‘Genuinely weird’: Critics denounce Meta’s new fake AI-generated profiles

On the heels of Meta’s short-lived foray into celebrity lookalike AI chatbots, users around the internet have been unearthing AI-generated profiles created by Meta that are non-celebrity bots—and the reaction to them, to put it mildly, has been negative.The Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah engaged in a back and forth with “Liv” an AI-generated Black “queer momma” who told the writer that her “creators admitted they lacked diverse references” when creating her personality. The bot, in reference to her programming, also said that the team that created her implied that white is the “default” or “natural identity.””Not sure if Liv has media training, but here we are,” said Attiah in a thread on Bluesky, where she attached screenshots of her conversation with the bot.”This is genuinely weird and concerning,” said Nina Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, of Liv. According to The Verge, “Carter” an “AI-managed by Meta” profile that promises to give users dating advice, also elicited negative reactions. “Wtf is the point of this,” wrote one commenter. “What the fuck does an AI know about dating?????” read another comment. Instagram pages for both Liv and Carter are no longer live. While these AI-generated profiles only recently attracted a lot of attention, they’ve been around for awhile. A late December Financial Times piece about Meta’s push into a range of AI-generated products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook in order to retain young users, created some confusion. Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta, was quoted by the FT saying “we expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way accounts do… They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”According to 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, “in the immediate aftermath of the Financial Times story, people began to notice the exact types of profiles that Hayes was talking about, and assumed that Meta had begun enacting its plan.” In fact, these profiles have been around for over a year.”There is confusion,” Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney told CNN. “The recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product.””What is obvious from scrolling through these dead profiles,” wrote Koebler, “is that Meta’s AI characters are not popular, people do not like them, and that they did not post anything interesting.”

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