[planb]

This will not happen. None of the existing apps people use daily on their phones have any incentive to support this. Social media wants the people to doomscroll, shopping apps and booking sites want to use their own dark patterns to make people believe they get a special discount if they buy _now_ and everything else just wants users to see the ads. Why on earth would they offer convenient hooks for AI chatbots?

[input_sh]

It's even more fascinatingly dumb to have this discussion like 2 or so years after every major platform decided to kill any notion of 3rd party clients they used to support.

Yes, in an ideal world, that'd be great for both humans and LLMs, but we are about as far from that ideal world as we could be. You can't even do some of the "advanced actions" as a human with human-level reflexes without encountering a captcha, but sure, all of a sudden, everyone will just decide to make their bread and butter that is data easier to explore via an LLM.

[aurareturn]

  Why on earth would they offer convenient hooks for AI chatbots?

Competition. If I ask my OS-level AI assistant to find a social media reel about a elephant dancing, the social media app that exposes a set of APIs for an AI agent might get used more.

Watch how fast Meta adds this if a new hot shot social media app succeeds by designing for AI agents controlled by users.

[JambalayaJimbo]

>Competition. If I ask my OS-level AI assistant to find a social media reel about a elephant dancing, the social media app that exposes a set of APIs for an AI agent might get used more.

This is the exact opposite of what will happen (and in fact what has happened). Reddit is suing Perplexity right now for scraping.

Meta will not serve content to some other app for free - for what benefit? They will not see advertising data.

[jasomill]

Who said anything about free?

Advertising isn't the only possible business model.

And profit isn't the only possible motive to provide a service.

[aurareturn]

Scraping and asking an agent is different.

[swiftcoder]

Having used a chatbot to find a reel Meta was censoring from search in the past... I'm not sure how well the incentives align

[tdeck]

Actually this more or less describes how accessibility APIs work.

[jasomill]

Not really. For the most part, accessibility APIs provide programmatic interfaces to user interfaces, application APIs provide semantically meaningful interfaces to application functionality.

A closer analogue would be AppleScript, or rather, the underlying Apple Event and Open Scripting Architecture functionality supplied by the OS to support AppleScript, that allowed applications to expose these interfaces along with metadata documenting them, and for external tools to record manually performed tasks across applications as programs expressed in terms of these interfaces to make them easier to use (this last bit, while not strictly required, is convenient, and especially useful for less technical users).

If you're familiar with VBA in Microsoft Office applications, sort of like that, except with support provided by OS APIs that could be used by any application that chose to implement scripting support, official guidance from Apple suggesting that all well-designed applications should be scriptable and recordable, and application design patterns and frameworks designed with scriptability and recordability in mind.

Note that I use the past tense here, despite AppleScript still being available in macOS, because it is not well-supported by modern applications.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1238844.1238845

[jackphilson]

because the social media sites that do will outcompete once people get personal AI coaches that tell them to use technology that is better for them.

[donaldjbiden]

How is an AI posting on your social media better for you?

[kaashif]

It's not, but token peddlers will say it is. It's good to interact with everything through buying tokens.

[charcircuit]

And how will a token peddler's social media company survive after the hype runs out?

[tdeck]

People on LinkedIn who are trying to build their "personal brand" seem to favor it. In fact, that's basically all the platform is these days.

[ai_fry_ur_brain]

These people are delusional and want to build a world thats convenient for them to accomplish things lazily with LLMs.

There are no shortcuts in life and its just expensive text autocomplete.

"Lets spin up $750k in GPUs full throttle to scrape a web page with my $200.00 CC subscription."

Everyone is delusional.