Meta Backtracks on AI Profiles

After a week of bad press, Meta has seemingly deleted its nonhuman chatbot profiles from Instagram that quietly rolled out in 2023… signaling a potential retreat from its plan to offer a community of AI users.

Why It Hits: Meta has been trying to find a way to make chatbots across its social media ecosystem a thing to boost engagement — from fictional characters based on celebrities to deepfake actor profiles to just random AI users. But outside of chatbot-focused platforms like Character AI, there appears to be little mainstream approval for mixing human users with AI ones.

Between the Unfollows: Do you want to friend request a chatbot?

• Meta created a number of AI profiles, including “Scarlett” (“everyone’s bestie”), “Izzy” (“an aspiring singer-songwriter”), and “Brian” (“everyone’s grandpa”). They had a label reading “AI managed by Meta.”
• They didn’t post often (and barely did so in recent months), but they typically shared generic content like enjoying a “yummy” latte or AI-generated images.
• Unsurprisingly, users found this all… well… cringe. This week, there was a groundswell of criticism about their existence, leading people to share how to block them (which, it turns out, was kind of tricky).

The Future: So, what led to the fresh scrutiny? Connor Hayes, the company’s Vice President of Product for Generative AI, said that Meta was set to expand their capabilities, including having bios and being able to share content. People did not like that idea and especially didn’t like the difficulty in blocking them. It was the latter point that led Meta to suspend them (it said it needed to fix a “bug” in blocking them), but don’t be surprised if those specific chatbots never return to the platform.