Instagram Now Lets Creators Make AI Chatbots of Themselves

Meta is letting people in the US make AI copies of themselves on Instagram or through the web using a new tool called AI Studio.

The idea is for people to use these AI helpers to talk to their followers. The AI can chat with people and answer comments on the real person’s account. This feature is mainly targeted at creators/influencers or businesses that have to interact with people a lot.

These AI helpers will respond to human users in chat threads or comment on the creator’s posts. Users can either start an “AI Chat” directly within Instagram or go to the AI Studio’s website.

You can customize your AI to fit your personality by giving it access to your Instagram posts and telling it what topics to avoid and what links to share. You can also control when your AI automatically replies to people and who it interacts with.

But that’s not all. AI Studio lets you create entirely new AI characters, not copies of yourself. This is similar to what other companies do, like Character.AI and Replika, where people can chat with and even develop feelings for fictional chatbots. Meta will also allow people to share their AI creations with others, just like OpenAI lets people share custom text generators.

Meta first tried this by making AI copies of celebrities but with different names and personas. The personas were changed in case the AI would say problematic things on behalf of their human versions. Even with the new controls, there’s still a chance this could happen with AI.