Instagram users discover old AI-powered “characters,” instantly revile them

A little over a year ago, Meta created Facebook and Instagram profiles for “28 AIs with unique interests and personalities for you to interact with and dive deeper into your interests.” Today, the last of those profiles is being taken down amid waves of viral revulsion as word of their existence has spread online.

The September 2023 launch of Meta’s social profiles for AI characters was announced alongside a much splashier initiative that created animated AI chatbots with celebrity avatars at the same time. Those celebrity-based AI chatbots were unceremoniously scrapped less than a year later amid a widespread lack of interest.

But roughly a dozen of the unrelated AI character profiles still remained accessible as of this morning via social media pages labeled as “AI managed by Meta.” Those profiles—which included a mix of AI-generated imagery and human-created content, according to Meta—also offered real users the ability to live chat with these AI characters via Instagram Direct or Facebook Messenger.

Now that we know it exists, we hate it

For the last few months, these profiles have continued to exist in something of a state of benign neglect, with little in the way of new posts and less in the way of organic interest from other Meta users. That started to change last week, though, after Financial Times published a report on Meta’s vision for “social media filled with AI-generated users.”

As Meta VP of Product for Generative AI Connor Hayes told FT, “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do… They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform. That’s where we see all of this going.”