"You'd be hard pressed to find someone who has spent more time building or obsessing over the online zeitgeist, for better or for worse," Alexis Ohanian introduced himself at the BRIDGE Summit in Abu Dhabi on Monday. Ohanian, a founding partner at venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, is perhaps best known as the co-founder and former executive chairman of Reddit. "Being chronically online was part of the job," he said, as part of a conversation with TIME executive editor Nikhil Kumar. TIME is a media partner of the BRIDGE Summit, which has gathered a global community of creators, policymakers, investors, technologists, media institutions, and cultural leaders to discuss the landscape and future of media. But the advent of artificial intelligence has made platforms like Reddit, which once served as hubs of connection, less human, Ohanian said.

On June 18, AI image-generation company Midjourney released a tool that lets users create short video clips using their own images as a template. Days later, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian posted on X about how he used the tech to animate a photo of his late mother, which shows him as a child wrapped in her embrace. In the artificial video, she laughs and smiles before rocking him in her arms. "Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel," he wrote. "This is how she hugged me.