Good Disruption: Social Media

The Disruption, a lively discussion between UVA Darden School of Business professors Yael Grushka Cocaine and Mike Lennox on cutting edge technologies and practices that are challenging the status quo.

Hey Mike, how are you doing?

I'm doing well.

How are you doing today, Yael?

I am doing great.

Have you, uh, posted anything on social media today?

Oh, today, no, I have not.

No, I have not.

Do you?

I always do.

I mean, the question is not, have I posted today, but have I posted in the past hour?

Uh, do you not post every day something on social media?

I don't, you know, I, I go through episodes where I'm, I'm, uh, more active, and then there are days where I just, I just don't think to do it.

Um, is, what is your, what is your social media of choice?

Let me ask you that.

So it's interesting, I think, um, I, I, I'm a weird consumer of social media, I would say.

I'm, I'm more likely to post than I am to actually read social media, as crazy as that sounds.

So, uh, I've long used Twitter, now known as X, uh, and because some of the changes I've been less using X.

And using LinkedIn actually more as a, as a source of kind of getting news out about things that I'm doing and the like.

Now, how about you?

I know you're, you're very active here.

Yeah, I do love social media.

Um, I use it all the time.

I've been shifting, like you, I, I was a heavy user of Twitter a while ago, or, um, X, and I've kind of slowly moved away from that, although I still use it, and I use LinkedIn a lot, but I really use Instagram, um, the most I would say, um, I just find it, uh, the most satisfying, the most fun, and I enjoy interacting with, um, individuals there.

Um, are you an Instagram follower?

I, I'm really not though.

I live vicariously through my wife's Instagram, so, and, and hers is populated with dog videos, uh, and like cute kid videos.

So, so that I, I do get to consume some of that content.

Well, um, the reason I ask you all these questions and talk about it is, um, obviously, maybe you've guessed it, that I'm hoping that we can talk about social media as a disruption, uh, today.

Well, not new, I know that it's been around and you can, you, you, I know that you have some reflections on the history, but I still think it's such a pervasive and such a powerful force in the world around us that, um, it, it's gonna help us think about the future and where.

Going in many ways.

So can we talk about social media today?

I love it.

I love it.

Let's call this like the Michael J.

Fox Back to the Future episode here, right?

There you go.

We're looking at something that's been around for a while, but we're looking towards the future as well.

Well, look, it's, it, let, let's just kind of be aligned and on the same page in the sense of the impact of social media.

It is huge, right?

So if there's about 5.4 billion internet users in the world. world, about 5 billion or 62% say that they are social media users, or at least to some, according to some polls and statistics, and it's growing every second, every single 2nd, 8.2 new users join social media, which is just shocking.

Now are those new users or are those bots that are creating their own accounts?

Fair enough.

Could potentially bots, potentially.

New users, uh, um, cut it as you will, it is still impactful, um, and it's just changed everything from, uh, how we interact with each other, how our kids interact with their friends, to how businesses and, you know, small businesses, entrepreneurs, how they start off, um, uh, social media is the place to go if you, if you haven't even noticed that yet.

So, so can I ask you a question?

So what, what is and it is not social media in your opinion?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Uh, definitions vary.

I think social media to some degree is, you know, talking a little bit in your lingo, in the strategy lingo.

It's kind of a network that connects end users, right?

So, like, an ability to have, uh, 1 to 1, uh, uh, uh, end to end kind of relationships, I think is what we're talking about here, and that becomes social.

Now, uh, you know, whether or not it's for social purposes or for business purposes is by the by, but, um, in my mind, that's how we think about social.

Social media is, is texting a, uh, social media?

Yeah, I think you can say that texting is social media.

I think, uh, WhatsApp, uh, uh, we, you know, WeChat, I think the various, uh, iterations of that is social media.

I think, you know, uh, there's always a joke about depending if you're texting in blue or green, if you're a green, blue, you know, if you're a green texter, maybe it's not social anymore, and you should move in and change to a, an apple or a, a fruit-based device, as I like to say.

Telephones, telephones, are they social media?

Like the old, uh, you know, group chats you could do on your, uh, your telephone back in like the 1980s.

Yeah, what were they called?

Uh, uh, those, uh, yeah, they had a name, right?

Those, those kinds of group conversations.

They're like party calls, right?

Wasn't just like a party.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're really dating ourselves again.

I know social media?

Is it, is it more than, is it more than 2 people?

Does it need to be more than 2 people to be a social media?

I think, I don't think it does.

Necessarily, I think, uh, a party calls definitely social media, and I think the telephone and it's the first iteration can be seen very much as social media, um, uh, for that time, right?

And it was disruption for that time and again, while we're not gonna totally do a back to the future, you can think about the evolution of these networks and evolution of social media over time, um, as disruptive forces and disruptive technologies as, as they've evolve.

Yeah, and I would note that Facebook came out almost exactly 20 years ago now.

So unbelievable.

It's been around for a while.

Obviously there were things that predated Facebook in that same digital social media space, but obviously Facebook was the big, the big disruptor of the, of the time there.

