We All Use AI, Even If You Might Think You Don’t

By Olivia Papendick

In the last decade, concerns about the dangers and negative impacts of artificial intelligence in widespread use have spiked significantly upwards. Humanity has feared the concept of artificial intelligence in technology gaining a sense of self and independence since we came up with the idea of it being possible. But, that’s not a huge risk at the moment, and not even something we know how to do, or even if we actually could create sentient AI. Due to fear and anxiety, or a number of other reasons, many people will swear off ever using AI at all. The issue with that is that they already use it constantly, and chances are, you do too.

The social media platform Instagram was first released onto the App Store as an iOS app under the name Burbn in the later half of 2010. It has grown into an incredibly successful downloadable social media app, which claims to have 2 billion active users every month. Instagram allows you to scroll through a stream of posts, each one containing either a photo, a series of photos to swipe through, or a short clip of video to play with accompanying sound attached as an option to hear while watching. You can follow the accounts that other users post from, and they are also able to follow you, as long as you have that feature available to them or approve their request to follow you. There are many celebrities using Instagram to advertise their upcoming concert dates or make you aware that the movie they recently starred in has hit theaters and is waiting for you to see it. Whenever you see posts you enjoy or that you just want to acknowledge, a quick, simple double tap of your screen over the post will give it a “like” and tally up with any other likes that are given. You can save posts to your own personal folders within the app to go back to later without searching an entire platform for them, and you can also use “hashtags” to find similar posts to the one you previously liked. Hashtags are just keywords that can help sort through posts and pick out different ones by topic if the person who originally made the post adds them in their caption. The other important feature of Instagram is comments, being able to leave text-based messages or remarks under other people’s posts. You can compliment them or ask questions about the post, and there are known and serious instances of bullying comments and even threats being made as comments under Instagram posts.

Now that I’ve given everyone an explanation they probably didn’t need but was given just in case, let’s talk about why Instagram and AI go hand-in-hand. The Instagram app wants to direct people towards new accounts and posts that they haven’t seen before, but that would require them to find their way there through their already existing interests. This is where AI comes into play and where a lot of people fail to realize they are using AI in their daily life without thinking about it. The Instagram app has used AI in systems to recognize when individual users interact with (Like, comment, follow) specific content (Posts, hashtags, accounts), and that system is able to then sort out other content that matches or is similar to the original content. Instagram is able to see what things you are showing interest in and then intentionally shows you more things like that. It isn’t an immediately harmful thing, it might just help a teenager who wants to learn more about makeup find more sources to learn from. Danger comes into play when someone sees even just a handful of posts that encourage them to imitate harmful or dangerous behavior. There is not true way to opt out of the use of AI to create your suggested content, but you can find ways to limit its use in the privacy settings of the app.

In general, the Instagram AI system to create what they believe is a better experience for users is a grey area for most people. It can have drawbacks if you interact with posts that you find upsetting or don’t want to see more of. Even commenting negatively will only feed the system to think you want more because you interacted with it. The upside is that if you can learn to just scroll past things you don’t like, just see the person who posted it is someone you dislike and move on, you can begin to actually create a display for yourself that shows you things that you are actually more likely to want to see and would enjoy seeing.

AI is smart, it can build a base of what it thinks you like, but it isn’t anywhere near smart enough to know what you actually like just based only on how you interact with posts. As I said before, you can use the Privacy Settings area of the app to take away the usage of AI in some ways on the app, but it isn’t foolproof and some things just stay because it makes the app work to the point we still want to use it. You are using AI, and it probably isn’t actually outsmarting you, you just have to know how to train it to work for you rather than against you. We aren’t looking at Instagram AI taking over everything on our social media, we’re looking at it being designed to do something very specific when it needs to work a bit more broadly and in detail on multiple things. In the case of Instagram, the AI to make what you see needs you to tell it what to do, so maybe save yourself the stress and scroll past that post you just know will make you angry and enjoy the one below it that you know will make you feel good. Your mental health might thank you too!