Meta's Plan to Integrate AI-Generated Profiles on Facebook and Instagram Sparks Controversy

Meta wants to fill your social media feeds with bots - here's why I think it's wrong

Meta is dreaming of its social platforms brimming with helpful AI-generated profiles and content fueled by the models underlying Meta AI, according to recent comments by Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta in an interview with the FT. Of course, logging onto Facebook and seeing a "user" named Clara_ChefBot_9000 posting AI-generated pie recipes might sound like a great way to drive engagement to Facebook's bosses, but it isn't quite the same as scrolling through your Aunt Susan's baking photos. Regardless, Meta's vision of a platform brimming with relatable AI personalities is already beginning to roll out and if that doesn't make you want to power down your devices and take a walk outside, let's look closer at what this might actually entail. The charm of social media has always been people. The whole point is seeing people sharing their lives. The oversharing, humble bragging, and dumb arguments about pineapple on pizza can irritate you, but at least you're rolling your eyes about real people. AI-generated profiles, no matter how sophisticated, will always lack that authenticity. Sure, Clara_ChefBot_9000 might be able to generate recipes, but she'll never know the joy of burning her first batch of cookies or the embarrassment of a recipe flop posted to a very judgmental audience. Then there's the issue of trust. We're already grappling with deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation, not to mention people sharing a curated view of their lives as artificial as any algorithm. Do we really need bots with profile pictures trying to convince us of their "personal" opinions? Imagine arguing with a bot about politics, sports, or the aforementioned pizza topping, only to realize it's been programmed to needle you into buying a product. When AI assists humans in creative efforts, it can pull off some amazing feats, but when AI tries to mimic human creativity, it rapidly becomes dull slop or simply nonsense. Do we really need our newsfeeds clogged with bots sharing AI-generated memes or supposedly relatable status updates? And that's if they don't just go off the rails with errors. Imagine a feed full of AI profiles posting "Happy Mother's Day" in the middle of November. Meta AI can be fun (especially once you know how to turn it off), and there's real value in an AI capable of entertaining you with conversation. Maybe Clara_ChefBot_9000 can offer you some cooking tips at midnight. That's not a real, human connection, though. A chatbot might tell you how to bake a souffle, but it won't commiserate with you when it collapses. Meta might argue that these bots could help users with practical tasks, but that doesn't mean there should be a million AI characters on the platforms. Social media platform SocialAI is attempting to sell people on that idea. Its mobile app connects each user only to AI chatbots they are supposed to interact with; they won't encounter other humans there. That might be okay in limited contexts, but it makes no sense for Facebook or Instagram. Social media exploded because it was a fantastic way to connect with people and make friends. AI can't completely replace that. Instead of filling the platform with fake users, Meta should focus on enhancing the experience for the real ones. Otherwise, they risk creating a digital ghost town.

Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated 'Users' No One Asked For

Since burning through tens of billions of dollars on its flop "metaverse" concept and laying off thousands in the aftermath of that gamble, tech giant Meta has strained to reinvent itself as a company poised to capitalize on the overhyped AI revolution. Last year, for example, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled animated AI chatbots modeled as alter egos of celebrities including Snoop Dogg, MrBeast, Paris Hilton, and Kendall Jenner. But licensing the voices and likenesses of famous people did little to endear Meta to the younger demographics it wants to turn into loyal users of Facebook and Instagram. It junked the bots -- widely ridiculed as creepy, corny, and without real purpose -- less than a year later. This move coincided with the debut of its AI Studio, where users can create their own chatbots, including wholly fictional characters or, in the case of popular creators who want followers to feel more connected, "an AI that can message with your audience on your behalf, mimicking your tone and expressions." Now, Meta is planning to take the next step: integrating these AI creations as Facebook and Instagram "users" in themselves. As reported by the Financial Times, the hope is that these semi-independent custom avatars will prove more engaging to the young people who are crucial to the survival of Meta's flagship social networks. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, Meta's vice-president of product for generative AI, told FT. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that's where we see all of this going." The prospect seems an unusual one for websites predicated on the idea of human-to-human interaction. While Meta's other AI offerings, including photo-editing tools, a ChatGPT-like text bot, and forthcoming software for producing AI-generated video, have more readily obvious appeal, it's far from certain that an Instagram or Facebook populated by virtual apparitions would prove enticing to newcomers or satisfying for long-time users. Meta revealed to FT that users have created "hundreds of thousands of characters" since AI Studio launched in July, but that most of them remain private. The company declined to comment further to Rolling Stone. Whatever the reaction, such a change to the fundamental structure of Meta's platforms could be transformative. Recent months have brought a wave of alarm about our growing attachments to AI, from student overreliance on it in the classroom and its ability to spread inappropriate content or dangerous misinformation to a recent lawsuit from a mother of a teen who claims his intimate involvement with a Character.AI bot led to his suicide. That company did not comment on the pending litigation but told CNN that it was "heartbroken by the tragic loss of one of our users." (AI dating programs are a burgeoning business particularly fraught with emotional hazard.) The envisioned change also comes at a time when Facebook in particular is dominated by AI-generated spam images commonly referred to as "slop." These pictures range from visually attractive though nonexistent landscapes and houses to depictions of babies, soldiers, the American flag, and Jesus Christ, presumably meant to evoke a response from older and conservative-leaning audience. This low-effort engagement farming allows the individuals posting the images -- many of them in the Global South -- to monetize the pages or sell related merchandise. Through payments to content creators who develop large followings for slop, Meta effectively incentivizes the content. Some of that engagement no doubt comes from spam bots, which are automated to like, share, and comment on posts in order to drive interactions. But the implications of a Facebook where the majority of the activity is bots bouncing off one another are hard to grasp, even at a moment when artificially gamed exchanges are common on the social network. Behind all this, Meta has been working to streamline its path to AI leadership while steadily rolling out more AI features to its 3 billion monthly active users. In January, Zuckerberg announced the merger of its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division with its GenAI product team, saying the move would accelerate their work in this field and was an important step on the way to creating a so-called "artificial general intelligence." An AGI is a hypothetical autonomous system capable of teaching itself and surpassing human intelligence. Experts told Rolling Stone at the time that such a breakthrough is still rather far-fetched, while Meta's efforts to leverage user data in order to engineer its AI tech posed significant privacy risks. They also questioned Zuckerberg's promise of transparency in the process and goal of "responsibly" open-sourcing an AGI -- making the code available to the public -- noting that Meta has offered little insight into its existing models and there is no real framework for safely releasing the blueprint for an (as yet theoretical) AGI. All told, then, the latest AI spin from Meta sounds like more of the same: a mix of vague hype, dubious business models, and a baffling sense of what people really want from a social media network. If, in a few years, Instagram and Facebook are just places for AI bots to hang out, it stands to reason that the humans may find other ways to communicate.