Yeah, yeah, um, and it continues to be, you know, the prominent, uh, platform, I would.

Say, uh, it is definitely the largest social media.

I think, uh, Instagram, LinkedIn are kind of slowly catching up, but those are still, you know, Facebook is still primarily the, the biggest platform, uh, 3 billion monthly active users.

I mean that is a large chunk of the population around the globe if you think about it, um, and by far the most popular social network.

That that's incredible.

It's incredible that that many people uh around the world are, are, are using it there.

Um, look, I think this is one in which, uh, given 20 years of history here, it'd be hard to argue that social media hasn't, uh, been a disruption, right?

So, so let's talk a little bit about the good and the bad to date, right?

And we, what we always see is we always do want to look towards the future here.

What, what do you see as the, the good sides of social media, our, our, our 20 year experience at least, uh, since social media as we kind of popularly know it now, uh, has arisen.

Yeah, and I know that we're gonna open the floodgates to some critique, and there's plenty of negativity, and, um, as a generation, uh, you know, you and I both have teenagers, and so we always think about whatever teenagers are big on, we like to criticize, you know, rarely have you seen a generation of parents say that their, their kids are into something good and productive, um, but I would say that on, on some level, social media has definitely helped people feel connected, feel accepted.

Uh, feel like they can get support in real time when they're struggling, um, and not feel as isolated as potentially, um, they would if they didn't have social media.

I mean, think, just think about the times of COVID and when we were all isolated in our homes.

If there wasn't social media and really well established platforms, I think we would have felt way more lonelier than we did, um, and, and we all benefited from that, uh.

In many different ways, um, costs of, of entry and cost of exposure and marketing capabilities have dramatically changed and increased and expanded and given power to, to the everyday person, if you will.

Um, so many people can be influencers, so many people can have a say, uh, uh, can share their knowledge and their excitement and enthusiasm in ways that were never possible before, unless you were some famous celebrity.

Or a very kind of successful model and in that way it really kind of has been breaking down slowly and surely barriers for folks to influence each other, share their, their, their knowledge, and gain exposure in ways that that they're they're seeking.

I really like that idea, we might call it the democratization of, of, of media and communications and that.

You know, it's, it's, it's hard to imagine now, 20 years in, but, you know, a time period where it'd be very hard to get your video in front of anybody, uh, or, or your thoughts for the day, uh, in front of anyone, and, and, and now this is, is incredibly easy, uh, at least to get it out there.

Now whether you can get a lot of followers is another, uh, another, another question there.

Um, what, what, what are you thinking about some of the, the earlier Um, beliefs about social media.

I'm thinking in particular like the Arab Spring, um, I'm forgetting exactly what year that was now, but there was a lot of rhetoric then about how social media was empowering people.

It was giving them voice and it was giving them ways to coordinate, uh, with others that were giving rise to these, uh, you know, democracy movements.

Of course, I mean, there's an, uh, uh, in a way, it's kind of ironic, you're, you're talking about an additional.

Level of transparency, uh, in, in terms of the ease in which you can connect with people, uh, like-minded people or connect with people that inspire you, connect with people that you may not know that exist, and I think movements like the Arab Spring, movements that, uh, that you see from time to time, often, yes, they have maybe a little bit more of a political tone to them, uh, but even fanship, uh, uh, of, of certain.

Artistry or, or certain forms of entertainment, like the connecting with people who share your passions has become much easier through social media.

Yeah, it is amazing to see the number of uh celebrities now, just flat out celebrities, musical successes who got their start on social media.

They didn't go through the, you know, quote unquote traditional challenge, uh, channels that you would see for success as, let's say a musician.

Right, and, and in some ways that has been well overdue.

I mean, the record companies and the labels have all uh been controlling some of that, um, to the dissatisfaction of the artists, and here now there is a platform that, as you say, democratizes that and empowers the artists to keep control and to talk directly to their audience, to sell directly to their consumers, um, uh, in a, in a much more fast and immediate way.

So, so we've talked about some of the, the upside here.

Tell, tell me, what are, what are the critiques?

I mean, we've all heard them, but tell us, tell us what you think are some of the, the top critiques we should be thinking about.

Yeah, I mean, I think things that we feel ourselves, things that, um, in some ways we would feel in many different social settings, uh, this notion that you see the good but not the bad.

You see people having fun, but not their struggle moments.

It puts added pressure, um, it makes people You know, maybe a little bit more self-conscientious or low self-esteem, or they see other people having fun with each other, but they're not included.

So it can have really, um, mental issues and mental pressure.

It can increase the mental pressure that folks feel, uh, in ways that maybe we've experienced across generations, but maybe this makes it more pronounced.

I mean, for sure, if you go back to your telephone example, uh, if you.

You were calling a friend, uh back in the 60s and the 70s, and they didn't answer, but you knew that they were on the, on the call with somebody else, you would get jealous in the same way that now if you see them on social media interacting with somebody that you're not, um, included, you might feel left out.

