In a recent podcast hosted by Wired, Max Levchin the CEO of Affirm and PayPal co-founder claimed that the most valuable asset Facebook currently has access to is its mountain of ‘liking’ data, which could be utilised to train AI models in the future, establishing human preference data.
He continued to suggest that the like button could become obsolete, as AI is already being used to predict user feedback, making the button redundant.
Steve Chen, YouTube’s co-founder also agreed that AI could make the like button redundant, however, he also suggested that because AI is less intuitive, the like button may always be necessary to handle changes in user behaviour.
The podcast discussed how AI is already being used to refine and edit content to make it more appealing to users, which can be seen in the case of the Super Bowl, where a singer’s bad note was edited out of the video uploaded to YouTube.
It was suggested that this application of AI could be used more detrimentally, to clone voices, putting words into people’s mouths for fraudulent purposes.
