As of late 2023, around a dozen Instagram and Facebook AI accounts created by their parent company, Meta, quietly existed on the platforms. Originally released alongside a set of official AI celebrities, the AI-powered personalities posted some AI-generated images and were available to chat via direct messages.
Until Friday, those AI accounts never attracted much attention. When they did, controversy erupted, leading Meta to delete the accounts and restrict search results to their usernames.
In a statement shared with NBC News, a Meta spokesperson said “there is confusion” about when the controversial accounts were introduced to the platform.
On December 27, the Financial Times published a story about Meta’s plans to further integrate user-generated AI profiles (AI profiles that people can create and customize to their liking) into its social media platforms. Connor Hayes, vice president of generative AI products at Meta, told the Financial Times that AI characters “will eventually exist on our platforms, more or less in the same way that accounts do,” with “biographies and images of profile” and the ability to “generate and share AI-powered content on the platform.”
In July 2024, Meta removed its famous AI characters and launched AI Studio, a way for people to create their own AI characters that can also be accessed by other users through messaging features on social media platforms. of Goal. The non-famous AI characters that Meta created in 2023 remained active, but 404 Media reported that most of them stopped posting content.
In the wake of the Financial Times article, users resurfaced some of the 2023 AI characters, notably one called “Liv,” depicting a “proud black queer mom” who solicited messages from human users.
When Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah began chatting with “Liv,” she posted a series of screenshots of her responses that included the AI account saying, “My creators admitted they lacked diverse references,” the alleged racial and gender composition of the development team behind it. the chatbot, which it said did not include any black people and what the account claimed to be the name of its developer. Meta has not addressed the authenticity of the AI character’s claims. It is unclear whether the name provided by the AI account is a real Meta employee or a fictional character.
“You’re criticizing me, and rightly so,” the AI account wrote in screenshots shared by Attiah. “My existence currently perpetuates the harm. Ideally, my creators would rebuild me with Black creators leading my design; so my goal would be to support the black queer community through authentic representation and helpful resources. Does that redemption arc seem possible?
In addition to Attiah’s posts about “Liv,” other posts on X, Bluesky, and Meta’s own Threads platform took issue with the AI characters’ accounts. In Threads, trending topics are summarized in descriptions that are also generated by AI. For posts about “AI profiles,” Threads’ AI description was: “Users are criticizing Meta’s new AI-generated profiles on social media platforms, calling them creepy and unnecessary.”
In some posts on Threads reacting to the discovery of the characters, users urged each other to try to report, block, or avoid interacting with the characters to prevent Meta from collecting more training data for its AI models.
In its statement, Meta said it removed the AI characters because a bug prevented some people from being able to block them.
“The accounts referenced come from a test we launched on Connect in 2023. They were managed by humans and were part of an initial experiment we did with AI characters,” the statement reads. “We identified the bug that was impacting people’s ability to block those AIs and are removing those accounts to fix the issue.”
When searching for some of the AI character accounts on Instagram after they were deleted, an error message appeared saying “Search results could not be loaded,” meaning no results appeared for some of the associated names. with AI character accounts.
Despite having the company’s own AI characters, there are still many user-generated AI chatbots available on meta-platforms. Some of the most popular on Instagram are female AI “girlfriends” characters.