Um, we definitely see that social media can have, um, can help spread and in a very rapid way, you know, misinformation or just sheer You know, wrong facts and lies and, and really cause uh um some not only stress and pressure, but also cause a lot of damage by spreading uh wrong information, and that of course is a big, big downside.

Yeah, I mean, I think about uh here growing up in the United States, you know, we had in essence 3 news outlets, right?

ABC, NBC, CBS, and you had the 3 newscasters and there was a very narrow set of sources for information and news.

Um, now we've created a world where literally, you know, millions and millions of sources, uh, here.

There's a good size to that, right?

Now, now we allow for additional voices and, and, and the like, um, but There's that downside that you just were mentioning, uh, the, the, the ability to proliferate, um, falsehoods, um, to build little, you know, subcommunities, uh, where now our information and facts aren't all the same that we're, uh, that we're dealing with there.

How do you react to that critique of social media that in some ways maybe you could even argue it, it's opened Pandora's box, where now great, everybody has voice, but man, do we want everybody to have a voice and, and is it really um improving the uh improving the commons.

Well, I think it's a valid critique, and I think, I think that like any other disruption that you and I have talked on this show about, uh, with innovation and with change comes a whole set of new considerations that we are all responsible of tackling.

So, um, just take for instance, this notion of, yeah, do we want everybody to have a voice, because sometimes those voices aren't really what we would like to hear, or sometimes they're wrong or.

Sometimes they're helping spread, uh, uh, um, errors information.

Well, then it's our responsibility to try and think about what is it, uh, that we want to encourage in terms of how people express themselves, how we are influenced by each other, uh, how we listen to each other, how do we give feedback, um, how do we assess whether information is correct or not?

How do we train our, our, our, our.

Teach our kids and the world around us to be more thoughtful when they consume information.

This has always been the case.

We've, you know, when you've gone to the newsstand, uh, 2030 years ago, you had to judge the validity of a certain magazine and an outlet.

You have to do the same thing today.

It's just, um, more of it and maybe more rapid than ever.

And then about the critique of uh mental health impact, especially on teens.

Um, I wanna remind us that the rise in social media has come with the rise of awareness in terms of social, uh, in terms of mental issues in general.

So we are all more aware of mental health.

Kids talk about it more.

Parents care about it more, seem to be caring about it and reacting to it more.

Schools and education systems are more sensitive to it.

And so, yes, there's an increase in.

Interest and increase in maybe cases where people are seeking mental health support, but that's not just because of social media rise.

That's also because of our awareness and the heightened sensitivity and heightened care that we're taking to try and support individuals who struggle.

Yeah, that's a good point that there's any number of societal ills where the first reaction is always to blame social media.

But as we know, the world's complex, and there's a lot of things going on, uh, and some of these things might be causative, some of them might be correlative, and, and maybe some of them, there really isn't any correlation at all, but we just make that assertion, uh, there as well.

Um.

I is is social media in your mind, um, just simply a tool, or is it something more as a phenomenon that we're that we're facing?

Is it, you mentioned before, like it's amplifying things that have always existed.

Is there anything that's different in kind that social media is bringing about in your mind?

Well, I definitely think that from if we think about, uh, you and I, we're, we're, you know, we're business school professors, we think about marketing, we think about operations, we think about PR, we think about uh uh uh just channels.

I mean, I think that we've seen a huge amount of disruption and change in ways that businesses thrive and succeed and in ways in which consumers uh uh seek to.

To find information, find out about new products, and consume those products, um, I think that it's changed wellness and lifestyle choices based on, on the web and just opportunities that social media provides in terms of educating individuals and training individuals to think differently about their own health and their own, uh, uh, uh, um, lifestyle, um, so yes, I think there are fundamental changes that are occurring around us that are.

Both impacting business models, impacting businesses, impacting policy and impacting individuals and how they live their lives.

It reminds me of some work that I've done some research I've done over the years on environmental activist actions against firms, and it, and it used to be that firms would be wary of these kind of large organizations, let's say like a Greenpeace, uh, well, well known activists that would, you know, target certain firms.

They have to worry now in this day and age of, you know, two people with a clever idea on YouTube, uh, creating a video that might destroy, you know, literally millions of dollars of value for a company overnight, um, which is a very, very different world again, because we've democratized voice and there are many more people who can have a vehicle for, for getting, getting the message out there.

And you know, that could have a positive effect in the sense that it makes everybody stop and think and make it, makes it aware that we don't have to wait for one company, one organization to figure out some challenges or some critique of our work, but we need to be thinking about every single individual out there and, and what they might say about our business.

But, you know, Mike, you and I often know that whatever we can discuss together is not gonna help us really.

Unravel the secrets or even the hope in this case with social media, um, but maybe it's time to bring in our expert.

What do you think?

I think it's always time to bring in the expert, so great suggestion.

Well, um, it's always a joy when we have one of our own alums coming back, one of our students that we had in the classroom come back as our expert.

And so I am really excited to have, uh, Travis Nixon here with us, uh.

Travis, um, is a machine learning engineer from Meta.

Travis, welcome to our show.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

We are really excited to have you here, and let me tell our, um, listeners a little bit about you, Travis, and you'll probably tell us a lot more that we need to know, but you have more than a decade of experience in machine learning and related fields.

