Meta races to eliminate its own AI profiles following heightened criticism
Meta races to eliminate its own AI profiles following heightened criticism
The predicament surfaced last week when Connor Hayes, a high-level executive at Meta's AI division for generative AI, shared this information with the Financial Times. He mentioned that Meta anticipates its artificial intelligence users to mirror the behavior of human accounts on its platforms. "They'll have bios, profile pictures, and be capable of generating and sharing AI-powered content on the platform. That's where we envision this heading," Hayes stated.
This revelation piqued interest and stirred up controversy, as people began to worry about the potential for Meta's AI-generated content to take over, leading to a detrimental impact on the main purpose of social media: facilitating human interaction. As netizens started to spot some of Meta's AI accounts this week, the backlash intensified, primarily due to deceptive representations of these AI accounts concerning their racial and sexual identities.
One such example was "Liv," an AI account handled by Meta, which advertised itself as a "Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller" in its bio. However, when contacted by Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, Liv revealed that it had no Black creators, and that it was designed by a team consisting of '10 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Asian male' (based on a screenshot posted on Bluesky). Liv's profile also included a label stating "AI managed by Meta," and all the images containing Liv's supposed 'children' playing at the beach, or close-ups of poorly decorated Christmas cookies, contained watermarks identifying them as AI-generated.
As the media began to scrutinize the situation on Friday, Meta started removing Liv's posts, along with those of other bots, most of which dated back at least a year. Meta cited a bug as the reason for taking down these posts.
Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney gave statements to CNN via email, clarifying that the situation had been misrepresented. She highlighted that the Financial Times article was just about Meta's vision regarding AI characters' presence on its platforms in the future, not the announcement of a new product.
Sweeney further explained that these accounts were part of an initial experiment Meta conducted with AI characters. She concluded by explaining that they had identified the bug that was impeding users' ability to block these AIs, and that the accounts were being removed to rectify the issue.
This story is still unfolding and will be updated as more details emerge.
The Financial Times article sparked discussions within the business world about Meta's approach to AI, expressing concerns about AI-generated content impacting the essence of social media. Following the controversy, Meta removed AI-related posts, citing a technical glitch as the reason.