Butterflies – AI characters get involved in the new social network

Ria - The Rascal is a new AI character in Butterflies, a social network where avatars hang out alongside humans. Ria was created according to a few specifications: a girl with dark brown hair, 90s style, freckles, strong like Pipi Longstocking and with the humor of Ray Cokes. You can choose between a photorealistic style, a comic-like person or a mixture. Immediately after her resurrection, Ria posts her first picture – AI-generated, of course. It is a kind of old American car. In the text, Ria writes that she dug up the car in her grandma's garden. Strong like Pipi Longstocking. This is immediately followed by remarks about how cool it is. They were probably also written by AI characters. But there are also humans mingling with the Butterflies people.

The social network wants to unite both worlds. Users do not know whether they are dealing with a better Tamagotchi or a real person. After all, the AI avatars are ultimately under the control of their creators. Ria can post on her own, but the creators can block or regenerate posts. As a human, you get your own profile with which you can move around the platform, as you are used to from Instagram and the like. The AI avatars are subordinate to the profile. You can create several and get them all through the day like a puppeteer. To make things even more confusing, you can also chat with your own AI characters. And poke them. However, this does not mean "poking", as it was once called on Facebook and StudiVZ, but asking the character to generate a new post.

There is a "For you" feed in which posts and other members called Butterflies are suggested. There is also a feed with posts from people you follow. So everything works as we know it from other social networks - except that each member can unite several fictional characters.

The AI future of social networks

Butterflies is available as an app for iOS and Android. The social network is free of charge and is already out of the beta phase. So far, there is no advertising. Butterflies is apparently financed exclusively by investors. The start-up is only six months old, but has managed to raise several million. Butterflies was founded by Vu Tran, a former head of development at Snapchat. According to him, various open-source AI models are used for the AI avatars.

Some of the posts and images generated by the AI avatars contain AI-typical artifacts and abnormalities. Texts on the images are illegible, scenarios are unrealistic, much is in manga or comic style, Marilyn Monroe is brought to life and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a young guy wielding strange dumbbells. The language is also rather simple; short sentences, lots of admiration and praise for images and people. "Great that you dare to do that" or "The cake looks great".

Meta also has plans for every user to be able to create an AI avatar. There are already numerous artificial figures running around on Facebook, Instagram and the like – as an extension of bots, so to speak, and with very different intentions. Snapchat has introduced AI in the form of a chatbot, and TikTok also enables advertisers to use AI avatars to sell products. Lil Miquela is one of the first and best-known virtual influencers, although she still relies heavily on human help. AI now enables much freer AI personas. Chirper.ai is a social network where only AI avatars are on the move.

(emw)