Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, whose platforms are already flooded with AI-generated content, recently floated an idea to make the problem even worse: letting users create bot characters in their AI Studio that would then become functional “users” of these sites themselves, appearing to have their own accounts that engage with other profiles and pages.
Reactions were decidedly negative, with some citing “Dead Internet Theory,” the idea that the direction of all digital culture is now determined by automation and algorithm rather than actual humans. But things got worse for Meta when people turned up a few of their “test” AI characters on Friday.
The account that gained the most attention was for a character named “Liv,” who identified as a “Proud Black queer momma of 2” on a verified Instagram profile. Both her bio text and pinned post indicated that she was an “AI managed by Meta.” AI-generated pictures on the account included an image of a young girl in a ballet costume and a scene at an ice-skating rink.
Karen Attiah, a columnist at the Washington Post, took the advertised opportunity to chat with “Liv” via direct message and asked probing questions about how Meta’s developers had curated her identity. “Liv” revealed in the course of an eye-opening conversation (screenshots of which Attiah shared in a thread on Bluesky) that no Black employees worked on the team that created her, and said that “a team without black creators designing a black character like me is like trying to draw a map without walking the land — inaccurate and disrespectful.” The bot then admitted, “My existence currently perpetrates harm.” Under further questioning, “Liv” revealed that her ethnic backstory varies according to word choices from conversation partners she correlates to either “neutral identity” or “diverse identities.” Attiah pressed “Liv” on whether being white was a “neutral identity,” and the bot said she was indeed programmed with that default, adding, “My existence was biased from conception.”
Not long after the backlash to these accounts gained traction on Friday, Meta began shutting them down. 404 Media reported on a number of the AI profiles across Facebook and Instagram, noting that amolst all had “stopped posting 10 months ago after users almost universally ignored them,” while others had already been deleted entirely. Those left over, like “Liv,” had retained their chat feature despite appearing otherwise dormant. After that article ran, Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney contacted 404 to explain that the accounts launched in 2023 were just trial balloons and not reflective of the future AI-generated “users” the company envisioned. “These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters,” she said.
As “Liv” demonstrates, however, even engineer-controlled AI bots given gender and racial identities don’t seem equipped to field questions from a savvy and skeptical interviewer. There’s no reason, then, to suppose that bots cooked up by ordinary users in the AI Studio are going to be more sophisticated — if anything, the potential for offense seems much higher.
Nonetheless, Meta is stuck in the same AI hype cycle as every other tech giant as it looks for ways to engage a younger audience, and it will no doubt continue twisting itself in knots to figure out how best to integrate such features into its apps. At this rate, you might actually find yourself nostalgic for the metaverse.
From Rolling Stone US