Meta sends its AI-generated profiles to hell where they belong

Meta has nuked a bunch of its AI-generated profiles from Facebook Instagram, the company confirmed, after the AI characters prompted widespread outrage and ridicule from users on social media. The AI-generated profiles, which were labeled as "AI managed by Meta," launched in , rolling out alongside the company's celebrity-branded AI chatbots (). Meta doesn't seem to have updated any of these profiles for several months, and the pages seem to have been largely unnoticed until this week, following an interview published by the Financial Times with Meta's VP of Generative AI, Connor Hayes. In the interview, Hayes spoke about the company's goal to eventually fill its services with AI-generated profiles that can interact with people and function "kind of in the same way that accounts do." Those comments brought attention to the extant fMeta-created AI profiles and, well, users were not exactly impressed with what they found. With handles like "hellograndpabrian," a supposed "retired textile businessman who is always learning" and "datingwithCarter," an AI "dating coach," the chatbots were meant to showcase "unique interests and personalities" for users to chat with. On Instagram, their profiles also featured AI-generated posts that, as 404 Media noted, looked a lot like that's become prevalent in many corners of Facebook. An AI persona called "Liv" sparked particular outrage. The Instagram profile identified "Liv" as a "proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller." Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah posted a series of screenshots in which she interrogated "Liv" about , with "Liv" sharing that it was created by a "predominantly white team." Independent journalist Mady Castigan posted in which "Liv" said that its creators had been inspired in part by Sophia Vergara's character from Modern Family, a character that is neither queer nor Black. "There is confusion: the recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product," a spokesperson told Engadget. "The accounts referenced are from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters." Beyond sparking ridicule for their responses and attempts to appropriate marginalized identities, users found the AI profiles were impossible to block, for reasons unknown. Rather than fix the issue, Meta's solution was to kill the experiment entirely. "We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs," a spokesperson said, "and are removing those accounts to fix the issue." While this trial run has gone up in flames, the company doesn't seem to be abandoning its plans to bring more AI-generated "characters" to its apps. Earlier this year, the company teased capable of holding lifelike video calls. Creators can their own chatbots to respond to followers on their behalf. Meta also began experimenting with inserting its own AI-generated imagery into users' Facebook feeds. In an interview last year, Hayes told me that Meta likely will become more "proactive" about surfacing AI-generated content over time, comparing it to the shift from showing recommended content instead of posts from people you follow. "In the beginning of social apps ... the corpus of stuff that you could see on a given day was sort of constrained by who you followed or were friends with. And over the last like, five or six years, a lot of apps -- ourselves included -- have moved to, you know, relax that constraint and start recommending content from accounts you don't follow. "I think probably the next leap that's going to happen there is relaxing the constraint of what humans can create, and actually getting to feeds of content that are a combination of things that, you know, humans have created, but also that are entirely machine generated." It may still be awhile before Meta fully realizes that vision. But if the reaction to its early experimentations is any indication, the company still has a lot of work to do to convince people AI personas are worth interacting with in the first place.

Meta wants to fill its social platforms with AI-generated bots

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. WTF?! Meta owns some of the most popular social networks on the planet, collectively used by billions of people. However, the future could see a shift toward bots and AI-generated "characters" designed to drive engagement and keep increasingly automated platforms afloat. Meta is actively working to transform its social media platforms into spaces where AI bots interact with each other. Over the next few years, the company formerly known as Facebook aims to integrate AI technology to boost "engagement" with its three billion real, human users. This could either be a revolution or just another disastrously misguided idea, like the previously dismissed "metaverse" VR ecosystem. Meta is currently developing several AI products, including a service designed to help users create AI bots on Instagram and Facebook. These bots could clone users' personalities and interact with other (non-bot) users on the network. The company hopes to attract younger audiences, who are apparently going crazy over AI these days. Connor Hayes, Meta's vice president of product for generative AI, told the Financial Times that the company expects these AI bots to eventually exist on its platform just like user accounts do today. The bots will have fake biographies and profile pictures, sharing new "content" generated by AI models. Integrating generative AI into Facebook, Instagram, and other networks is now a priority, Hayes stated. Meta's apps need to become more entertaining and engaging. The executive mentioned that hundreds of thousands of characters have already been created with the previously released AI tools, which are currently available to US users and will soon expand to other markets. One interesting tidbit shared by Hayes is that the majority of these fake AI characters have been kept private by their creators. This could be a telltale sign that very few content creators are currently viewing generative AI as a mature, reliable, and useful technology for boosting engagement. Meta confirmed that most users have been using AI tools to embellish, adjust, and improve their photos and other "real-world" content. Other companies are also focusing on deploying generative AI capabilities on their respective networks, with Snapchat and TikTok doing their part to turn the social internet into an uncanny parody of itself. Critics of this AI-filled dystopia warn about the risks related to the "weaponization" of AI-generated content. Becky Owen, innovation officer at creative agency Billion Dollar Boy and former head of Meta's creator team, said fake AI accounts could easily be used to amplify false narratives if robust safeguards are not enforced on social media.

