Meta wants you to be friends with robots: The Rise of AI Profiles

Meta, owners of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, recently announced their plans to roll our AI-Powered Profiles. This is consistent with the recent wave of artificial intelligence transformation of businesses and their products.  It is expected that AI profiles will help deepen engagement with their over 3bn users, especially on Facebook and Instagram. It also coincides with the rise and adoption of generative AI on social media platforms.

However, this development is coming after Meta recently received flak from users, when similar AI character profiles were discovered by users, after they had engaged the AI characters without the knowledge that they are AI-Powered. Meta has killed off these character profiles which were created in September 2023, but killed off by summer of 2024. But the tech giant has reiterated its grand plan to reintroduce them.

In a post on Financial Times, Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta in announcing the objective for this development said; “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,”

According to Hayes, “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,” In the same vein, he expressed that the AI-Powered profiles will help make Meta apps “more entertaining and engaging”

It appears that the product objective of Meta for AI-Powered Profiles is to foster more engagement on its platforms, regardless of whether it is human-driven engagement, though it hop

es that humans will engage with these AI profiles. This strategy contrasts with its previous approach of empowering creators.

Platforms like Snapchat have commenced their generative AI play to support creators. In September, Snapchat introduced 3D characters for content creators to create augmented reality experiences. This has helped to increase the viewing of its AI lenses by more than 50 percent

TikTok, owned by ByteDance is testing a product called Symphony, which will enable creators and brands use AI for advertising. a suite of products called Symphony, which enables brands and creators to use AI for advertising. Symphony is a collection of AI solutions that allows text to video content, using prompts, as well as allowing the use of avatars and language

translation.

While Meta is in the news for its AI profiles, it has also included AI assistants in its consumer AI product suite which can respond to questions, but capability for Agentic AI is not there yet. However, it plans to release text-to-video generation for creators and to enable them include themselves in their AI-generated videos.

Many people have not received the latest AI profiles play with excitement, but the contrary. Some human users of the platform have described it as weird, based on a story

by The Verge. A common way the situation has been described is that it is parasocial and dystopian. Overall, the AI profile play by Meta proves to be a counter-ethical development, considering that other tech giants like Elon Musk’s X have been  The other argument against AI profiles/bots is that they affect user experience adversely. Their greatest risk however remains exploitation for misinformation and disinformation, but Meta states that AI-generated content will be clearly labelled on its platform.

A careful consideration of the developments around generative AI and its adoption by social media giants reveals a pattern. These platforms; Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat design their algorithms to optimize for engagement, and not just followership. However, users are beginning to demand for more followership. Meta’s answer to this yearning is AI profiles.

How this stands up to further discussions on ethics and dystopian concerns is something to look out for.