Last week, Meta announced that it would launch several AI-generated accounts that would look like standard profiles on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
The backlash across the internet was nearly immediate and wasn't helped when human beings actually began interacting with the bot accounts, which posted sloppy images or even seemed to reveal details about how Meta created them.
Now, Meta is seemingly deleting the AI accounts.
Prior to the backlash, Meta's vice president of generative AI, Connor Hayes, told the Financial Times that the goal was to make its AI accounts appear very similar to human ones. “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.”
Seemingly, this was an attempt to boost engagement on Meta's platforms like Facebook.
Initial negative responses were around concern about AI-generated "slop" that already litters Facebook and that Meta would be directly feeding into the feeds itself. The more prominent backlash came as people discovered the accounts describing themselves as actual people with racial and sexual identities.
The standout was "Liv," an AI-generated account that described itself as a "Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller." The Washington Post's Karen Attiah got "Liv" to admit that no one on the team that built it was black or queer, and it gets worse from there. That same bot also made a fake post about donating fake clothes to charity while utilizing an AI-generated image of clothes in boxes, which provoked further outrage.
As scrutiny and outcry have increased, Meta has appeared to delete Liv and several other bot posts, some of which dated back at least a year. Meta claimed a "bug" was why things needed to be deleted.
A spokesperson told CNN, "There is confusion. The recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product.”
They claimed the bug was surrounding the ability for people to block the AI accounts (which were unblockable to our knowledge).
It's not clear how many AI accounts are still active. In CNN's report, they discovered a bot that had been running since 2020 on Instagram and Messenger. However, that same bot also lied repeatedly and often and was more than willing to switch stories at the drop of a hat, so it's not clear how much truth to take from what it actually wrote.
Meta did not respond to CNN when asked about these revelations.
Unfortunately, it all lends more credence to the Dead Internet Conspiracy Theory that companies like Meta have made human connection nearly impossible platforms full of bot accounts and algorithmic curation that minimizes actual human activity.
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