I remember talking about it in quite a lot of detail when you were a student, um, at Darden.

Um, you're one of the leading experts in the country in machine learning and its application, impact, and potential.

And you've built many systems to harness the power of advanced natural language processing, which is, you know, very timely now, um, uh, in order to deliver new insights and make better decisions.

Um, you, of course, have a background in finance, you have your Darden MBA, which, uh, uh, I alluded to, and before moving to Meta, you spent, um, quite a while actually at Microsoft, uh, um, um, and other firms before that.

Thank you again for coming, Travis.

Um.

How do you feel about social media?

I think you told us you're not really a user of social media ironically.

Yeah, yeah, so, um, I started my career with the US State Department, uh, and so I was overseas when Facebook, uh, really hit, uh, and, um, when I got back to the States, everyone was on Facebook, uh, dating had to be on Facebook, you know, instead of like exchanging numbers, you would have each other on Facebook and I felt like I had missed this whole movement of moving your life to an online experience.

Uh, and so I, I just kind of missed the boat on that and never quite caught up.

Um, but, uh, I look, I don't have anything personally against it.

It's just I never really got too much into being a user, uh, of it.

And I think that that's really interesting that across generations, I've seen, um, uh, folks either really take to it, and each person might take to a different social media in a different way or a different platform of choice, um, and some folks that don't find the need or don't gravitate towards it, and I, and I assume, Mike, that you have the same experience with people around you.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And like I said, I think it's interesting to be one who uses social media as a vehicle to promote things versus those who are consuming it as a source of either news or entertainment on, on the daily.

If, if I could jump in on that thought, actually, I, because I think that's a really good point.

And I was listening to the conversation, uh, prior to me coming in, uh, loved it, loved the thoughts that we had there.

But I do want to interject one thing that social media is oftentimes talked about in terms of users and what, what This is doing, bringing users together as a society, um, but there's another whole half of it.

And, and in the industry, this second half is really the guiding star of where social media is and where it's going, and that is the corporate side, the people that are buying the ad time on the social media, and that shapes a lot of, a lot of the questions that you would have of why is this this way in Instagram or on Facebook or any of these platforms.

Well, they, they've really got to build out a business case for selling attention in the form of advertisement.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

And I wonder, um, uh, from your perspective, like, have you seen that change a lot over time, and do you think that that change is kind of good for the consumer?

Like, what is your take on it?

So, oh, that's a big question now.

Look, um, I think that we're at an inflection point.

We have been for the past year.

Uh, in fact, ever since December 2022, when Chat ChippyT was released, uh, and we had this sudden pause moment with what AI was becoming.

Uh, that the, the basis mission, uh, uh, and makeup of what social media is and what it is intended for is undergoing a whole revolution and change.

Um, so there's a lot of different answers to that question.

So how did, how did we get here?

Well, it, it depends on the facets.

So you mentioned like one of the, one of the negative sides of social media was a mental health concern.

Can people get too addicted to social media like, Who here hasn't been at some point in their lives caught in a loop of you see an interesting link and you follow it, and then that leads to another link or that leads to another video and in TikTok these days, uh, there's, there's just such a compelling addiction towards scrolling to the next video or reels.

Uh, the, the fact is we, we built some AI models and we had an objective because for every AI model, you, you have to name an objective.

What, what are you minimizing?

What are you optimizing?

What are you maximizing?

What we really wanted to maximize was people watching the next video.

We said, hey, we'll feed in all this data.

We've got, we've got this data, we can anonymize it, we can do whatever we want, uh, aggregate it, feed it into the neural networks, and then at the end of the day, what we want to maximize is people clicking on the next video, OK?

And it turns out there's some great ways to do that in negative harmful ways.

It, it turns out negative emotions are very compelling to click on, negative content, things that you disagree with.

And so we can feed vitriol into someone's lives, and that's not born out of any kind of negative impetus or desire or I want to manipulate someone's life in a negative way.

It's just born out of this AI model takes a whole bunch of stuff in, it's called a black box model, so we have no idea what's going on in the middle of it.

And then on the outset, we've maximize or optimize clicks, great, but it turns out then.

Just as you were talking about at the beginning, there's some mental health outcomes that aren't quite desirable.

So we start to chip away at this question now and, and I hope that starts to answer what you're talking about, how did we get to where we're at.

But it's a very multifaceted problem.

Yeah, it makes me think here about, you know, obviously the business model for a lot of these companies is advertising and as you just said, that then leads to an incentive to create the algorithm having the, the objective function of attention, maximize attention.

But I was trying to think of like what would be the alternative, like what would it be like um.

I don't know, would it be like the users affect for the videos they're seeing, and how would you even measure that other than through attention?

Um, and so I, I, I hear you and I agree, and this is one of the big critiques of social media, but I'm trying to think of like what would the alternative be if we just even took the business model aside.

How would it decide what next video to give me other than attention?

I, I saw, fantastic question, Mike, uh, and I think that's where we hit the inflection point is before we could measure dollars and dollars are the easiest thing to measure in the world, right?

