Meta shuts down its AI character accounts after user outcry
Since late 2023, around a dozen AI Instagram and Facebook accounts created by their social media parent company Meta quietly existed on the platforms.
Since late 2023, around a dozen artificial intelligence Instagram and Facebook accounts created by their parent company, Meta, quietly existed on the platforms. Originally launched alongside a suite of official celebrity AI characters, the AI-driven personalities posted some AI-generated images and were available for chatting over direct messages.
Until Friday, those AI accounts never attracted much attention. When they did, controversy erupted, leading Meta to pull down the accounts and restrict search results for their usernames.
In a statement shared with NBC News, a Meta spokesperson said “There is confusion” over when the controversial accounts were introduced to the platform.
On Dec. 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, Meta’s VP of product for generative AI, told the FT the AI characters would “over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” with “bios and profile pictures” and the ability “to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
In July 2024, Meta scrapped its celebrity 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 the messaging functions on Meta’s social media platforms. The noncelebrity AI characters Meta created in 2023 stayed up, but 404 Media reported that most of them stopped posting content.
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