AI
Goodbye to human users on Facebook and Instagram: Meta wants to add thousands of artificial intelligence users
Meta is setting off alarms by announcing an implementation of AI-powered users on Facebook and Instagram. What are the ethical and moral implications of this major change?
Meta, the parent company of such popular social networks as Facebook and Instagram, is once again in the spotlight due to a major development that is as interesting as it is controversial: the implementation of AI users on these platforms. The company, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, plans to revolutionize the digital landscape through the use of generative artificial intelligence, all to offer new forms of entertainment and increase the engagement of real users with these platforms.
Meta and its strong bet on AI: the company wants to create “artificial intelligence users” on Facebook and Instagram
Meta, the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg, is once again generating debate for an announced measure that will drastically influence both the use of Facebook and Instagram and how we understand these two social networks. As revealed by the Financial Times, this technology company is committed to bringing to these two platforms thousands of “characters” generated by artificial intelligence in order to increase interactions with its 3 billion users.
The Silicon Valley-based group has launched a series of AI products, including a tool for creating artificial intelligence characters on Instagram and Facebook. Personalities such as MrBeast have lent their image to the creation and characterization of these virtual entities. According to Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta, the long-term goal is for these AI users to exist on the platforms in a similar way to accounts managed by flesh-and-blood people. These AI accounts will 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 commented.
Hayes also revealed that a priority for Meta over the next two years is to increase the “entertaining and engaging” potential of its applications, which is one of the main reasons for its strong commitment to AI.
The Meta executive also revealed that there are already hundreds of thousands of such AI users, which was launched in the United States in July 2024, with plans to expand in the near future. However, most of these user accounts are private, so it is understood that the company would still be implementing these changes and new features gradually to assess their impact on its “real” user base.
Beyond these AI-powered users, Meta also plans to add tools to Instagram and Facebook’s catalog of features, such as AI assistants that can answer questions from followers, as well as text-to-video generation software for creators, allowing them to insert themselves into AI-generated videos.
Although these are important developments for these two popular social networks, experts view them with suspicion, since an inadequate implementation or without security guarantees for active users could create new problems, apart from the ethical and moral implications of creating these AI users that many could confuse with real people.
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