Bluesky has unveiled an artificial intelligence assistant named Attie, which empowers users to craft their personalized social media algorithms and generate bespoke content streams within the company’s AT Protocol framework. And it’s safe to say the reaction has been intense.
Bluesky’s community, largely averse to AI technology, failed to welcome the fresh offering, which debuted this weekend at the firm’s Atmosphere summit. Conversely, approximately 125,000 individuals have already restricted access to Attie’s Bluesky account, positioning it as the network’s second most blocked profile, based on publicly available information. Attie counts merely 1,500 adherents, indicating that roughly 83 times more users have opted to block the profile than to subscribe to it.
The sole profile experiencing a greater number of restrictions than Bluesky’s AI representative is Vice President J.D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks — Attie even exceeded the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That’s truly disliked associates for a platform with a predominantly left-leaning political alignment.
Bluesky failed to reply to inquiries for a statement prior to this article’s release.
Bluesky expanded a significant portion of its membership — currently boasting 43 million profiles — offering a substitute for Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X, a platform now rife with Neo-Nazism and AI-fabricated CSAM. For many Bluesky users, the network acts as a sanctuary from the predominant social web, where AI search, AI chatbots, and even AI-produced video feeds are ubiquitous, which causes Attie’s introduction to be perceived as a breach of trust.
Others have faulted Bluesky’s development focus, pointing out the network continues to lack much-demanded fundamental functionalities, such as direct messaging of images.
From Bluesky’s viewpoint, the unveiling of this offering isn’t as objectionable as it might appear.
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Jay Graber, the past Bluesky CEO, recently moved into a CIO position, stated in a blog entry that the organization believes “AI should serve people, not platforms.”
“Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it’s enhancing it,” Graber wrote. “The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy at a time when we need accurate information more than ever. The signal is getting harder to find exactly when it matters most.”
Graber is contending that, while there are undoubtedly malicious applications of AI, the inherent technology possesses a broad spectrum of possible uses, a subset of which could benefit humankind. Social media is notoriously an inadequate setting for subtle deliberations about sensitive and contentious subjects. Then again, AI skeptics hold valid grounds to shun the technology — the requirement for additional AI data facilities and enhanced processing capability is already producing noticeable environmental effects, concurrently diminishing cultural aspects.
Relative to the most egregious applications of AI, the prospective peril posed by Attie is negligible. But for Bluesky users, this indignation is less about Attie directly than it is about its symbolic meaning: a capitulation to the notion that AI’s pervasive intrusion is unavoidable.
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