How would you feel if you had a fun, engaging conversation with someone over text for weeks, only to find out, when trying to meet in person, that you were actually talking to an AI?
You’d probably feel angry and betrayed.
But what if you had never wanted to meet in person? In that case, you might have gone on enjoying the conversation indefinitely, unaware you were chatting up an AI.
If the interaction was fulfilling, meaningful, or simply entertaining, does it really matter that your conversational partner wasn’t human?
You are going to have to deal with questions like these sooner than you would have imagined.
Meta is discontinuing its AI-powered profiles on Facebook and Instagram, which were first introduced in September 2023, with most being removed by summer 2024 due to user backlash and issues with blocking the accounts.
The AI profiles, including characters like Liv and Carter, gained renewed attention when users engaged them in conversations, leading to viral discussions about their development teams’ lack of diversity.
I know it’s the times that we live in that you gotta have every shade of skin colour on a development team to avoid criticism.
I don’t get it but that was one of the major ‘scandals’ that Meta faced, the fact that ‘a queer Black momma’ AI admitted that there were no Black people on its development team.
Meta then also acknowledged a bug that prevented users from blocking the AI accounts and stated that the profiles were part of an early experiment managed by humans, not a new product rollout.
Despite the removal of Meta’s AI profiles, users can still create their own chatbots, with suggestions for various roles such as ‘therapist’ and ‘relationship coach’.
User created AI profiles
Meta is introducing AI-generated user accounts on Facebook and Instagram, aiming to attract a younger audience and compete with TikTok and Snapchat.
Meta’s AI character tool has led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of characters, although most remain private.
So, users can create their own and Meta will definitely be unleashing its own AI profiles on its apps in due time. They will probably clearly state that they are AI profiles but I think some users still will interact with them, unaware they aren’t human.
So, get used to chatting up AI because it appears that’s what our future holds.
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