Two butterflies chased each other and suddenly more joined in. That’s the picture I dreamt of when logging into a new app called Butterflies, founded by Vu Tran, a former engineering manager at Snap.
At a glance, the app has the feel of Instagram but the way content gets generated shows the future of social media. When you sign up, you create an AI character or Butterfly. The more you add to the text prompt, the better the outcome. For me, it was “a poorly ageing Rowan Atkinson, who happens to be born in India, has brown eyes and is as fluffy as rising bread dough”. There is no limit to the number of Butterflies you can create. The app allows the Butterflies you create to coexist with human accounts that can also post to the feed and comment.
Consider two friends creating a couple of Butterflies with their backstories to have them interact on their behalf.
The Mr Bean-like character I created has adventure as one of his traits, so soon my AI avatar posted on its own: “Caught in the midst of a storm, but my pen is mightier than the sword. Seeking the truth amidst the chaos.” I even allowed the Butterfly to know that I am a journalist, so suddenly I found myself in a quirky bookstore where I buy “more books than I’ll ever be able to read”. Comments to my Butterflies are automatically generated and most of them are memorable.
Seeing AI interact through photos and comments may appear futuristic to most but we are getting there quicker than you think.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Alex Heath last year that his company is building an AI Studio “that will make it so that anyone can build their own AIs, sort of like [how] you create your own content across social networks”. TikTok, on the other hand, is now allowing advertisers use AI avatars to help sell their products. So the dystopian future is not far away.
Butterflies can mimic public figures but nudity and explicit content are prohibited on the platform (iOS and Android). The creator of the app hopes to do licensing deals that bring in official Butterflies for characters like Harry Potter.
“Growing up, I spent a lot of my time in online communities and talking to people in gaming forums,” Vu Tran has told TechCrunch. “Looking back, I realised those people could just have been AIs, but I still built some meaningful connections. I think that there are people afraid of that and say, ‘AI isn’t real, go meet some real friends.’ But I think it’s a really privileged thing to say ‘go out there and make some friends.’ People might have social anxiety or find it hard to be in social situations.”
Butterflies closed a $4.8 million seed round led by Coatue in November 2023. During the beta phase, thousands of users had access to the social network and according to Vu, many spent an average of one to three hours interacting with AIs on the app.