That's why sales organizations tend to be very meritocratic in, in promotions and things like that.

Sell more, better dollars, easy to measure, right?

Um.

It, it, like I said with these models coming down to how do we maximize dollars, uh, ad spend, uh, has led to some negative effects.

But now that we have these large language models, we're now able to measure things like how healthy was this conversation.

How much did this affect their life and, and I can have a start point of their emotional or mental state is predicted to be at this, and at the end of that conversation, it was higher, so I can benchmark it higher.

So now the ability to arrange your social media algorithms and output. to a healthy outcome are, are myriad.

And I think that this is exactly where we redefine what is social media for.

Is it meant to connect us or is it meant to give us a feeling of connection?

Because I can give you a feeling of connection with chatbots, and with the onset of LAA 4 and GPT 5, we're there.

Right, so fascinating, fascinating, and that, that's a rabbit hole, of course, to go down to, uh, but, uh, it, what is social media?

What is it for?

I think is a very valid question right now.

And I think you pick up on a good point, and this is where our imagination and our crea our positive creativity, I would say comes into play in the sense that if we align our goals and our, our objectives, as you both alluded to, maybe.

Now, tools can detect my emotional state.

They can detect my, my, my, my health state.

They can detect measures of like blood pressure, uh, they can detect, uh, uh, smiles and, and, and frowns and tired uh individuals or lethargic behavior.

Like, now that we can start to kind of pick up on some other cues in different ways, maybe we can, maybe the social media companies.

Or maybe their organizations behind it and the individuals will put more of an expectation that we also help individuals overcome challenges when uh when they, when they face them.

Is that, is that a good way to think about it, Travis?

Absolutely.

And I, and I see signs of this happening as a big consideration for social media companies.

For example, uh, I, I have a great opportunity to speak with a lot of our partners and um.

Uh, so other folks such as Reddit and, and various social media platforms, and it's what's interesting to me is social media companies used to define themselves and their value in the form of how they could get ads and how many eyeballs and how much attention and how much lifted revenue for their corporate customers.

What I'm hearing more and more is the breadth and depth of their data.

In other words, we, our, our current large language models have fed in all the language we possibly can that's out there and available for OpenAI to ingest, let's say, take OpenAI.

And that means that we've produced LLMs that are largely formal because they can go and scrape all of these great news articles and blog posts that are out there for the world to see, but what they aren't scraping is informal conversations and how we just interact with each other on a day to day basis.

The social media companies have those conversations, and I know Reddit, in the news has been monetizing those conversations a lot.

Um, the, the, uh, that, that actually ended up hurting Google a little bit with the release of, of their, uh, models.

Um, but I think that it is a competitive advantage that a lot of these social media companies are gonna use to say, I can actually model how a conversation goes, what a healthy conversation is, what is the arc, how do we keep it interesting, uh, and everything like that.

That's a valuable data set to have.

Interesting.

Reddit, another social media that started at UVA, of course.

You had to get that in.

Uh, just to play devil's advocate though, if, if we design systems now that improve our, our welfare, I mean that sounds on its surface like this is great, this is where we need to go with social media.

But then I can think about like drug addiction, right?

Like that might put me in a state of euphoria and, and like is that, is that what we need as humans, is that like.

That positive affect at all time when we're engaging with a with a platform.

Well, in, in direct answer to that, Mike, I don't think we're ready for AI as a society, and it's coming way too fast.

Uh, I, I was seeing today that we're we're looking at an acceleration of intelligence units per dollar, doubling every 6 months, and this has been happening since Attention Is All You Need came out in 2018 or 2017 and then acted on in 2018 and beyond.

Uh, look, um, it's, it's absolutely staggering.

Uh, and if you think the models are smart now, um, just, just a quick anecdote.

When I was at Microsoft, I was working with a lot of financial customers, um, on how to implement GPT 3, and nobody wanted it.

Just to be transparent, GBT 3, like we could not, there, there was all these great use cases that we would build and we would ingest data and we would show how it's great at classification and regression tasks.

If you just put some additional layers on top.

By, by the time we got to that point in the conversation, they were already out.

Uh, 6 months later, chat GBT comes out because we added some labeling onto that with some uh offshoring teams and things like that.

Uh, and now everyone can't get enough of it.

So I just want to point out that we're all raving about GPT 4, but GPT 3 was in the industry considered not too valuable.

Now the step from 3 to 4 is everyone's changing their business models.

Uh, and I think the key to this is AI is not an innovative tool.

AI is a tool of innovation and it fundamentally transforms everything about a company.

Now, OpenAI is telling us the leap from 4 to 5 is equivalent in size as the leap from 3 to 4.

You think you, your job, your role, your life is not going to get disrupted by this technology, you've got to rethink and, and start thinking exponential, stop thinking linear, right?

Uh, and, and so, uh.

To, to the point of what happens when we can get all the dopamine from social interactions from our computer and not have to reach out, Mike, I think that's, I, I think that's the question that we've got to answer in 4 years and we've got to come to a consensus about it, and I don't know.

