Platform Let's start when Facebook and then Twitter came out. My impression at the time was that these were ego-stroking tools for people who had nothing better to do. This isn't because I didn't like tech or the internet -- blogging was one of my first loves (probably even before girls). But I dismissed social media for a long time because I generally don't like self-aggrandizing, and I assumed that it is what the kind of people who used social media used it for.

My memory of when these tings got started (especially headliners like Facebook and Twitter) is that there was more emphasis on social than on media. I regret that I didn't spend time learning how to use them in these early stages. Or that I had asked myself how the world would look if social media stuck around and even became integral to daily life, rather than being reluctantly dragged into usage before realising : Ah! there is something here.

Utility In the last decade or so, social media tools (forums like this one, Reddit (less so), things like X or LinkedIN, Telegram -- never yet found a use for Facebook) have been hugely useful to me. First, as tools for learning. Second, helping me to build relationships. Third, I've gotten all my jobs and gigs through social media, as has my wife. Even though there is a huge amount of fluff, the connective power of social media and its massive availability of information and door-opening access to people is a wonder.

Your points about better looking work and the distraction of AI personas or AGI faff are good. And, if anything, that's the tone that society in its current understanding of AI as a scifi character rather than a tool certainly needs.

Comparing AI tools to humans to see who is "better" doesn't seem useful, but comparing them us to figure out what AI might be good at does.

Finally: "buy muh subscription", "we be serving you ads" -- this is where my pessimism comes in. I don't see how we end up anywhere else. General populations, even businesses, have demonstrated they mostly do not want to run their own infrastructure. The only exception to this is routers (people seem willing to plug in a device, but are very unlikely to change any settings or do something like flash their own firmware on to it). If email can be taken as a model: there is no world where most people run their own models nor where they even care to. This is true for Bitcoin as well...unless we can find an incentive that motivates more than a few crazy individuals (perhaps if the censorship state comes quick and hard, it would generate enough of a backlash to create a culture of people who care about personal sovereignty in their devices) to desire control over the tools they use, we'll probably end up with captured AI like captured email. I suppose the captured AI future looks even uglier than the captured email future and doesn't leave us in a very nice state.