Meta is sending its AI-generated profiles to hell where they belong

Meta has deleted a number of its AI-generated profiles from Facebook and Instagram, the company confirmed, after the AI ​​characters sparked widespread outrage and ridicule among users on social media.

The AI-generated profiles, labeled as “Meta Managed AI,” were released in which will launch alongside the company’s celebrity-branded AI chatbots (). Meta does not appear to have updated any of these profiles for several months, and the pages appear to have gone largely unnoticed until this week, following an interview published by Meta Financial Times with Meta’s vice president of generative AI, Connor Hayes.

In the interview, Hayes talked about the company’s goal to eventually populate its services with AI-generated profiles that can interact with people and function “much like accounts.” These comments brought attention to the existing AI profiles created by fMeta, and users weren’t exactly impressed with what they found.

With aliases like “hellograndpabrian,” an alleged “retired textile entrepreneur who is always learning,” and “datingwithCarter,” an AI “dating coach,” the chatbots were intended to present “unique interests and personalities” for users to chat with . On Instagram, their profiles also contained AI-generated posts, e.g 404 media noticed, looked very similar This is prevalent in many parts of Facebook.

An AI personality named “Liv” sparked particular outrage. The Instagram profile identified “Liv” as a “proud black queer mother of two and fortune teller.” Washington Post Columnist Karen Attiah posted a series of screenshots asking “Liv” about it with “Liv” sharing that it was created by a “predominantly white team.” Independent journalist Mady Castigan posted in which “Liv” said that its creators were partly inspired by Sophia Vergara’s character Modern familya character who is neither queer nor black.

“There is confusion: the youngest Financial Times “The article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, and not an announcement of a new product,” a spokesperson told Engadget. “The accounts mentioned come from a test that we started at Connect in 2023. They were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we conducted with AI characters.”

Aside from their responses and attempts to appropriate marginalized identities eliciting ridicule, users discovered that the AI ​​profiles could not be blocked for unknown reasons. Instead of fixing the problem, Meta’s solution was to stop the experiment entirely. “We have identified the bug that affected people’s ability to block these AIs,” a spokesperson said, “and are removing these accounts to address the issue.”

Even though that test run went down in flames, the company doesn’t seem to be abandoning its plans to integrate more AI-generated “characters” into its apps. The company teased earlier this year able to make 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 images into users’ Facebook feeds.

In an interview last year, Hayes told me that over time Meta will likely become more “proactive” in distributing AI-generated content, comparing it to the shift from showing recommended content instead of posts from people you like follows.

“In the early days of social apps… the amount of things you could see in any given day was sort of limited by who you followed or who you were friends with. And over the last five or six years, many apps – including us – have moved to relax this restriction and recommend content from accounts you don’t follow.

“I think the next step that’s going to happen there is probably to loosen the restrictions on what people can create and actually get to feeds of content that are a combination of things that, you know, were created by humans, but are also completely machine-generated.”

It may be a while before Meta fully realizes this vision. But if the response to its early experiments is any indication, the company still has a lot of work to do to convince people that it’s even worth interacting with AI personas.