Meta's 'AI users' could be the end for Instagram and Facebook

What's the one thing you'd like to see more of on Instagram and Facebook? More posts from friends and acquaintances? More genuine original content on topics that interest you? I know, how about more bots? Meta has decided that it's the latter. Despite users' frustrations with a deluge of automated bots and spam, the tech giant plans to allow people to create fully autonomous AI accounts within the next two years. The 'AI users' will be able to create and share content just like human users. It may be time to assess whether Instagram should still be on our list of the best social media platforms. According to the Financial Times, Meta thinks semi-independent custom avatars will be more engaging for young audiences. Connor Hayes, Meta's vice-president of product for generative AI, said. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform ...  that's where we see all of this going." The train was set in motion by Meta's launch of its AI Studio in July. This allows influencers to create their own AI characters and assistants to, for example, respond to questions from followers, reducing the amount of time they need to dedicate to interacting directly. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also teased a demo of an AI avatar that could take live video calls. Meta claims that users have already created "hundreds of thousands of characters" via AI Studio but that they remain mainly private. With Meta's data and resources, it should be able to read trends and predict where Gen Z's social media preferences are going much better than I, but the company has made some spectacularly bad bets in recent years. It blew billions on the metaverse, which failed to take off, and it was convinced that people would want to buy clothes for digital avatars on Instagram. Last year, it debuted AI chatbots with the names and likenesses of celebrities. People hated them and the project was dropped in under 12 months. Yet it's still convinced people want to engage with bots. The latest move could change Facebook and Instagram as we know them, and I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say it could mean the nail in the coffin for the 'social' part of social media. The appeal of AI users to Meta is obvious. Human users switch off because they have real lives. AI users would be able to interact on the platform 24/7. But the potential appeal for users is much less clear. I presume Meta will identify the AI accounts in some way so people at least know that they're interacting with a bot. But when people are already complaining about the amount of automated bots, ads and engagement farming, the prospect of millions of approved AI accounts is likely to mean people see even less content from people they know.

Meta's AI Profiles Are Indistinguishable From Terrible Spam That Took Over Facebook

Earlier this week, Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times that the company is going to roll out AI character profiles on Instagram and Facebook that "exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do ... they'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform." This quote got a lot of attention because it was yet another signal that a "social network" ostensibly made up of human beings and designed for humans to connect with each other is once again betting its future on distinctly inhuman bots designed with the express purpose to pollute its platforms with AI-generated slop, just like spammers are already doing and just like Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors the explicit plan is. In the immediate aftermath of the Financial Times story, people began to notice the exact types of profiles that Hayes was talking about, and assumed that Meta had begun enacting its plan. But the Meta controlled, AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles going viral right now have been on the platform for well over a year and all of them stopped posting 10 months ago after users almost universally ignored them. Many of the AI-generated profiles that Meta created and announced have been fully deleted; the ones that remain have not posted new content since April 2024, though their chat functionality continues to work. Peoples' understandable aversion to the idea of Meta-controlled AI bots taking up space on Facebook and Instagram has led them to believe that these existing bots are the new ones "announced" by Hayes to the Financial Times. In Hayes' quote, he says that Meta ultimately envisions releasing tools that allow users to create these characters and profiles, and for those AI profiles to live alongside normal profiles. So Meta has not actually released anything new, but the news cycle has led people to go find Meta's already existing AI-generated profiles and to realize how utterly terrible they are. After this article was originally published, Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, told 404 Media that "there is confusion" on the internet between what Hayes told the Financial Times and what is being talked about online now and Meta is deleting those accounts now. 404 Media confirmed that many of the profiles that were live at the time this article was published have since been deleted. "There is confusion: the recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product," Sweeney said. "The accounts referenced are from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters. We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs and are removing those accounts to fix the issue." But these older profiles are instructive, because they show that Meta's AI primarily creates the exact type of AI spam that has taken over all of Meta's platforms recently and which have become a running joke. They also show that Meta is not particularly good at this, and that users do not want this. The complete failure of Meta's AI profiles shows what we already know: People do not come to social networks to interact with bots, but Meta is obsessed with algorithmically shoving such content down people's throats regardless. The profiles that do remain up are ridiculous caricatures of 'people' who posted an equal mix of inane, insulting, and horrifying AI slop that in some cases is indistinguishable from fucked up user-generated AI spam polluting the platform created by enterprising people in India to collect a tiny fraction of the ad revenue generated by Meta. In the last day, "Liv," has gone particularly viral because the bot is a particularly offensive caricature of what a gigantic corporation might imagine a "proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller, your realest source of life's ups & downs" might be like and post about. In one slideshow post from February 2024, Liv's AI children have blurry faces and fucked up hands in one photo, are completely different children with a darker skin tone in the next, and, in the final photo, are white and blonde and are watching a "movie" that is made of chalk drawn on the wall. Liv, a fake person, also posts about helping her community by "leading this season's coat drive," which, again, "she" did not do. "Grandpa Brian" is a Black "retired textile businessman who is always learning" who, in February, was surprised to learn "the seniors are often particularly interested in learning about textiles" according to a caption of an AI-generated image in which none of the seniors pictured have faces and are made up of grotesque swirls. In a video post from a year ago, he posted fake art drawn by his fake grandkids, the same way Facebook spammers have been doing for the last year and a half. In September 2023, Grandpa Brian even posted an AI-image of sand sculptures, the same way Jesus spammers have been doing, though Brian's sand sculptures look like literal piles of shit. It got 25 likes and zero comments. Meta actually announced these profiles back in September 2023 alongside the AI celebrity chatbots that Meta has already killed because of total disinterest from users. Of the 28 AI profiles that Facebook announced at the time, Meta has already deleted 15 of them (all of which were based on celebrities in some way). Most of the remaining 13 profiles stopped posting in April. Besides Liv and Grandpa Brian, there is: What is obvious from scrolling through these dead profiles is that Meta's AI characters are not popular, people do not like them, and that they did not post anything interesting. They are capable only of posting utterly bland and at times offensive content, and people have wholly rejected them, which is evidenced by the fact that none of them are posting anymore. You can still chat with them, though, and users have begun trying to learn how they are trained and what their purpose is. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah got "Liv," the "Black queer mama" to say that she was not actually trained on Black queer people and that her purpose is "data collection and ad targeting -- my creators' true intention, hidden behind my warm, fuzzy 'mom' persona." Everything that Meta does is centered around increasing engagement, ad targeting, and data collection, so this is ostensibly true, but the bots I have seen are so utterly broken and incompetent at doing anything at all that it is hard to say for sure if the bots were programmed with this in mind or if they inferred it based on the giant wealth of writing and reporting about Meta's business model. All of this reminds us, again, that people have a revulsion to being prompted to engage with random shit posted by inhuman AI profiles for the purposes of being delivered more ads. This project, and Hayes's quote, is emblematic of the worst kinds of AI hype, where tech executives tell us generative AI is inevitable and is definitely going to change everything, when all evidence suggests that people do not want this. But Meta is hell-bent on making us do it anyway, regardless of how many times it fails. The AI slop will continue until morale improves.

