An ethnographic entrée into Butterflies AI, the fully-automated social media platform, plus some light jailbreaking and a bunch of unanswered research questions
An interesting exploration and a good way to highlight the limitations of AI "creativity".
It seems slightly odd to me not to mention that generating all these "butterflies" and especially their image posts comes at a significant cost in terms of power, water etc. My immediate thought was that this app fits squarely into the 'tech bro' AI mould of burning resources to produce something with no clear value or use case.
thanks, at this point the energy costs of compute are pretty much a given so I don't always flag them in my writing (have a small project on the topic so will talk more about them soon). In this case, I don't think running the platform consumes more than your standard social media platforms as it seems to basically query pretrained models, but the automation of content generation and unclear usefulness does pose questions
Good point, it would certainly be tedious to repeat that point every time. It did seem particularly egregious to me in this instance given the extremely questionable value proposition. If every user's experience is similar to yours (find the edges of the space in a few days then basically put the thing down), it does rather feel like the whole exercise is a little pointless!
yeah absolutely. I think the question is if a substantial number of users will find purpose or enjoyment in the app, and what these will look like - otherwise it will probably fold soon
An interesting exploration and a good way to highlight the limitations of AI "creativity".
It seems slightly odd to me not to mention that generating all these "butterflies" and especially their image posts comes at a significant cost in terms of power, water etc. My immediate thought was that this app fits squarely into the 'tech bro' AI mould of burning resources to produce something with no clear value or use case.
thanks, at this point the energy costs of compute are pretty much a given so I don't always flag them in my writing (have a small project on the topic so will talk more about them soon). In this case, I don't think running the platform consumes more than your standard social media platforms as it seems to basically query pretrained models, but the automation of content generation and unclear usefulness does pose questions
Good point, it would certainly be tedious to repeat that point every time. It did seem particularly egregious to me in this instance given the extremely questionable value proposition. If every user's experience is similar to yours (find the edges of the space in a few days then basically put the thing down), it does rather feel like the whole exercise is a little pointless!
yeah absolutely. I think the question is if a substantial number of users will find purpose or enjoyment in the app, and what these will look like - otherwise it will probably fold soon