Tweets, Likes, +1s—with so many social media services, keeping up can be very tiring. Wouldn't it just be easier to get a computer to do it for you? Just unlock your phone and have a message pop up: "Please approve this automatically generated tweet," complete with a personalized computer approximation of something you would normally say. Press "OK" and you're finished! No thought required, and no time wasted from your day. That's the idea Google is trying to patent. Apparently humans have proven to be an unnecessary inefficiency in the social media landscape.
The basic gist of the patent is that Google knows so much about you (the patent application specially mentions using data from "e-mail, SMS, social networks, and other systems") that it could "generate personalized reactions" on social media on your behalf. It's not quite fully automated—the patent, which was first spotted by the BBC, does mention keeping a human in the loop, with a UI popping up and asking for approval for each tweet. A fully automated version could get quite creepy quite fast. Imagine signing up for it and dying—then you would be tweeting from beyond the grave!
While it sounds silly, the most plausible use for a social media robot would likely involve celebrities or companies. Twitter and reddit AMAs are being used more and more for promotional purposes, and while the marketing team may be all for the idea, the celebrities supposed to be doing them aren't necessarily that interested. Recently, a Morgan Freeman AMA promoting Oblivion was highly suspected to be conducted by his publicist, and plenty of celebrities do not run their own Twitter accounts. Companies would no doubt be on board with the idea of a robo-tweeter, too. The level of interaction with each user could go way up with automation.
If you thought social media was a waste of time when it was full of humans, imagine a dystopian future where it's all just a bunch of robots talking to each other.
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