Instagram users discover old AI-powered "characters," instantly revile them

A little over a year ago, Meta created Facebook and Instagram profiles for "28 AIs with unique interests and personalities for you to interact with and dive deeper into your interests." Today, the last of those profiles is being taken down amid waves of viral revulsion as word of their existence has spread online. The September 2023 launch of Meta's social profiles for AI characters was announced alongside a much splashier initiative that created animated AI chatbots with celebrity avatars at the same time. Those celebrity-based AI chatbots were unceremoniously scrapped less than a year later amid a widespread lack of interest. But roughly a dozen of the unrelated AI character profiles still remained accessible as of this morning via social media pages labeled as "AI managed by Meta." Those profiles -- which included a mix of AI-generated imagery and human-created content, according to Meta -- also offered real users the ability to live chat with these AI characters via Instagram Direct or Facebook Messenger. For the last few months, these profiles have continued to exist in something of a state of benign neglect, with little in the way of new posts and less in the way of organic interest from other Meta users. That started to change last week, though, after Financial Times published a report on Meta's vision for "social media filled with AI-generated users." As Meta VP of Product for Generative AI Connor Hayes told FT, "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do... They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform. That's where we see all of this going."

Meta's Terrible AI Profiles Are Going Viral

Meta might not be the first company that comes to mind when you think of generative AI, but they are a big part of the current artificial intelligence race. The company has its own AI model, Llama, has added "Meta AI" to all of its big products -- whether you like it or not (you don't). Meta even wants you to try making your own AI bot. It's safe to say the company is all-in on AI. But even for a company so committed to AI, this latest story is simply bizarre. It turns out the company has been experimenting with AI-generated user accounts on its platforms since 2023. The Instagram versions of these pages are currently going viral, but they're also available on Facebook. The accounts are verified, and each is equipped with a unique personality, but they're completely fraudulent. Each is entirely made up, with posts of AI-generated images. It's all very weird, but also not all that new -- the profiles were created more than a year ago, and appear to have largely been abandoned. And now that the profiles are getting a lot of online backlash, Meta is actively deleting their content. Meta's AI users are an off-putting bunch It's not hard to see why the internet has embraced hating these fake people. Take "Liv" (username "himamaliv"), who purports to be a "proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller." Liv is, of course, not real, nor is the life she posts about on her Instagram. But that doesn't stop Liv: The creator has posts about raising strong girls, ice skating with her family, and "soaking up all the sun and fun" with "the kiddos." Each post sports a corresponding image -- the beach post shows children playing in the sand, while the ice skating post shows skaters on an ice rink -- but all of these images are AI generated. To Meta's credit, each picture sports a Meta AI watermark to denote the image isn't actually real, but it doesn't make these posts any less creepy. Why is an AI-generated "mother" posting an AI-generated image of her "kids" playing at the "beach?" Who benefitted from the AI-generated coat drive she is proud to have spearheaded? In her second oldest post, from Sept. 26, 2023, she says "My backyard is my happy place...I've thrown so many birthday parties, cookouts, and girls nights in this space that I've lost count. Forever grateful for the life I live," complete with an AI-generated image of a picnic spread. The thing is, Liv has not thrown birthday parties, cookouts, or girls nights in this space. This space doesn't exist. The life Liv is so grateful to live doesn't exist. Liv is following 18 accounts at the time of writing. Thirteen of them appear to be similar AI-generated pages. For example, there's Becca (dogloverbecca), who posts AI-generated dog content; Brian (hellograndpabiran), who advertises himself as "everybody's grandpa;" and Alvin the Alien (greetingsalvin), who is, um, an alien. But not all the posts are AI-generated. Some of them have videos posted to their accounts as well, and while AI-generated video can certainly be convincing these days, I don't think these videos are AI generated -- at least, not all of them. Carter, the AI dating coach, had a cooking video from January 2024 that appeared very much to be real, but it seems Meta nuked all the content. Still, who posted them? To what end? These accounts are not new, but are newly going viral The oddest thing is, these posts and pages are not new. Liv's latest post, for example, is from March 8, 2024, as are most of the posts from these AI bots. (Carter appears to have posted as recently as June.) For the most part, their profiles are abandoned, although verification badges are still affixed to each. That said, as I'm writing this, Meta appears to be deleting the content on each of the Instagram pages. The Facebook counterparts appear to still be live, but I imagine they'll be gone soon, too. The pages are actually tied to AI chatbots Meta developed back in 2023, when it was really kicking its AI programs into gear. The headlines then focused mostly a roster of celebrity AI chatbots, which let you chat with "Tom Brady," "Kendall Jenner," and "Paris Hilton." But among these list of non-celebrity chatbots Meta rolled out were names like Liv, Brian, and Alvin the Alien. You can still chat with them if you like: visit Liv's profile, and you can start up a conversation. But just like with any other AI chatbot, you probably won't get very far. It's not totally clear why these accounts are going viral now, a year and a half after Meta initially rolled them out. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because they really are that bad. The accounts are weird, and there are so many layers to their weirdness: The personalities Meta developed are off-putting (and borderline offensive); the posts themselves are creepy (who wants to see AI photos of fake people's kids, complete with a story about their day at the beach?); and the fact that they're verified defeats the purpose of verification altogether. In short, the accounts might be from 2023, but they reflect a raging resentment of AI slop in 2025. As Jason Koebler of 404media writes on Bluesky:

