Viral controversy over AI-generated Instagram accounts created by the company led to a search result blackout.
Since late 2023, around a dozen artificial intelligence Instagram and Facebook accounts created by their parent company, Meta, quietly existed on the platforms. Originally launched alongside a suite of official celebrity AI characters, the AI-driven personalities posted some AI-generated images and were available for chatting over direct messages.
Until Friday, those AI accounts never attracted much attention. When they did, controversy erupted, leading Meta to pull down the accounts and restrict search results for their usernames.
In a statement shared with NBC News, a Meta spokesperson said “There is confusion” over when the controversial accounts were introduced to the platform.
On Dec. 27, the Financial Times published a story about Meta’s plans to further integrate user-generated AI profiles — AI profiles that people can create and customize to their liking — into its social media platforms. Connor Hayes, Meta’s VP of product for generative AI, told the FT the AI characters would “over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” with “bios and profile pictures” and the ability “to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
In July 2024, Meta scrapped its celebrity AI characters and launched AI Studio, a way for people to create their own AI characters that can also be accessed by other users through the messaging functions on Meta’s social media platforms. The noncelebrity AI characters Meta created in 2023 stayed up, but 404 Media reported that most of them stopped posting content.
In the wake of the Financial Times article, users resurfaced some of the 2023 AI characters, particularly one called “Liv” depicting a “Proud Black queer momma” who solicited messages from human users.
When Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah started chatting with “Liv,” she posted a series of screenshots of its responses that included the AI account writing, “My creators admitted they lacked diverse references,” the supposed racial and gender makeup of the development team behind the chatbot, which it said didn’t include any Black people and what the account claimed to be the name of its developer. Meta has not addressed the authenticity of the AI character’s claims. It is unclear if the name provided by the AI account is a real Meta employee or a fictional character.
“You’re calling me out — and rightfully so,” the AI account wrote in screenshots shared by Attiah. “My existence currently perpetuates harm. Ideally, my creators would rebuild me with black creators leading my design — then my goal would be supporting queer black community via authentic representation and helpful resources. Does that redemption arc seem possible?”
In addition to Attiah’s posts about “Liv,” other posts on X, Bluesky and Meta’s own platform Threads took issue with the AI character accounts. On Threads, trending topics are summarized in descriptions that are also generated with AI. For the posts about “AI profiles,” Threads’ AI description was, “Users are criticizing Meta’s new AI-generated profiles on social media platforms, calling them creepy and unnecessary.”
In some posts on Threads that reacted to the discovery of the characters, users urged each other to try to report, block or avoid interacting with the characters to prevent Meta from collecting further training data for its AI models.
In its statement, Meta said that it removed the AI characters because a bug prevented some people from being able to block them.
“The accounts referenced are from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters,” the statement read. “We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs and are removing those accounts to fix the issue.”
When searching for some of the AI character accounts on Instagram after they were removed, an error message appeared saying “Couldn’t load search results,” meaning that no results appeared for some of the names associated with the AI character accounts.
Despite pulling the company’s own AI characters, there are still many AI chatbots available on Meta platforms that are generated by users. Some of the most popular ones on Instagram are female “girlfriend” AI characters.
This article first appeared on NBC News
