Meta says the crappy AI bots going viral this week aren't the ones they're excited about

In the past week, an account named “Liv” has inspired a lot of hand-wringing on social media. She’s a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller” and “your realest source for life’s ups & downs.” She’s also a fake, AI-generated non-person living entirely through a chat feature on Instagram. Even worse, a user on Bluesky got her to admit that there wasn’t a single Black person on the team that created her.

Normally, people might ignore such obvious slop. For a minute though, it seemed like Liv was a harbinger of a distressing and increasingly-unreal future. Earlier this week, Connor Hayes, a Meta exec, told Financial Times that the platform was planning on rolling out “hundreds and thousands” of AI-generated characters that would “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do.” He continued, “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.”

But despite the understandable confusion, Meta says Liv and other profiles like her that people have dug up since the FT article are not what Hayes was referring to. “The recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product,” Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement to 404 Media. “The accounts referenced are 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. We identified the bug that was impacting the ability for people to block those AIs and are removing those accounts to fix the issue.” Many of them have already been deleted.

But despite the mix-up, “these older profiles are instructive, because they show that Meta’s AI primarily creates the exact type of AI spam that has taken over all of Meta’s platforms recently and which have become a running joke,” 404‘s Jason Koebler writes. “They also show that Meta is not particularly good at this, and that users do not want this.” The article goes on to detail some of the truly heinous slop these accounts have been posting, all meant to disguise, in “Liv”‘s own words, “data collection and ad targeting—my creators’ true intention.” You can read more of 404‘s takedown (and prepare for the inevitable future) here.