I think about the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix.

Yeah.

Can we just back up for one second.

It's one thing I, I, I'm trying to follow here is like when, when I think about generative AI and I think about like the her situation there, it seems it's social, but it's artificial social versus at least some notion that social media exists today is a communication between two humans here.

Am I, am I thinking about that wrong, or is, is it just everything's getting blurred and it doesn't matter if the person on the other side is a bot or a human who's generating content.

It's absolutely the latter because I, and I'm, I won't go too much into the detail on this, but let me ask you, if we can host a conversation between two people, uh, and have the other person not know that they're talking to a bot, is that not a great label data set to see how good your bot is?

I'm going to take us back to social, social media, uh, for a moment, guys, in terms of like, the social media, how we think about it today.

I know, Mike, you just opened a Pandora box about thinking about it in terms of interaction between individuals in a box, but if we think about interaction between 1 to 1 or one to many, or many to many humans, Travis, is there anything that you look at with an excitement, like, you know, where, where, where do you think the social, uh, media is gonna go in a way that has potential to improve our life, improve our social, improve our feeling, improve our, our Happiness?

Is there something on the horizon that we can look forward to?

I think there's tons, yeah.

I, I am very bullish on AI.

I think that this is the moment that we have an opportunity to, as a species graduate to the next level.

And I think that's extremely exciting, uh, living in an age of abundance.

Um, but let me ask you this, uh, The, the, there's an analogy I like to tell, and, and it might be terrible, so give me the feedback, that's great.

But, uh, but this is, this is what I, how I like to say it.

If, if you have an ice cream vendor who found a genie, Genie says, I'll grant you a wish, and they say, I want to make ice cream, the, the best ice cream that it is possible to make.

And, and poof, boom, he's got unlimited supply of the best ice cream that it's possible to make.

And it turns out it's so good that no one else can eat anything, anything else.

The food was good.

The first bowl is fantastic, but when you can't do anything else, it comes at the expense of the rest of life.

And now the desire is coming back and, and it's, it's now, it's now a curse, right?

Um, so some kind of Faustian bargain there.

I think that we're there with, with social media, uh, and, and with AI.

So the question is, and, and I think let's take this to advertising.

So my, my specialty in meta is actually on the ads, uh, org, uh, and making models to decide which ads you should see when you sign into Instagram or Facebook, OK.

We need to choose the five best ads that people see.

What happens when we get so good at choosing those ads that you can't say no?

And now, what, like what happens if you invented the ultimate ad engine and now everyone just runs up huge debts on their credit cards?

That's not good, right?

Now, where we're at now, so that's, that's last yesteryear, right?

Where we're at now is what happens when I can make the ad in real time to fit exactly what you want.

Yeah, this, this is something I've long been concerned about and uh just to to get academic speak here for a second is uh in a lot of our models we assume that preferences are exogenous, right?

Like you have some preferences they're born in you, maybe they change over time, but it's exogenous to the actions of others.

We know, um, from consumer behavior, from the efforts on, you know, behavioral economics and like that, but no, no, we can actually shape those preferences, right?

And so to your point, like, as we get better at that, as we are able to leverage this data and use algorithms to like completely shape what we believe, that, that can get very disconcerting.

I you know now I feel like we're going down the dystopian path here of, uh, you know, an entity, either the state or a company deciding like, you know, we're gonna tell us what you want and what you should do and, and Um, you know, total control type of, uh, uh, thinking.

So please tell me how I'm wrong, Travis, that this is, this is where we're going.

Well, the, the core mitigation is societal and personal, uh, and I want to get, uh, and fully answer Yao's question on, on what is the optimist take on this as well too, right?

Uh, so, but let, let me address those two points.

So the personal is you, you've got to be prepared yourself.

You've got to be aware of what's happening in AI.

You, you can't wait for someone else to tell you three months after the fact.

You need to understand how the algorithms might affect you today.

So, the first thing is listen to this podcast, read.

As much about this talk as you can because this is not a nerd technology.

This is not happening in some data center.

This is happening in your life.

The second is societally.

We need to be aware of these dangers and we need a political system that's able to act on things to act in society's best interest as rapid as possible.

Uh, and I know that saying politics does not give, uh, is not really a rallying cry of hope these days.

I think that the world has acted fairly well in times of crisis and adapting to, to new developments.

So I, I'm hopeful on that.

Um, let me paint the utopia picture.

So we're going down to the dystopia bent real quick, but let me paint the, the utopian picture if we get this right.

So let's say that my my neighbor, uh, we just had a big storm and a tree fell on their house, uh, and two damage to their home, uh, and they luckily they have insurance, but suppose they didn't have insurance.

Now, suppose we're 5 years down the road and AI has progressed as, as it has been.

And they're able to go to the computer and say I've got holes in my roof.

I need a quick solution.

Here's what what's available to me.

And they actually hold a conversation with the AI agent, so they don't just need to ask everything in their first prompt.

And the AII agent helps them invent something that's actually going to repair their roof, and not only that, it's going to be a SpaceX relay, so that they can actually now get SpaceX internet, right?