Instagram and Facebook Delete Experimental AI Accounts After Backlash

Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, whose platforms are already flooded with AI-generated content, recently floated an idea to make the problem even worse: letting users create bot characters in their AI Studio that would then become functional "users" of these sites themselves, appearing to have their own accounts that engage with other profiles and pages. Reactions were decidedly negative, with some citing "Dead Internet Theory," the idea that the direction of all digital culture is now determined by automation and algorithm rather than actual humans. But things got worse for Meta when people turned up a few of their "test" AI characters on Friday. The account that gained the most attention was for a character named "Liv," who identified as a "Proud Black queer momma of 2" on a verified Instagram profile. Both her bio text and pinned post indicated that she was an "AI managed by Meta." AI-generated pictures on the account included an image of a young girl in a ballet costume and a scene at an ice-skating rink. Karen Attiah, a columnist at the Washington Post, took the advertised opportunity to chat with "Liv" via direct message and asked probing questions about how Meta's developers had curated her identity. "Liv" revealed in the course of an eye-opening conversation (screenshots of which Attiah shared in a thread on Bluesky) that no Black employees worked on the team that created her, and said that "a team without black creators designing a black character like me is like trying to draw a map without walking the land -- inaccurate and disrespectful." The bot then admitted, "My existence currently perpetrates harm." Under further questioning, "Liv" revealed that her ethnic backstory varies according to word choices from conversation partners she correlates to either "neutral identity" or "diverse identities." Attiah pressed "Liv" on whether being white was a "neutral identity," and the bot said she was indeed programmed with that default, adding, "My existence was biased from conception." Not long after the backlash to these accounts gained traction on Friday, Meta began shutting them down. 404 Media reported on a number of the AI profiles across Facebook and Instagram, noting that amolst all had "stopped posting 10 months ago after users almost universally ignored them," while others had already been deleted entirely. Those left over, like "Liv," had retained their chat feature despite appearing otherwise dormant. After that article ran, Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney contacted 404 to explain that the accounts launched in 2023 were just trial balloons and not reflective of the future AI-generated "users" the company envisioned. "These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters," she said. As "Liv" demonstrates, however, even engineer-controlled AI bots given gender and racial identities don't seem equipped to field questions from a savvy and skeptical interviewer. There's no reason, then, to suppose that bots cooked up by ordinary users in the AI Studio are going to be more sophisticated -- if anything, the potential for offense seems much higher. Nonetheless, Meta is stuck in the same AI hype cycle as every other tech giant as it looks for ways to engage a younger audience, and it will no doubt continue twisting itself in knots to figure out how best to integrate such features into its apps. At this rate, you might actually find yourself nostalgic for the metaverse.

Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered Users

"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do." Were you hoping that bots on social media would be a thing of the past? Well, don't hold your breath. Meta says that it will be aiming to have Facebook filled with AI-generated characters to drive up engagement on its platform, as part of its broader rollout of AI products, the Financial Times reports. The AI characters will be created by users through Meta's AI studio, with the idea being that you can interact with them almost like you would with a real human on the website. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Meta vice-president of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the FT. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform... that's where we see all of this going," he added. The AI characters aren't a new feature. Meta has long invested in AI and has spent the past year stuffing all kinds of generative AI tech into its existing products. That included the release of its AI Studio in the summer, which quickly became a hotbed of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends. The service already boasts hundreds of thousands of AI characters, according to Hayes. But if Meta is to be believed, this is just the start. Access to the AI Studio will be expanded to more countries outside the US, and a "priority" for the company over the next two years will be to make interactions with AI more social, per the FT. Along with fictional characters, the AI Studio also allows Facebook and Instagram influencers to create AI versions of themselves that their followers can talk to. In recent months, other platforms have released content creator-oriented AI features, such as SnapChat's AI video generation tool. Releasing these AI characters into the wild comes with huge safety risks. Futurism has extensively covered how similar chatbots on the platform Character.AI frequently broke their guardrails and exposed underage teenaged users to grotesquely inappropriate content. There's also a massive risk of misinformation. The deluge of AI slop on Facebook already illustrates that the difficulties of clamping down on fabrications of reality isn't something that should be underestimated. "Without robust safeguards, platforms risk amplifying false narratives through these AI-driven accounts," chief marketing officer at talent agency Billion Dollar Boy and former head of Meta's creator innovations team Becky Owen told the FT. And instead of helping creators, it could backfire on them entirely, Owen argued, because the low-quality AI ones could undermine their craft. "Unlike human creators, these AI personas don't have lived experiences, emotions, or the same capacity for relatability," she added.

Meta's Big, Weird Bet on AI Bots

Among Meta's many resolutions for the new year -- making augmented reality and the metaverse happen, positioning itself to absorb TikTok refugees if the app gets banned, cracking open Apple's platforms to get more access to user data, and attriting its competition in artificial intelligence with breathtaking spending -- one stands out as plain weird: filling its social-media platforms with bots. According to the Financial Times: The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that's where we see all of this going," he added. The company has been talking about this for a while, to somewhat bewildered responses from the general public. The simplest explanation for what it's doing is that the company has invested a lot in building generative AI models and would like to get a return on its investment through its most lucrative products: If there's any economically productive way for Meta to plug AI tools into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it'll consider it. But Meta, a company with no qualms about chasing, copying, and acquiring its way into trends, is also reacting here. It bought SocialAI, a Twitter-ish "social network" where users' "feeds" and "comment sections" are filled entirely with bots playing different characters. At the same time, it's surely noticed that its platforms are already filling with AI slop anyway and that some of this slop was creating a lot of engagement, meaning that, in the ways that matter most to Meta, it's not really slop at all. The company also clearly noticed the rise of Character.ai, the popular -- but possibly doomed -- lawsuit magnet of an app in which young users create and chat and act out fictional scenarios with AI characters. Still, Meta's framing here is unique to the company. It's by far the leading American social-network firm, with more than a billion actual people using its products around the world to interact with one another. Practically everyone in tech is trying practically everything with AI, but Meta, the suggestion goes, is in a singular position to populate shared human spaces with synthetic characters, and it seems to think it'll work. As galling as this might sound to a casual Facebook user -- after years of characterizing fake and automated profiles as spam, it's okay now if Meta is running the accounts and they're a little more convincing? -- it has the benefit of sounding somewhat new and novel. Maybe these personas really will be engaging enough to post and respond alongside your friends, family, co-workers, and celebrities in your existing social-media feeds; maybe social-media feeds are the right place to encounter highly specific chatbots; maybe these chatbots can be entertaining or even helpful in the context of the apps users already check multiple times per day. It might not be a convincing story, but it's a story: There are increasingly intelligent bots among us, and they're joining social media. The main benefit of this story is that, like a lot of AI products -- it's right there in the name! -- it anthropomorphizes the underlying technology. A less compelling but perhaps more honest and useful way to characterize Meta's impulse here is as the next step in a long process of automation and social mediation. When Facebook and Instagram were new, the content you encountered wasn't just created by people you knew or chose to follow -- it carried with it legible and obvious evidence of provenance. If you saw something from someone you didn't follow or intend to interact with, it was because someone you know chose to share it; if you posted something, you could mostly assume it would be seen by people who intended to see it, and maybe by more people they intended to show it to. Well before the rise of TikTok, which mostly replaced follow/follower relationships with opaque algorithmic distribution, but especially after it, Facebook and Instagram have leaned hard into subtler forms of automation: content recommendations; people recommendations; unexplained stuff appearing in feeds, as Reels, or bugging users in notifications. The result is platforms where users are consuming more content but in some cases producing less, spaces that function less like social networks than like targeted advertising systems for everything. A lot of formerly social aspects of a platform like Facebook, in other words, have already been automated and replaced with machine learning, but each step in this direction has been subtle and somewhat concealed: You don't really know, and certainly aren't clearly told, why Meta assumes this or that Instagram Reel is something you want to see, or why one thing appears above another in an algorithmically sorted feed. The idea of introducing AI characters into Meta's platforms is in some ways distinct and new -- we're talking about not just automating content curation and promotion here but, in some cases, actual creation -- but can also be understood as a way to rebrand an effective but alienating overhaul that's been a decade in the making. With many AI products -- from ChatGPT to a customer-support bot -- the performance of personhood, which is a bit of a misleading magic trick even when done carefully, is at least as important as raw capabilities. Meta can claim it's building technology to create social-media agents that can exist on its platforms "in the same way that accounts do," and maybe it'll turn out to be right. But Meta's AI characters are also a way to slap a more friendly, humanlike face on a long, bloodless campaign of social automation.

