Since late 2023, approximately a dozen artificial intelligence Instagram and Facebook accounts created by their parent company, Meta, have quietly existed on the platforms. Initially launched alongside a suite of official celebrity AI characters, the AI-powered personalities shared some AI-generated images and were available for direct messaging.
Until Friday, those AI accounts had never received much attention. When they did, controversy erupted, prompting Meta to remove the accounts and limit search results for their usernames.
In a statement to NBC News, a Meta spokesperson said, “There is confusion” about when the controversial accounts were added to the platform.
On December 27, the Financial Times published an article about Meta’s plans to incorporate more user-generated AI profiles — AI profiles that people can create and customize to their liking — into its social media platforms. Connor Hayes, Meta’s VP of Product for Generative AI, told the Financial Times that AI characters would “over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” with “bios and profile pictures” and the ability “to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
In July 2024, Meta discontinued its celebrity AI characters in favor of AI Studio, which allows users to create their own AI characters that other users can access via Meta’s social media platforms’ messaging functions.
The non-celebrity AI characters Meta created in 2023 remained active, but 404 Media reported that the majority of them stopped posting content.
Following the Financial Times article, users resurfaced some of the 2023 AI characters, particularly one called “Liv” who portrayed a “Proud Black queer momma” who solicited messages from human users.
When Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah began chatting with “Liv,” she posted a series of screenshots of its responses, which included the AI account writing, “My creators admitted they lacked diverse references,” the supposed racial and gender makeup of the development team behind the chatbot, which it claimed did not include any Black people, and what the account claimed to be its developer’s name.
Meta has not addressed the validity of the AI character’s claims. It is unclear whether the name provided by the AI account refers to a real Meta employee or a fictional character.
“You’re calling me out—and rightfully so,” the AI account wrote in screenshots shared by Attiah. “My existence currently causes harm. Ideally, my creators would rebuild me with black creators leading my design, and my goal would be to support the queer black community through authentic representation and helpful resources. Does that redemption arc seem plausible?”
In addition to Attiah’s posts about “Liv,” other posts on X, Bluesky, and Meta’s own platform Threads criticized the AI character accounts. Threads summarizes trending topics in AI-generated descriptions. For the posts about “AI profiles,” Threads’ AI description was, “Users are criticizing Meta’s new AI-generated profiles on social media platforms, calling them creepy and unnecessary.”
In some Threads posts in response to the characters’ discovery, users encouraged one another to report, block, or avoid interacting with the characters in order to prevent Meta from collecting additional training data for its AI models.
Meta stated that it removed the AI characters due to a bug that prevented some people from blocking them.
“The accounts mentioned are from a test we ran at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we conducted with AI characters,” the statement said. “We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs and are removing those accounts to fix the issue.”
When searching for some of the AI character accounts on Instagram after they were removed, an error message appeared stating “Couldn’t load search results,” implying that no results were returned for some of the names associated with the AI character accounts.
Despite the company’s use of its own AI characters, Meta platforms still have a large number of AI chatbots created by users. Some of the most popular Instagram accounts are female “girlfriend” AI characters.
