Is OpenAI's ChatGPT building a new kind of social media, where purpose replaces followers?
If traditional social media was about broadcasting identity, the next wave could be about negotiating intent. AI may soon become not just the medium we speak through, but the mediator of why and how we connect at all.
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When Facebook was dismissed as a souped-up MySpace in 2004, few anticipated it would reconstruct the internet around the “social graph.” Two decades later, Akhil Nair, Founder and CEO of BigTrunk Communications, believes we may be witnessing a similar inflection point, this time powered not by social relationships but by intent itself.
“I’ve been doing digital marketing for more than ten years, and what wins isn’t always the best technology. It’s the one that best understands human desire,” Nair says. “This moment feels like 2004 all over again. Zuckerberg made relationships the playground. OpenAI might do the same with intent.”
OpenAI’s reported experiment with a direct-messaging feature inside ChatGPT could shift the platform from conversational AI to what some call social AI. Instead of connecting people through public feeds or follower counts, users might soon message one another inside ChatGPT, with AI mediating introductions, context, and conversation.
“Social media tells you, here are your friends, go talk to them,” Nair explains. “ChatGPT could say, here are the right people for what you’re trying to do. That’s a completely different philosophy.”
He sees it less as a replacement for Instagram or WhatsApp and more as a quiet reordering of connection itself. “Instagram is about showing off. ChatGPT would be about being useful, noisy only when needed, private, contextual, and almost invisible at times.” He imagines a world where instead of crafting the perfect social post, a creator or brand could simply rely on AI to connect them directly to the people who matter. “It’s not about fighting for reach,” he adds. “It’s about purpose-driven connection.”
That shift, from visibility to value, could define the next twenty years of digital life. “The last two decades were about reach. The next two might be about genuine usefulness,” Nair says. “The real question isn’t will ChatGPT replace social media? It’s what does connection look like when intent becomes the medium?”
From Networks to Purpose-Built Conversations
For Akshay Mathur, founder and CEO of Unpromptd, OpenAI’s DM feature isn’t an incremental product update, it’s a reimagining of how people communicate online. “If OpenAI brings direct messaging to ChatGPT, it could mark the beginning of a new kind of social interaction,” he says. “This isn’t about replacing X or WhatsApp. It’s about AI becoming an intelligent layer that connects people, communities, and even brands in more purposeful ways.”
Mathur calls it the birth of AI-augmented social spaces, smaller, smarter, more intentional interactions facilitated by an AI that understands goals and context. “Imagine talking to someone not because you follow them but because your AI knows you share an interest or a problem worth solving,” he says. “A founder could discover an investor who shares their thesis, or students across countries could collaborate through AI-curated project groups.”
For creators, he envisions automated co-creation. “The AI could suggest joint content ideas, coordinate workflows, even build micro-communities without needing a public feed.”
But the promise of purposeful connection comes with new anxieties. “If AI mediates how people talk, it must be transparent about how it interprets, stores, and shares data,” Mathur cautions. “The line between assistance and intrusion can blur fast.” Still, he believes the potential outweighs the risk. “We might finally move from performance-driven platforms to context-driven connection.”
OpenAI’s Bid for the Social Infrastructure Layer
Gopa Menon, COO & Co-founder at Theblur, views OpenAI’s rumored DM experiment as an architectural pivot rather than a product tweak. “OpenAI isn’t just adding a chat feature,” she says. “They’re repositioning themselves in the social infrastructure layer. Instead of being a tool within platforms, they’d become a platform itself, that’s a major behavioural and business shift.”
Whether this threatens incumbents like WhatsApp or Discord depends on how users behave, she argues. “Private messaging is already saturated. Network effects are powerful, people rarely switch apps. ChatGPT would have to offer something fundamentally different, not just another way to text.”
Where OpenAI could diverge, Menon notes, is in offering intent-based, context-aware interactions, the inverse of platforms like Instagram or X, which thrive on public visibility. “ChatGPT’s strength would be depth over display,” she says. “You might still go to Instagram for discovery but turn to ChatGPT for intentional, purpose-driven conversations.”
For creators, such trust-based, AI-mediated spaces could unlock new intimacy, but also new dependence. “If creators can directly engage audiences without algorithmic interference, that’s powerful,” she says. “But it also means OpenAI controls the pipes, the infrastructure of reach and monetization.”
Menon warns against conflating personalization with privacy. “They’ll market it as more private, but personalization requires behavioral data,” she explains. “Who owns those conversations? That’s where scrutiny is needed.”
She sees potential niches, professional collaboration, structured community discussions, even research groups, where AI adds value. “It won’t replace WhatsApp,” she says. “It fills a gap rather than dominates.”
The Creator’s Dilemma – Scale or Soul?
In the creator economy, Rubeena Singh, Managing Director at NP Digital India, sees both opportunity and caution. “Creators can use AI to scale personal interactions, replying to DMs, generating personalized content, or hosting virtual meet-and-greets,” she says. “That opens up new revenue models.”
AI could even enable private content distribution or interactive storytelling, but Singh worries about over-automation. “The danger is losing authenticity. If everything becomes AI-mediated, core audiences may feel alienated.”
She also points to a broader social cost. “As interactions retreat to private spaces, public debate could decline. We risk losing shared cultural moments, the things that make social media, for all its flaws, communal.”
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Singh believes new forms of regulation and ethical frameworks are inevitable. “Users must know when they’re talking to AI, not a human, and what data is being used,” she says. She lists critical areas: consent, transparency, bias, and emotional manipulation. “AI that mimics empathy risks exploiting human psychology,” she notes. “It can be comforting, but also dangerously persuasive.”
Governments, she predicts, will have to mandate disclosure and accountability. “If AI-mediated communication causes harm, misinformation, emotional distress, who’s responsible?” she asks. “Legal systems aren’t ready yet.”
Her final concern is user safety. “Private AI channels could be weaponized, scams, impersonation, harassment. We’ll need new moderation models and mental-health safeguards. People can’t replace human connection with algorithmic intimacy.”
Toward a Gentler Internet
Rajiv Dingra, Founder and CEO of ReBid, calls the DM experiment “potentially transformative.” “It suggests AI may evolve from being a solo conversational partner to a connective tissue that mediates interactions between people,” he says. “Instead of follower counts, we’ll have intent-based conversations, triggered by purpose and sustained by context.”
He imagines ChatGPT as a hybrid between smart assistant and social network. “You talk to the AI and through it, with others. If done right, it could offer a gentler alternative to the firehose of public feeds, one that prioritizes privacy, relevance, and emotional intelligence.”
But Dingra is equally wary of new ethical and regulatory frontiers. “If users chat through AI intermediaries, who owns the data and insights? How do you prevent subtle persuasion or manipulation in private exchanges?” Moderation, transparency, and accountability, he says, will define whether this evolution uplifts or undermines social discourse. “Users must know when they’re speaking to a human, a bot, or a blend of both. And policies must clarify liability when harm occurs.”
He calls it a necessary re-imagining of social architecture. “Public social media was built for visibility, this new layer will be built for meaning. The stakes are different, but so is the promise.”
ChatGPT’s rumored DMs aren’t simply a product experiment, they’re a philosophical one. If traditional social media was about broadcasting identity, the next wave could be about negotiating intent. AI may soon become not just the medium we speak through, but the mediator of why and how we connect at all.