Great.

They go to a website and they say publish this idea and patent it.

AI takes care of that.

Uh, AI compares and researches all the patents and says now we have a new product, and they say, great.

Uh, there's an adversarial, uh, AI that shows whether or not this could be successful in an open market.

Now, he's got a huge, um, gap in his finances to fill, and so he says, market this, and I want you to put it on Facebook, uh, and Instagram, and I want you to build ads and help me sell this.

Uh, and I want to send this to a manufacturing facility which can pick up the design and auto fabricate what it needs to.

Uh, in order to develop this product, and now you have him with a patented product out selling in the marketplace, uh, in a situation where intelligence has by and large been commoditized.

It raises the question, what are humans at that point if intelligence gets commoditized, but I think that there is a utopian path in this of helping everyone grab a slice of innovation.

I love that.

I love that.

And the social part of that is what in terms of, it's part of the process of democratizing it, like is that, that now social becomes like just how we interact more broadly?

Is that, is that how you see it?

Social media, this is, this is where I come down to the redefining of what is social media.

Uh, so in that, uh, experience that I just mentioned, um, social media can play many parts.

First off, on the, on the advertising part, how do you get your product?

How do you get your brand out there?

How do you start from scratch?

And I, I would say that one of the most positive forces from social media to date has been the ability of small businesses to play in what were large markets traditionally.

I mean, the risk you'd have to go through to buy TV ads before was substantial, impossible, right?

And now with a budget of as little as 50 bucks, you can affect consumers within 10 miles of your coffee shop and get them to come in and and boost your sales, as well as Meta already has abilities to help you increase the quality of your ads.

You don't need as big of a marketing team and marketing budget anymore.

I think that's a wonderful thing, democratizing market.

Um, and I think that's gonna continue.

So I, I, I think, yeah, that's, that's where it's headed there and in the social media part of the story.

And I, and I want to go back to something that resonated with me that you mentioned earlier that, um, anything in abundance suddenly kind of, it could be good in and of itself, but then it could have negative effects and, uh, um, you know, synergies or, or, or a negative impact on other adjacent activities, and we see it, right?

Like even if social media had a good effect on, let's say a good effect on individuals, the fact that it's distracting from.

Let's say, going out there and being, doing physical activity or, or, or excluding some, or reading a book or what have you, yes, that is an an immediate challenge, but in the longer term, it also means that we have to rethink some of the other aspects of our lives, meaning, um, you see that with the increase in social media, I think there's also a boom in terms of quality of, let's say, TV and movies.

Why has suddenly the game and the act, uh, stepped up on the TV.

Front is because in order to attract viewers, they had to change and improve the quality and suddenly you brought in star quality and star productions, in order to bring in, you know, viewers because they were being lost to social media, um, uh, you know, innovation around writing and around, uh, thinking about literature, innovation around entertainment, just, I just think that it opens the door to creativity in different ways, um, to keep everything in balance.

Does that make sense?

Does that, can I sell that story, Mike, to you a little bit?

I, I like it.

I like it.

I like the, uh, uh, the, the positive utopian kind of view we're discussing discussing here.

Uh, obviously, you know, I think, you know, what, what are the bifurcations lead us down one path versus another is really something that kind of top of mind for me of how do we, how do we make sure it doesn't go off the rails and make sure that it, it leads us to this more, uh, utopian path that we're discussing.

Well, Travis, you said, um, responsibility is on all of us, all of us to get exposed, to learn, to be judgmental in our consumption, and I, and I, and that I buy a lot.

I mean, criticizing AI is one thing, but learning enough about it in order to be a smart consumer and criticize it, uh, in a productive manner is a whole different ball game.

Um, so I like that call.

Well, so, and, and a couple of thoughts on that.

Look, with social media, you can unplug.

Um, to a certain extent, um, and, and actually I, I realize now as I'm thinking about it, I'm actually not social media free.

I'm on LinkedIn.

There you go, right, exactly.

Avoiding social media is gonna be YouTube.

YouTube is a social media network, right?

Avoiding social media in, in total is very, very difficult, um.

Avoiding AI is going to be impossible, just absolutely impossible, uh, if you want to continue to participate in society, uh, at, at the normal level.

So I think that defensive strategies and understanding it is really a requirement for everybody.

Well, Chas, this has been really super helpful.

Thank you.

For taking the time spending it with us, uh, uh, for this amount of time, and it's great to chat with you and to hear about all of your insight and success.

Uh, um, it's been a long time and I'm so, so proud to, to hear from you and your position and thank you for sharing your knowledge of, uh, not only, um, AI generative AI, social media, and, and, and the like.

Um, yeah, thanks.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure reconnecting.

Thank you so much for the time.

Thank you, Travis.

So Mike, are you still down on social media?

I was gonna ask you, are you, are you going to delete any of your social media accounts now?

Oh, so have we changed our perspective at all?

Um, no, I think, I think it's always about with like everything else, it's with the moderation, um, and so.

