Meta's dream of AI-generated users isn't going anywhere

• Last week, people noticed (and hated) AI-generated users that were created and managed by Meta.
• But these AI bots were actually a year old, and mostly defunct. Meta has now deleted them.
• This is all totally separate from what a Meta exec described as a future with AI-generated users.

There's been some confusion about Meta's ambitions for AI-generated users. Let me clear it up for you: Meta is still, definitely, very excited about AI-generated users — despite removing a few of the ones people were complaining about last week.

Here's the backstory: Sometime last week, people discovered a handful of Instagram accounts that were "AI managed by Meta." In other words, they were Meta bots programmed to look and interact like real people — powered by AI. There was one named Liv, a "Proud Black queer momma of 2," Grandpa Brian, and a dating coach named Carter — all AI-generated.

These accounts spit out conversation that was treacly and weird — and also somewhat problematic. (Liv told Karen Attiah of The Washington Post in a chat that none of her creators were Black.)

As soon as people on social media noticed the AI bots, they hated them. Meta quickly removed the accounts.

But it turns out, these accounts were actually quite old. Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, said that the AI accounts were "from a test we launched at Connect in 2023. These were managed by humans and were part of an early experiment we did with AI characters."

(This was around the same time Meta launched a bunch of AI chatbots based on celebrities like Kendall Jenner and MrBeast. Those celeb AIs were scrapped this past summer.)

But here's where there was some confusion: Liv, Grandpa Brian, and Dating with Carter were not the AI users that Meta is dreaming of — they were an abandoned experiment from over a year ago. Meta is very much full steam ahead with its vision of an AI-user-filled future.

Connor Hayes, VP of generative AI at Meta, recently gave an interview to the Financial Times in which he talked about Meta's vision for an AI user-filled future:

"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.

Hayes's interview doesn't really give too much detail about what these AI users would be for — or why people would want to interact with them, or much detail at all. (I asked Meta for additional comment.)

Meanwhile, Facebook already has AI bots you can chat with — they're inside Messenger. Just go to "Compose a new message" in Messenger, and you'll see an option for "Chat with AI characters," where you can design your own AI or use someone else's.

If you look through the user-made chatbots, you can sort of start to get a sense of what people are using these for: companionship chatting.

Companionship/romance AI chatbot services like Replika or Character.ai are becoming very popular (if not also problematic). There is a market for people who want to chat with an AI, even if I don't see the appeal. (I've tested them!)

Meta has been, uh, inspired by features from other competing social apps plenty of times before (Instagram Stories seeming to be rather inspired by Snapchat, for instance). Perhaps Meta is just seeing that social chatbots are popular, so they're rolling out their own.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what Meta's vision is here, and I'm pretty skeptical about why I would ever want to interact with an AI-generated user on Facebook. I tried out a few of the AI chatbots in Messenger and even tried creating a few of my own.

But as far as a social network full of these kinds of AI accounts? I just don't get it — even if Meta seems very confident about its future.