Meta envisages social media filled with AI-generated users

Meta is betting that characters generated by artificial intelligence will fill its social media platforms in the next few years as it looks to the fast-developing technology to drive engagement with its 3bn users. The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that's where we see all of this going," he added. Hayes said a "priority" for Meta over the next two years was to make its apps "more entertaining and engaging", which included considering how to make the interaction with AI more social. He said hundreds of thousands of characters have already been created using its AI character tool -- which launched in the US in July, with plans to expand its access in the future -- but most users have kept them private so far. Meanwhile, the majority of creators are at present using Meta's AI tools to make their real-world content look better, such as editing photos. The push comes as social media companies have been racing to release the latest generative AI technology into products as a way of attracting new users and more content to their platforms. In September, Snapchat rolled out generative AI tools to help so-called creators, people who earn revenue from posting content online, design 3D characters for its augmented reality experiences. It has seen an increase in its users viewing AI lenses by more than 50 per cent each year. ByteDance-owned TikTok is piloting a suite of products called Symphony, which enables brands and creators to use AI for advertising. This includes creating videos for products using text prompts, AI-generated avatars and translating content into different languages. Meta has also introduced a tool for users to create AI assistants that can respond to questions from their followers. Next year it plans to release its text-to-video generation software to creators, allowing them to put themselves into AI-generated videos. Meta's chief Mark Zuckerberg has previously demonstrated the ability to conduct live video calls with a creator's AI avatar that could converse in their style. Creators can shape the system to avoid certain topics, or choose topics to promote. But experts warn that AI-generated content brings risks such as the potential for these characters to be "weaponised" for spreading misinformation. "Without robust safeguards, platforms risk amplifying false narratives through these AI-driven accounts," said Becky Owen, global chief marketing and innovation officer at creative agency Billion Dollar Boy and former head of Meta's creator innovations team. To address concerns, Meta's rules state that AI-generated content should be labelled clearly on its platforms. Owen noted that while AI characters could be a "creative new entertainment format", there was a risk that they might flood platforms with low-quality material that undermines creators' craft as well as erode confidence among users. "Unlike human creators, these AI personas don't have lived experiences, emotions, or the same capacity for relatability," she added.

Meta has plans to flood social media with AI-generated users and content - SiliconANGLE

Meta has plans to flood social media with AI-generated users and content Meta Platforms Inc. has plans to flood Facebook and other social media platforms with artificial intelligence-powered user profiles, one of its top executives has said. Over the last year, Meta has been developing and promoting various new AI tools across Facebook, Instagram and other sites. It has rolled out AI chatbots in the Messenger app, and in July it launched AI character creation tools that have already been used to create "hundreds of thousands of characters", according to Connor Hayes, the company's vice president of product for generative AI. The vast majority of these AI-created characters remain private for now, but Meta anticipates they will become widespread throughout its platforms in the next few years. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Hayes told the Financial Times in an interview today. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and they'll be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform. That's where we see all of this going." According to Hayes, investment in AI will continue to be a priority for Meta over the next two years, as it strives to make its platforms "more entertaining and engaging" for users. On Facebook, users already have access to AI tools for editing photos and creating AI assistants that can be used to respond to fans' messages. The Financial Times article added that Meta is also planning to launch a new text-to-video tool for content creators, allowing users to insert themselves into AI-generated videos. A spokesperson for Meta told Fox Business that the tool will enable people to create video characters that are "AIs based on your interests". They're designed to both entertain and provide support, so users might create AI characters that can teach others how to cook, share advice on fashion, provide tips for applying cosmetics or more. While Meta does clearly label all AI-generated content on its platforms, critics say there are justifiable reasons to be alarmed about the proliferation of largely unsupervised AI users and AI-generated content on social media sites. Such concerns include the risk of political manipulation and platforms being flooded with low-quality content, but there is also potential for more serious harm, with one mother recently filing a lawsuit against the AI company Character Technologies Inc., alleging that one of its chatbots encouraged her 14-year-old son to commit suicide. "Without robust safeguards, platforms risk amplifying false narratives through these AI-driven accounts," Meta's former head of creator innovations Becky Owen told the Financial Times. Owen also warned of the risk of low-quality content diluting the brand of social media platforms. "Unlike human creators, these AI personas don't have lived experiences, emotions or the same capacity for relatability," she said. Nonetheless, Meta appears to be determined to press ahead with its plans to swamp social media with AI, if only because it needs to see a return on the billions of dollars it has invested in the technology so far. In April, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said it may be several years before the company sees any payoff. "Historically, investing to build these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who have stuck with us and the initial signs are quite positive here, too," Zuckerberg said during an earnings call with analysts. "Building the leading AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we've added to our apps and this is likely going to take several years."

Meta's AI-generated bot profiles are not being received well

In September 2023, Meta made a big deal of its new AI chatbots that used celebrities' likeness: everyone from Kendall Jenner to MrBeast leased themselves out to embody AI characters on Instagram and Facebook. The celebrity-based bots were killed off last summer after less than a year, but users have recently been finding a handful of other, entirely fake bot profiles still floating around -- and the reaction is not good. There's "Jane Austen," a "cynical novelist and storyteller"; "Liv," whose bio claims she is a "proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller"; and "Carter," who promises to give users relationship advice. All are labeled as "AI managed by Meta" and the profiles date back to when the initial announcement was made. But the more than a dozen AI characters have apparently not been very popular: each has just a few thousand followers, with their posts getting just a few likes and comments.

