Every text-centric social platform has its own way of nudging people to write the content needed to keep other users engaged. “What is happening?!” yelps the compose box on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. Meta’s equivalent on Facebook wonders, “What’s on your mind?” No matter what the question, it’s always been on users to conjure up a response.
Pebble, a Twitter-style service formerly known as T2, today launched a new approach: Users can skip past its “What’s happening?” nudge and click on a tab labeled Ideas with a lightbulb icon, to view a list of AI-generated posts or replies inspired by their past activity. Publishing one of those suggestions after reviewing it takes a single click.
Gabor Cselle, Pebble’s CEO, says this and generative AI features to come will enable a kinder, safer, and more fun experience. “We want to make sure that you see great content, that you’re posting great content, and that you’re interacting with the community,” he says.
Pebble launched the generative AI feature and ditched its stopgap name today as Cselle, previously a product manager at Google and Twitter, laid out his most detailed vision yet of how he plans to challenge Musk’s X. In that spirit, the service now allows anyone with an account on X to sign up, after previously being open only to invited users. The company closed $1.4 million in funding early this year and has four employees and a handful of contractors. It expects to seek additional funding and eventually run ads and sell subscriptions.
Pebble becomes one of the first social platforms to try putting AI-spun post suggestions in front of users to tweak or publish. Meta offers generated text options for advertisers, and LinkedIn offers them for users, but both require some up-front cues from users. Productivity tools such as Gmail and Outlook have begun offering AI-generated replies for messages, but they either suggest only a few words or require users to write out a prompt for text-generation algorithms to work from. Pebble’s suggestions are fully automatic, drawing AI inspiration from users’ recent posts and interactions on the service as well as a few generic templates the company developed.
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