Yet another piece of AI news makes one wonder, “Who asked for this?” Meta is rolling out AI chatbots based on real creators.
That’s right! You might soon be able to DM with an AI chatbot on Instagram that a creator made to mimic themself. Isn’t that…something?
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself made the announcement.
“Rolling out an early test in the U.S. of our AI studio, so you might start seeing AIs from your favorite creators and interest-based AIs in the coming weeks on Instagram. These will primarily show up in messaging for now and will be clearly labeled as AI,” he said.
Popular creators likely get more messages than they can begin to parse through, so this will be a way for them to outsource that work to AI. Though one could say — and I would say — talking with a chatbot is far from having a genuine conversation.
Instead of having a human interaction with a creator or celeb you admire, you can speak to some artificial amalgamation of their personality. A shadow of the real thing. Plato would be proud.
TechCrunch reported that Meta will begin the rollout with just 50 creators and a limited number of Insta users before expanding it over the next couple of months and then doing a full launch by August.
Maybe some folks will find the experience novel, but it feels like another AI solution in need of a problem. There is something so lonely about chatting with an AI version of a real person. Anyway, you’ll soon be able to do just that on Instagram.
