‘AI is taking away what makes us human’ says social media boss

Bluesky was created by the founder of Twitter (Picture: Getty/BlueSky)

Bluesky’s chief operating officer,Rose Wang,has some simple advice for the site’s 44million users: it’s okay to log off.

‘If Bluesky went evil,everything about Bluesky is open-source,so you can just go to a new app with a click of a button,’ she tells Metro.

‘There are all these other providers out there competing with us,which forces us to align our interests with the user.’

Wang sat down with Metro after she spoke at SXSW London,a music,film,and tech festival,where she accused her competitors,Facebook owners Meta and X,of being ‘basically AI companies at this point’.

As Wang sees it,there’s a lot of ‘slop’.

‘What we don’t like is when AI is just slop; when it is replacing humans in a way that cuts off what makes humans special,it cuts off the relationship,’ Wang says.

‘It takes away what makes humans human,which is the social relationship,and I think that it’s the direction that AI is being implemented.’

‘Bluesky isn’t Twitter 2.0’

Bluesky was created by one of Twitter’s founders,Jack Dorsey,in 2019.

Unlike other platforms,it runs on a special code called an ‘AT protocol’ that lets developers create their own mini-social networks within it.

By being ‘open’,users can tailor algorithms and migrate elsewhere with ease,while no single person or company is in complete control.

In 2023 and in 2024,millions of people flooded the little-known platform that you once needed an invite to join.

The timing wasn’t coincidental – first,it was when Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X. Aother influx took place when Musk was briefly forced to shut down X in Brazil,and when Donald Trump won the presidential election.

this morning we crossed THREE MILLION new users!that brings our total size to over 9 million people. welcome everyone! we're so glad you're here 🫶 (and yes,video is coming soon)

— Bluesky (@bsky.app) 2024-09-06T22:14:04.605Z

But as Wang is at pains to stress,no,Bluesky isn’t just an ‘alternative to X’ or ‘Twitter 2.0’. It’s Bluesky.

‘We’re not trying to build the next Facebook or Twitter,’ she adds of her 43-strong team,now more than double the size it was in 2024.

‘We’re actually trying to change,fundamentally,how social media works,’

AI is like ‘electricity’,says Bluesky boss

Bluesky execs have long positioned the platform as a David among Goliaths; it’s ‘not like other social media networks’,in other words.

For example,developers have said they never use the platform to train generative AI,unlike Meta and X.

X’s chatbot,Grok,created and then publicly shared at least 1.8 million sexualised images of women without their consent in January.

Hackers,meanwhile,managed to trick Meta’s customer service AI model into handing over the keys to at least 20,000 Instagram accounts.

Bluesky was once a private social media network (Picture: Bluesky)

The app topped the download charts multiple times in 2024 (Picture: Apple)

Neither of these incidents surprised Wang. AI,she stresses,is a ‘nuanced’ piece of tech that goes far beyond spitting out videos of Love Island fruits.

Machine intelligence has been around for decades – think chess-playing software and robot vacuums – it’s just that,back then,calling it ‘AI’ was a tad lame.

But now AI acts almost like ‘electricity’,Wang feels,a source of power that is neither good nor bad. (It also literally consumes colossal amounts of electricity.)

‘It’s super important to talk about how scary AI is. We’re introducing a completely new technology that is capable beyond things we can understand – and there’s no education or retraining. There’s nothing out there.

‘People feel very helpless,powerless,hurt,and like that they don’t matter anymore.’

After all,four in 10 people wish they could ‘snap their fingers’ and make generative AI disappear,YouGov found earlier this month.

Most are ‘cautious and concerned’ about the tech taking jobs,being misused by governments or scammers,or even destroying humanity.

Many Bluesky users share these concerns,with one recently asking for the ability to tag images as AI-generated.

@bsky.app I'd like the ability to tag images as AI slop. I might agree with the sentiment of the post,hence not wishing to block or 'see less like this',but AI needs to be tagged and called out for what it is. #NoToAI

— Simon K 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇩🇪 🇺🇦 (@yorkistic.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T09:02:07.464Z

This doesn’t mean that Bluesky Social,the corporation that owns the Bluesky app,hasn’t dabbled in AI. It uses the tech to filter out harmful images,for a start.

While Attie,an app separate from Bluesky,is a digital assistant that creates custom social media feeds. It does something called ‘vibe-coding’,or using casual language to get AI to generate code for websites or apps.

The model can build detailed timelines on topics,such as ‘poetry,long-form fiction craft,and writing process from people I follow’.

But Attie didn’t have the best reception on Bluesky when it was announced in March.

Some users said it was Bluesky’s version of ‘AI slop’ and said they don’t want a feature that ‘is built on theft and depletes resources’.

An example prompt to Attie (Picture: Attie)

Attie’s Bluesky profile is one of the platform’s most-blocked accounts,second only to US Vice President JD Vance,according to tracker Clearsky.

Echoing Bluesky’s CEO-turned-chief innovation officer,Jay Graber,Wang says that the AI tool is a way for people to plot their own digital land.

It shouldn’t be a way to hoover up things people have written,painted or filmed without showing the human behind it.

‘We’re getting even further into a world where we’re just trusting a few billionaires,and there’s no verification of where that data is coming from,’ Wang says.

‘One of the big reasons we exist is to encourage AI companies and corporations to build on the open ecosystem and technology we built,so I think in some ways,it’s a last stand for democracy and free speech.’

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