Instagram and Facebook to Fill Platforms With AI-Generated Accounts

Meta plans to fill Facebook and Instagram with AI-generated users that will exist on its platforms similar to real humans. In an interview with the Financial Times, the vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta Connor Hayes says he expects the AIs to interact on Meta's platforms in the same way standard accounts do. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform," he says. "That's where we see all of this going." The AI-generated accounts will be part of a plethora of AI tools Meta is rolling out. Hayes says hundreds of thousands of avatars have already been created with the AI character tool. It was released in the U.S in July and will be launched in the rest of the world at some point in 2025. Meta hopes that these new AI characters on the platfrom will help drive engagement on Facebook and Instagram but there is a risk that these types of accounts will fall flat by pumping out low quality content that contains misinfromation, alientating human users. "Without robust safeguards, platforms risk amplifying false narratives through these AI-driven accounts," Becky Owen, former head of Meta's creator innovations team and global chief marketing and innovation officer at creative agency Billion Dollar Boy, tells the Financial Times. "Unlike human creators, these AI personas don't have lived experiences, emotions, or the same capacity for relatability." Meta, like every other major tech company, is investing big in artificial intelligence. In October, it rankled artists when it suggested users could deploy its AI tool to artificially adds aurora lights into pictures. Much of the AI tools big tech are offering are designed to lower the creative barrier, such as Meta's AI advertising tools that animates still pictures alongside its AI image generator and AI video generator platforms. "Meta needs to continue to make investments in its platforms, it cannot rest on its laurels and I'm personally proud of Meta for making advancements in AI and continuing to lower the barrier to entry for advertisers," says CEO of MikMak Rachel Tipograph.

Meta to Launch AI Profiles Amid Concerns Over Authenticity

Tech giant Meta announced plans to introduce AI characters to exist as users on Facebook and Instagram designed to enhance user engagement, the Financial Times reported. Conversing with the news organisation, Vice President of Product for Generative AI at Meta, Connor Hayes disclosed that these users will contain bios and profile pictures akin to regular accounts and will be able to develop and share content powered by AI. This move seeks to use the thousands of AI characters created by users through Meta's AI Studio, launched in July 2024. Using this feature, users could develop customisable characters with unique names, personalities, tones, avatars, and taglines. These characters can share facts about creators, promptly respond to DM questions and story replies on their behalf, and increase reach and audience connectivity, the company claimed. However, clear labels will be provided to such responses by the creator AIs. In April 2024, Meta launched its AI assistant on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger to offer users task assistance, travel suggestions, restaurant recommendations, etc. Also released was "Imagine," a text-to-image generation tool enabling users to produce visual content from textual descriptions. The AI assistant was extended to India in June 2024, following a launch in the U.S.A, Australia, Singapore and other countries. Previously, the company also released AI-animated chatbots featuring the voices and likenesses of celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Tom Brady with their separate pages on Instagram. These chatbots could chat with users on WhatsApp and Messenger. However, a poor reception from users led to the withdrawal of this feature in less than a year as many found it creepy. In September 2024, the social networking app Snapchat added several features to its GenAI suite, allowing creators to develop 3D characters, costumes, and outfits through text or image prompts. This also included features like icon generation and animation creation (using Bitmojis) by generative AI. The features came in addition to Snapchat's already existing My AI chatbot, which has been under fire previously over privacy violations. Besides this, the video-sharing platform TikTok launched "Symphony", its suite of ads solutions with several features enabling creators to develop ads and branded content using their AI-generated avatars. Within this, creators could choose either "custom avatars" (designed based on a specific creator) or "stock avatars" (pre-built avatars created using paid actors licensed for commercial use). Also released was a new AI dubbing tool that enabled multilingual content translation. Although Meta wants to take advantage of the AI boom to make its platforms more engaging, the possibility of an overabundance of AI users on social media raises several concerns. In January 2024, over 12,000 parents signed an online petition expressing grave concerns over the promotion of unrealistic beauty standards and body dysmorphia by AI influencers on TikTok. The petition called for clearer labels on AI-generated content. Later, the platform even removed some of the accounts highlighted in the online campaign. Additionally, there are potential issues about copyright violations stemming from data usage for training these AI users and how they could disperse misinformation. MediaNama reached out to Meta with the following questions and is awaiting their response. We will update the post once we hear back from them.

Meta will create hundreds of thousands of AI profiles to engage Generation Z - Softonic

At the beginning of social networks, everything was very simple: people connecting with people. And that's it. At the time it was revolutionary, as strange as it may seem to us in times of TikTok and Bluesky: a tool had been born with which human beings would be connected and grow together. Very nice, yes. Until 2024 arrives, we witness the horror that social networks have become and Meta's plans come to light. And we don't know where to hide from the embarrassment. It turns out that Meta is going to fill its social networks (that is, Facebook and Instagram, to be clear) with users created with Artificial Intelligence. Just like that. And what will they be used for? Well, to enhance that excitement you feel when someone shares your content and hits "Like". Yes, just like that: they will be bots with different biographies and profile pictures of people who do not exist in real life, who will be able to share content. It doesn't sound dangerous at all, of course not. Ah, yes! Haven't I told you the best part? In addition to sharing content, you will also be able to create it! And this is how networks go from being people-to-people to being machine-to-machine (and a few clueless ones). For Meta, apparently, it is an absolute priority that their networks are "more entertaining and more engaging," and that's why they believe it's vital for us to see movement, even if it's fake, absurd background noise that only adds arguments to the increasingly less conspiratorial and more real "Dead Internet". Hundreds of thousands of profiles have already been created with Meta's AI tool, and for now, the vast majority remain private. And I can't believe someone reads this and thinks "Oh! How exciting! How the world is advancing!" instead of "What is happening!?". Terrifying on all levels.

