Plenty of lonely people, especially old people, on the internet who have no one to talk to and are vulnerable to falling into internet’s rabbit holes. Now they’d have a personalized digital companion to talk to, who cares about them and is willing to listen to their grievances, and probably guide them toward certain purchases based on their conversations, or at the very least collect information about their preferences, private thoughts etc. This is going to be a business.

Moral of the story? Talk to your parents and grandparents.

They want to replace posting with AI slop. On Facebook, they've noticed that even really lame and obvious AI stuff gets lots of engagement from people who don't understand it. Since engagement is the only thing they care about, they think they can literally replace content creators and posters with AI and keep people logged on, browsing their own personal slop algorithm, forever. It's expensive to run AI, but less expensive than paying content creators or moderating / censoring. But they haven't quite figured out how to make this happen yet, so they're experimenting with different modes. Maybe the AI pretends to be a person, or maybe something else.