Is it still ‘social media’ if it’s overrun by AI? [Video]

Back in 2010, a 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for Facebook — by that point a wildly popular social network with more than 500 million users.

“The primary thing that we focus on all day long is how to help people share and stay connected with their friends, family and the people in the community around them,” Zuckerberg told CNBC. “That’s what we care about, and that’s why we started the company.”

Fifteen years and three billion users later, Facebook’s parent company Meta has a new vision: characters powered by artificial intelligence existing alongside actual friends and family. Some experts caution that this could mark the end of social media as we know it.

For early users of social media, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become “about as anti-social as you can imagine,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst and journalist based in London, Ont. “It’s becoming increasingly …