ABSTRACT
Social network sites (SNSs), which have recently become tremendously popular,1 have so far been exclusively populated by human actors. On the other hand, at least part of the functionality of such networks relies on software agents implementing artificial intelligence techniques-for example, in order to implement recommendation systems for friends or other entities. However, such agents were not playing actor roles within the network. Recently, the monopoly of human actors within SNSs has been broken; disembodied or even physically embodied intelligent software agents are just starting to populate SNSs. A huge range of potentialities exists regarding useful roles for such artificial agents, which might furthermore have varying degrees of autonomy. In this chapter, I will start by introducing a concrete example of such an agent: Sarah the FaceBot, a robotically embodied intelligent artificial agent, which carries out natural language interactions with people, physically present or remote, and which utilizes and publishes social information on Facebook-even having her own automatically updated page. Then, five areas of open questions that have arisen will be presented, as well as an exposition of the potentialities for other artificial agents in SNSs, either in actor or in other roles, which are promising to unleash new possibilities and beneficially transform social networks.
