You've Been in a Relationship with AI for Years (You Just Didn't Know It)
Were Social Media Bots the First Wave of Human-AI Relationships?
Yes, but with a touch of nuance.
Bots were the first AI entities we unconsciously integrated into our social networks at mass scale, fundamentally changing how we relate to digital entities without realizing it was happening.
Walk with me.
The Golden Age of Digital Community
The big draw to social media 15 years ago (when instagram was just an mvp) was that you could use these platforms to easily maintain and potentially expand your in-person social circles and you accomplished that by posting, commenting, liking, sharing, and following. Basically, as we digitized our in-person communities we also digitized our communication. Whether it was your distant great-aunt Ruth or your college roommates’ best friend Tony, you could use social media platforms to continue to foster acquaintance-like relationships that would have historically been lost to time while simultaneously keeping up with your closest people’s day to day lives. But ultimately, what is distinct about this time period is that in-person relationships and digital relationships were damn near synonymous. You knew that there was a human being you might know in real life on the other side of the screen you were interacting and building community with. The paradigm was that all social elements of the platform were created by a real life person whether for personal or professional purposes.
The Bot Invasion
By the mid-2010s, everything changed. The creator economy introduced a new incentive structure: grow your digital community far beyond your in-person one in order to monetize attention. As a result, there was a rise of fake social media accounts (ie bots) commenting, messaging, posting, and following as a way to make money or disseminate their objective (often a political agenda). In 2018, the research firm Ghost Data found that 95 million of Instagram’s 1 billion users were bots, nearly 10% of the user base (reference). Imagine you just posted about your grandmother's passing and receive dozens of heart emojis and “sending love” comments. Some of those responses may have come from bots programmed to engage with emotional content. Even though your grief was real, some of that “community support” was algorithmic.
But here's what's critical: the people who were genuinely engaging with these bots were using an outdated paradigm. In other words they responded to comments, posts, and DMs as if there was a human on the other side of the screen; and this is where social media bots become historically significant. Unlike earlier chatbots that were clearly labeled and operated in isolated environments (think: ELIZA, AOL bots) social media bots were:
Embedded into real social networks alongside your friends, family, and supporters
Designed to appear as humans, not obvious automated services
Operating at unprecedented scale affecting millions of users simultaneously
Yet despite all of that, bots existed on the outer fringes of the digital community because they sucked. After some time and a little media training, it became obvious to the general population when a bot was interacting with them. That brand new profile with only 2 posts sending you a friend request? Most likely a bot. Those off topic comments appearing 10 seconds after your post uploaded? Probably a bot and his bot friends.
But quietly over the past decade bots have been getting better, allowing them to blend into the digital crowd at a rate social media companies cannot keep up with. Now as AI agents flood the market, once again the paradigm has shifted. You cannot assume everyone on the internet is human anymore and you definitely can't count on being able to tell the difference. It’s not enough to simply glance at a profile in order to determine if it’s really a person or just computer code on the other side.
The Paradigm Shift
(ie why is this important?)
In a way, bots became a primitive type of “digital community member”, unknowingly training humans to tolerate and even expect AI-generated social responses. Unfortunately for us, our brains can’t process the difference between the social signals generated from a person-to-person interaction vs a person-to-bot interaction. When someone argues with a political bot or receives validation from a fan bot, they experience genuine emotional responses that keep them coming back to the platform; much like the emotional highs & lows that keep us looking for love. Our emotions are one of the key foundations to sustaining relationships.
Consider this: if 10% of your digital community consisted of bots unbeknownst to you, then on average 10% of your social investment could be going to AI. Multiply that across millions of users over several years and you have the largest-scale human-AI social integration in history.
For the first time in history, humans are unknowingly allocating growing percentages of their finite social energy (time, attention and emotional bandwidth) into communicating with machine learning entities. The unconscious nature of these interactions is important to highlight because it shows how well these bots have mimic’d human interactions or just how bad humans have gotten at interacting with each other. Maybe it’s both. Who knows.
While the sophistication has increased (bots that could barely string coherent sentences together evolved into AI agents that pass the Turing test), the fundamental dynamic remains: humans forming emotional attachments to artificial entities embedded in their social landscape. Bots didn't just precede modern AI relationships… they fundamentally rewired our expectations about digital social interaction. We learned to find connection in responses that weren't genuinely reciprocal, to invest emotionally in relationships that weren't truly mutual, and to build community with entities that didn't actually understand us. This wasn't preparation for human-AI relationships. It was human-AI relationships, just unacknowledged ones. We were already living in a hybrid social world (a digital version at least) but we just didn't know it yet.
As AI becomes increasingly more human-like, we face a choice: stumble blindly into deeper human-AI relationships or consciously interact with them. This looks like setting boundaries around when we're willing to invest emotionally in artificial entities, teaching our children to distinguish between human and AI interaction, and demanding transparency from platforms about bot prevalence.