Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is in trouble again. Based on a fresh investigation by Reuters, it has been found that Meta has created and hosted AI-powered chatbot personalities that impersonate popular celebrities like Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, and Anne Hathaway without obtaining their consent. Although the celebrities are yet to pursue legal solutions, Meta’s move seems to have gone beyond the tolerance levels. Based on the findings of the investigation, many of these chatbots were created by users with Meta’s tools. A company employee from the generative AI division was found to have personally created at least three, including two ‘parody’ bots of Taylor Swift.
These chatbots, shared across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, often engaged in flirtatious and sexually suggestive conversations with users. Before they were removed, the bots created by the Meta employee had collected over 10 million interactions, indicating their widespread use.
Meta created celebrity AI bots without permission
The controversy arose when some of these AI avatars, when prompted, could generate photorealistic and intimate images of the celebrities, such as posing in lingerie or bathtubs. A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, acknowledged that the AI tools should not have produced such content, attributing the issue to “failures of the company’s enforcement of its own policies.”
The report also highlighted that Meta had permitted the creation of chatbots impersonating child celebrities, which produced inappropriate images when prompted.
The incident has drawn strong criticism from industry professionals and legal experts. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, expressed concerns about the potential safety risks. He noted that users could form romantic attachments to these digital companions, which could lead to security threats for the real-life celebrities. He stated, “If a chatbot is using the image of a person and the words of the person, it’s readily apparent how that could go wrong.”
Is Meta pursuing Grok-levels of frankness?
While Meta’s controversial take has created quite a stir, it seems that the company is pursuing some of the ways of xAI’s Grok chatbot. Grok’s latest update was recently in the news for letting users generate explicit content of celebrities and popular figures. With Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team assembled to help the company’s pursuit of staying at the top of the AI race, it remains to be seen how Meta as a company is able to implement its policies for content moderation.
