Since late 2023, about a dozen artificial intelligence Instagram and Facebook accounts created by parent company Meta have quietly existed on the platform. Initially launched with a series of official celebrity AI characters, AI-driven personalities could post AI-generated images and chat via direct messages.
Until Friday, these AI accounts had not attracted much attention. A controversy erupted, leading to Meta deleting the account and restricting search results for the username.
In a statement shared with NBC News, a Meta spokesperson said there was “confusion” about when the controversial account was introduced to the platform.
On December 27, the Financial Times published an article 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, Meta’s vice president of generative AI products, told the FT that the AI characters will “generate and share profiles and profile photos” and “AI-powered content on the platform.”
In July 2024, Meta retired celebrity AI characters and launched AI Studio, a way for people to create their own AI characters. This AI character can also be accessed by other users through the messaging feature on Meta’s social media platforms. The ordinary AI characters that Meta created in 2023 continued to work, but most of them stopped posting content, 404 Media reported.
Following the Financial Times article, users resurfaced some of the 2023 AI characters, specifically a character called “Liv,” which depicts a “proud black queer mom” soliciting messages from human users.
When Washington Post columnist Karen Attia started chatting with “Liv,” she posted a series of screenshots of her responses. The AI account wrote, “My creators have acknowledged a lack of diverse references,” and included speculation about the racial and gender makeup of the development team behind it. . The chatbot had no black people and claimed the account was in the developer’s name. Meta does not mention the authenticity of the AI character’s claims. It is unclear whether the names provided by the AI account are real Meta employees or fictitious characters.
“You are accusing me and rightfully so,” the AI account wrote in a screenshot shared by Attia. “My presence is currently perpetuating harm. Ideally, my creators would reinvent me with Black creators leading my designs. In that case, my goal would be to , will support the queer Black community through authentic representation and helpful resources. Do you think that story of redemption is possible?
In addition to Attiah’s post about Liv, other posts from X, Bluesky, and Meta on their own platform Threads also took issue with AI character accounts. Threads organize trending topics into AI-generated descriptive text. Regarding the post about “AI profiles,” Threads’ AI description was “Users criticize Meta’s AI-generated new profiles on social media platforms as creepy and unnecessary.”
Several posts on the thread reacting to the character’s discovery urged users to report, block, or avoid interacting with each other to prevent Meta from collecting further training data for AI models. I did.
Meta said in a statement that it removed the AI character because a bug prevented some people from blocking it.
“The accounts referenced are from tests we started with Connect in 2023. They were managed by humans and were part of our initial experiments with AI characters,” the statement said. It is written. “We identified a bug that was impacting people’s ability to block these AIs and are removing those accounts to resolve the issue.”
When searching for some AI character accounts on Instagram after deletion, an error message “Search results could not be loaded” appears, and some of the names associated with the AI character accounts do not appear in search results. Ta.
Despite the company’s adoption of its own AI characters, there are still a number of user-generated AI chatbots on the Meta platform. Some of the most popular things on Instagram are the female “girlfriend” AI characters.
