?I do surfing?: an AI-generated Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook?s bad year

What does Mark Zuckerberg care about?

The 37-year-old tech executive has a wife, two kids, $110bn , and near absolute control over a group of companies - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp - that shape the information, entertainment, and communication of 3 billion people.

But in a year that kicked off with those companies playing a major role in fueling a violent and conspiracy-addled riot at the US Capitol on 6 January, and closed with a whistleblower revealing just how much Facebook knew - and concealed from the public - about the damage it was doing to individuals and societies, Zuckerberg has himself seemed remarkably unbothered.

Gone is the Zuckerberg who repeated apologies and pledges to take a broader view of Facebook's responsibility ad nauseum. New Zuck (dare we call him "metaZuck"?) appears to be primarily focused on his super relatable hobbies (electric surfing, fencing, hydrofoiling, boar hunting) and building a fantasy world that he hasn't managed to mess up - yet.

"I just decided to focus more on some of the awesome things we're building, and doing more fun things with my family and friends," Zuckerberg said to a fan who asked about the secret to his being "super laid-back and funny these last few months".

The Guardian would have loved to ask Zuckerberg some follow-up questions about that, but since metaZuck isn't doing much in the way of sitting for interviews with critical journalists these days, we fell back upon a last resort: we built another Zuckerbot and interviewed it instead.

To do this, we worked with Botnik Studios to create a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg's public statements (archived by Marquette University's Zuckerberg Files). Our previous interview with the Zuckerbot, conducted in 2019 and based on Zuck's statements from 2016 to 2019, can be found here. Guardian journalists provided the questions; Botnik used the predictive keyboard to generate the answers.