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Bluesky has launched an AI assistant called Attie that allows users to design their own social media algorithms and create custom feeds within the company’s AT Protocol ecosystem. And let’s just say the response has been heated.
Attie debuted this weekend at the ATmosphere conference, which Bluesky sponsors. But Bluesky’s userbase did not embrace the new product. Instead, about 125,000 users have already blocked Attie’s Bluesky account, making it the second most blocked account on the network, according to open source data. Attie only has 1,500 followers, meaning that about 83 times more users have blocked the account than followed it.
The only account with more blocks than Bluesky’s AI agent is Vice President J. D. Vance, with about 180,000 blocks — Attie even surpassed the White House account (122,000 blocks) and the ICE account (112,460 blocks). That’s some seriously detested company for a platform that skews left politically.
Bluesky did not respond to request for comment before publication.
Bluesky grew much of its userbase — now sitting at 43 million accounts — as an alternative to Elon Musk’s X, a platform now plagued by neo-Nazism and AI-generated CSAM. For many Bluesky users, the platform serves as a reprieve from the more mainstream social internet, where AI search, AI chatbots, and even AI-generated video feeds are omnipresent, which makes the launch of Attie feel like a betrayal.
Others have criticized Bluesky’s product priorities, noting the platform is still missing highly requested basic features, like sending images via DM.
From Bluesky’s perspective, this product launch isn’t as offensive as it seems.
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Jay Graber, the former Bluesky CEO who recently transitioned to a CIO role, wrote in a blog post the company thinks “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 making the point that, while there are definitely evil uses of AI, the technology itself has a wide range of potential applications, and some of them may prove helpful for humanity. Social media is famously a poor venue for nuanced discussions about emotionally fraught topics. Then again, AI naysayers have legitimate reasons to boycott the technology — the demand for more AI data centers and more computing power is already having tangible impacts on the environment while also eroding culture.
Compared to the most offensive uses of AI, the potential danger of Attie is laughable. But for Bluesky users, this anger isn’t so much about Attie itself as it is about what it symbolizes: a surrender to the idea that AI’s encroachment into everything is inevitable.
This story was edited to reflect Bluesky’s relationship to the ATmosphere conference.
