “create” for us.

But having it give us a blueprint is a whole other story. A couple of building blocks, like kindling to a fire.

This is what we’ve designed our platform to do. Yes, you do prompt it for the post and it makes the slides from your prompt. But it makes them in an open-ended way on purpose.

They are supposed to be taken apart, modified, tweaked and rewritten by you. It gives you a structure of logical steps around an idea.

The rest is up to you.

We do make it a little easier with smart concepts like automatic-post color palletes coming from your cover slide. That makes it always look good and consistent for non-design-savvy users.

But if you want, you can make the background neon pink — be yourself, nothing to be ashamed of!

Small business social struggles

We interviewed many small businesses — from fitness coaches, dietitians, all the way to local craft shops. When being active on social media they face the reality of either learning something like Canva, or paying an agency.

Most post design tools are not beginner friendly.

They’re overloaded with options so even if you manage to learn them, the tendency to over-edit your posts is almost unavoidable.

Most people know how to communicate.

They can easily edit the content, but we don’t want them engaged too much in the visuals. That’s why we suggest the best matching fonts, colors, themes for them.

And they can train the AI on their face to generate matching cover slides without being tech-savvy at all.

Joining the conversation

We want them to joint the conversation. By making their messages clear, readable, good looking, we are enabling their social presence.

AI guides them, but in our initial testing EVERYONE modified the outcomes. Wrote it in their own words and added their personal quirks.

AI should be filling some gaps, mostly skill-related ones. When it does stuff for us it removes the human part. Like the dry humor in my instagram posts.

They wouldn’t have been the same without it. And adding those parts is my job. AI just makes the creation and actual posting almost 10 faster for me.

I went down from 10 hours per week to around one hour weekly.

The posts are still mine, they resonate with the audience, but I just manage to share my thoughts a little faster.

And this is how AI should be present in human generated content. We want the media to still be social. Just removing some friction.

What do you think?

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