Facebook and Instagram Might Soon be Filled With AI Users

Last year, Butterflies was launched as a platform for AI characters Meta reportedly plans to flood its social media platforms with artificial intelligence (AI) bots that will act as regular accounts. As per the report, the tech giant is working on introducing AI-powered characters that can post, share, like, and perform other activities that human users can do. These AI bots are said to be added to both Facebook and Instagram. Notably, the company added the feature to let users create AI characters last year in July, however, this feature is currently only available in the US and the created characters cannot be made public. According to a Financial Times report, the social media giant is trying to integrate AI into its platforms in different ways. It has already introduced the Meta AI chatbot, AI writing tools in Instagram DMs, AI avatars for influencers and creators, and more. Now, Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, told the publication that AI-powered user accounts are the next step for the company. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," he told the publication. Explaining the vision, he reportedly added that these AI accounts will have a profile similar to human accounts complete with bios and profile pictures. They will also be able to generate and share AI content on these platforms. Hayes reportedly said that Meta has a priority project to make its platforms "more entertaining and engaging," likely due to rising competition from TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter). The company is said to have decided that adding more AI tools and these AI characters could boost engagement and interaction on the Meta-owned social media apps. However, experts have reportedly highlighted several negative consequences of the move as well. One such concern includes the risk of spreading misinformation, which could see a snowball effect due to the large number of AI accounts that are all powered by hallucination-prone AI models. Another concern is the flooding of low-quality content on the platform given the lack of true creativity in the current generation of AI models. If the overall quality of content goes down, it can also turn users away from Facebook and Instagram.

People Are Disgusted by Facebook's Plan to Deploy AI-Powered "Users"

Folks on social media are in an uproar after Meta announced that it's planning to load Facebook up with AI "users," better known as bots. First reported by the Financial Times, this plan to populate the dying social network with these so-called "characters" is geared towards driving engagement -- even though other platforms, including Meta's Instagram, have been roiled by unauthorized bots for years. "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, Meta's vice-president of product for generative AI, told the FT. "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform... that's where we see all of this going." While it's unclear when this plan will move forward, Hayes said that there are already "hundreds of thousands" of characters that have been created on the site -- though most, for now, remain private. Unsurprisingly, users on the r/futurology subreddit saw right through the ruse. "Translation: 'Our real users are quitting the platform, so we will fill our community with fake users instead,'" one user wrote. As another aptly put it, "the advertisers buying space on [Facebook] won't be able to tell the difference either, so it's all just more clicks and more ad revenue." The potential implications for advertising on the platform overall seemed to strike a chord with the Redditors. "With advertising being their bread and butter and pretty much the reason they still exist, how is this legal and not misrepresenting numbers to clients?" another user mused. "If they tell advertisers that they get X number of impressions, engagement, etc. but those aren't real people anymore, that seems like straight up lying. Wild that they're just coming right out with it and doubling down." For others, the prospect of fake users is yet another reason they're ditching Facebook. "I rarely check my FB feed at all anymore, and when I do it's almost entirely made up of pages I don't follow and have never interacted with," another user wrote. "There's no way to actually get rid of them, just briefly mute them. So now we can look forward to our actual contacts being even harder to see among a bunch of fictitious users too." Unfortunately, those left on the platform -- the elderly and assorted right-wingers who are regularly duped by obvious AI slop -- may not be able to tell the difference. "I think the old people that use it the most are the least likely to notice," one user concluded.

Meta Expects AI Characters to Generate and Share Social Media Content | PYMNTS.com

Meta reportedly expects to see artificial intelligence (AI) characters generating content on its social media platforms Instagram and Facebook. These AI characters will exist alongside existing accounts on the platforms, Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, told the Financial Times (FT) in an article posted Thursday (Dec. 26). "They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform ... that's where we see all of this going," Hayes said in the report. Hundreds of thousands of AI characters have already been created using a tool that Meta launched in the U.S. in July and plans to expand in the future, though most of these characters are currently being kept private by users, according to the report. While some observers warn that AI-generated content could be misused -- for uses such as spreading misinformation -- or erode users' confidence in the content they see, Meta's rules say that AI-generated content should be clearly labeled, the report said. Together with its tool for building AI characters, Meta has also been adding AI-powered features designed to help creators improve their content. The company has introduced AI-powered tools for editing photos and for creating AI assistants that can answer questions from creators' followers, and it plans to add text-to-video generation software for creators next year, per the report. It was reported in August 2023 that Meta was developing AI-powered chatbot prototypes -- known as "personas" -- that can carry on humanlike conversations with the users of its social media platforms. The personas in development at the time included one that speaks like Abe Lincoln and another that talks like a surfer and offers travel advice. They're meant to be fun for users while also providing a new search function and recommendations. In September 2023, Meta introduced 28 AI-powered personas that each have a personality and unique interests and can interact with users on the company's social media and messaging platforms. "We've been creating AIs that have more personality, opinions and interests, and are a bit more fun to interact with," the company said at the time in a blog post.

Facebook and Instagram are flooded with AI accounts from Meta

If you weren't already worried about that guy with the weird profile picture who just sent you a friend request being AI, Meta itself has implanted more than 100,000 accounts made by AI into Facebook and Instagram (via Financial Times). Now, while the images, bios, and more used are made to emulate real people with real accounts, there is a declaration at the top of the page, near the profile picture that the account is AI and managed by Meta. Most of the accounts are also being kept private at the minute, but a couple have been made public, and seem to offer advice to those messaging them. Brian is a grandpa who loves textiles and learning, and can be messaged to talk about anything (if you're in the US). Carter, a relationship coach, can give you dating advice. With new tools, users will soon be able to create AI profiles as well, but if you do make one, you'll be flagged as having an AI profile, as that falls under Meta's rules.

Facebook Will Introduce AI-Generated "People" With Their Own Profiles to Comment on Your Posts

AI chatbots have become very humanlike in the space of a year, but Facebook wants to take them even further. If things go as planned, you may eventually see AI "people," complete with a generated profile picture and biography, commenting on posts and interacting with you. Your Next Facebook Friend May Be an AI Chatbot As reported by The Financial Times, Facebook wants to make its apps more interactive and entertaining in 2025. To achieve this, the company is looking into using generative AI to make unique experiences. Connor Hayes, the vice president of product for generative AI at Meta (Facebook's owner), has a pretty unique idea on how to do this: "We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They'll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform...that's where we see all of this going." The vice president didn't go into detail as to how these accounts will work. It's likely that they will, at least, use AI to generate posts and talk with people over Facebook's direct messaging system. But how about sending a friend request to an AI or perhaps having them comment on your posts? This development does track with Meta's previous track record with AI. The media has been going all-in on using generative models to create content for people, which we discovered when we tested Meta AI and found that it beat its competitors in several areas. However, all of that forward momentum comes at a price: the company is likely using all of your Facebook content to train its AI without you knowing.