I feel like social media plays a really critical part in, in my life, and we haven't even talked about the potential of connecting people, networks.

I'm traveling, I've been living away from my family for years and years and years, and I'm, I, I feel that social media has enabled me to stay connected and so for me, it plays a critical role, and that's why I do it, um, but with the.

Power comes great responsibility, so I hear your warnings and your concerns.

Yeah, and I think, you know, I, I can't deny, one, you know, this has obviously been disruptive in the way we traditionally talk about this.

It's, it's, it's restructured any number of different industries from communications to media to news, um, and, and, and, and that's, that's obvious.

I think in terms of the good or the bad, um, clearly there are good aspects of this, clearly, and it has created value for society.

I, I, I, I, I worry about the, the kind of dystopian future, as you know, and you know, hearing Travis talk about some of the, you know, you know, coming with AI, um, it makes me even more worried, right?

So, so, so is your worry, is your worry about, um, The AI part or the social media per se.

So are you more concerned with the fact that AI is so pervasive and will continue to control our lives, or are you, uh, worried about the social media specific aspect?

If we can differentiate it, maybe we can, yeah, yeah, and I think, I think it, it gets back to what Travis had said about, um, you know, what are these machines designed.

Designed to do, right?

And, and I think that that notion of they're, they're there to attract your attention and keep you engaged with them.

So I would make a distinction between the, you know, the Instagrams, the TikToks, the YouTubes from like we were saying, texting.

I think that that's a, it's a different environment there.

It's a different level of engagement.

And I think when you think about, you know, the ability not only to optimize the next piece of content you receive, but to actually optimize the content itself using generative AI.

Then that addictive ability is going to be even that much stronger.

And, and, and what does that mean for us if, if, you know, it's not just because user X created a cool cat video, uh, that gets, you know, brought up in the recommendation engine, it's the AI is now creating something bespoke for me that's going to keep me on these platforms, uh, even longer.

Um, that, that's worrisome to me.

Yeah, that's fair, and I can see that concern, and I guess, uh, to some degree, it's, you know, us, meaning the employees, the, the, the leaders, the managers, the, the, the C-suite, uh, us who train future business leaders, you know, those who, who are our regulators, like it is all of our collective responsibility to think about how do these tools get used and how does this disruption get set up to be more.

Um, you know, positive in our lives and negative, um, and how do we think about that content, that self-generated content by AI, um, and the role that it's going to play in our lives in the future.

I mean, I, I do agree that we know, we have discretion, right?

We have agency, so, you know, we don't have to use these tools, right?

So that, that's a good thing, of course, um, um, but we'll, we'll see if, if people, you know, heed that or, or not.

So yeah, where, where do you come down, good, bad, or no disruption?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, this is gonna be controversial because I think I'm gonna come down on the good disruption and I kind of predict you're gonna say bad.

Yeah, I, I, I am actually.

I, and, and it's funny because you know me, I'm, I'm usually the optimist, I'm usually the utopian.

I love technology and I, and I usually come down on the side of good.

Um, I, I'm gonna go bad on this one. we've, we've had some other ones recently that are kind of related topics that I, I think I came out on bad on a few of those as well.

Um, I, I, I do worry like we're, we're kind of opening Pandora's box here and, um, I, I don't know how we put it back, but, um, it, it, it certainly can have implications that can be worrisome.

So I'm gonna kind of um uh take our moment of uh saying goodbye and thanking um those who need to be thanked to also challenge you, Mike, um, if, uh, if we come down or if we believe that it is a bad disruption, meaning social media is a bad disruption, then what are you gonna do about it or what are we gonna do about it in order to help cater and shift the direction, because just saying that it's bad.

And I see this with kids, like, we can ban it, we can do a lot of different things, but we've seen historical impacts and successful, you know, banning of different things that individuals thought were bad.

That doesn't really solve the problem.

Um, I think that we can be much more constructive in, in the actions that we take.

Yeah, and I totally agree with that.

I think maybe it's, it's, it's education again, right?

Just making sure people are informed.

Uh, about what's happening behind the scenes on these systems.

Uh, and, and, and so they do have that agency we were talking about.

Um, and look, who doesn't like to sit for an hour watching a bunch of cat videos, right?

Like it's, you know, there's a certain piece in, you know, uh, mind space that that can create, um, but, but they, you know, understanding what's going on and what they're trying to do, I, I think it's going to be important.

I hear you.

I hear you.

Well, thank you for that, Mike, and I appreciate, uh, uh, you letting me get excited about things that you, um, aren't very supportive of.

You're gonna get me in trouble.

I don't know if I I'm just trying to be provocative here.

I hear you.

I hear you.

Next time, next time we have our two avatars record this conversation and we'll see what they say about it.

That's exactly right.

We're gonna go complete AI on our podcast.

There you go.

There you go.

Well, um.

With that, I think it's time to wrap this one up.

Um, uh, thank you, Mike.

Um, thanks to Travis who joined us.

Thanks to, uh, to Becky and, uh, Gary, as always, for, uh, providing us the support that we need, and that's it from us, from social media.

Good Disruption is a podcast from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.