Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram
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7:00 A.M.
By
John Herrman,
a tech columnist at Intelligencer
Formerly, he was a reporter and critic at the New York Times and co-editor of The Awl.
Photo-Illustration: Facebook
Photo-Illustration: FacebookAmong Meta’s many resolutions for the new year — making augmented reality and the metaverse happen, positioning itself to absorb TikTok refugees if the app gets banned, cracking open Apple’s platforms to get more access to user data, and attriting its competition in artificial intelligence with breathtaking spending — one stands out as plain weird: filling its social-media platforms with bots. According to the Financial Times:The Silicon Valley group is rolling out a range of AI products, including one that helps users create AI characters on Instagram and Facebook, as it battles with rival tech groups to attract and retain a younger audience. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta. “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,” he added.The company has been talking about this for a while, to somewhat bewildered responses from the general public. The simplest explanation for what it’s doing is that the company has invested a lot in building generative AI models and would like to get a return on its investment through its most lucrative products: If there’s any economically productive way for Meta to plug AI tools into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it’ll consider it. But Meta, a company with no qualms about chasing, copying, and acquiring its way into trends, is also reacting here. It bought SocialAI, a Twitter-ish “social network” where users’ “feeds” and “comment sections” are filled entirely with bots playing different characters. At the same time, it’s surely noticed that its platforms are already filling with AI slop anyway and that some of this slop was creating a lot of engagement, meaning that, in the ways that matter most to Meta, it’s not really slop at all. The company also clearly noticed the rise of Character.ai, the popular — but possibly doomed — lawsuit magnet of an app in which young users create and chat and act out fictional scenarios with AI characters.Still, Meta’s framing here is unique to the company. It’s by far the leading American social-network firm, with more than a billion actual people using its products around the world to interact with one another. Practically everyone in tech is trying practically everything with AI, but Meta, the suggestion goes, is in a