Earlier this week, Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times that the company is going to roll out AI character profiles on Instagram and Facebook that “exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do … they’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.” 

This quote got a lot of attention because it was yet another signal that a “social network” ostensibly made up of human beings and designed for humans to connect with each other is once again betting its future on distinctly inhuman bots designed with the express purpose to pollute its platforms with AI-generated slop, just like spammers are already doing and just like Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors the explicit plan is. In the immediate aftermath of the Financial Times story, people began to notice the exact types of profiles that Hayes was talking about, and assumed that Meta had begun enacting its plan. 

But the Meta controlled, AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles going viral right now have been on the platform for well over a year and all of them stopped posting 10 months ago after users almost universally ignored them. Many of the AI-generated profiles that Meta created and announced have been fully deleted; the ones that remain have not posted new content since April 2024, though their chat functionality continues to work. 

Peoples’ understandable aversion to the idea of Meta-controlled AI bots taking up space on Facebook and Instagram has led them to believe that these existing bots are the new ones “announced” by Hayes to the Financial Times. In Hayes’ quote, he says that Meta ultimately envisions releasing tools that allow users to create these characters and profiles, and for those AI profiles to live alongside normal profiles. So Meta has not actually released anything new, but the news cycle has led people to go find Meta’s already existing AI-generated profiles and to realize how utterly terrible they are.

After this article was originally published, Liz Sweeney, a Meta spokesperson, told 404 Media that “there is confusion” on the internet between what Hayes told the Financial Times and what is being talked about online now and Meta is deleting those accounts now. 404 Media confirmed that many of the profiles that were live at the time this article was published have since been deleted.

“There is confusion: the recent Financial Times article was about our vision for AI characters existing on our platforms over time, not announcing any new product,” Sweeney said. “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.” 

But 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. They also show that Meta is not particularly good at this, and that users do not want this.

The complete failure of Meta’s AI profiles shows what we already know: People do not come to social networks to interact with bots, but Meta is obsessed with algorithmically shoving such content down people’s throats regardless. 

The profiles that do remain up are ridiculous caricatures of ‘people’ who posted an equal mix of inane, insulting, and horrifying AI slop that in some cases is indistinguishable from fucked up user-generated AI spam polluting the platform created by enterprising people in India to collect a tiny fraction of the ad revenue generated by Meta. 

In the last day, “Liv,” has gone particularly viral because the bot is a particularly offensive caricature of what a gigantic corporation might imagine a “proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller, your realest source of life’s ups & downs” might be like and post about. In one slideshow post from February 2024, Liv’s AI children have blurry faces and fucked up hands in one photo, are completely different children with a darker skin tone in the next, and, in the final photo, are white and blonde and are watching a “movie” that is made of chalk drawn on the wall. Liv, a fake person, also posts about helping her community by “leading this season’s coat drive,” which, again, “she” did not do.

“Grandpa Brian” is a Black “retired textile businessman who is always learning” who, in February, was surprised to learn “the seniors are often particularly interested in learning about textiles” according to a caption of an AI-generated image in which none of the seniors pictured have faces and are made up of grotesque swirls. In a video post from a year ago, he posted fake art drawn by his fake grandkids, the same way Facebook spammers have been doing for the last year and a half. In September 2023, Grandpa Brian even posted an AI-image of sand sculptures, the same way Jesus spammers have been doing, though Brian’s sand sculptures look like literal piles of shit. It got 25 likes and zero comments.

Meta actually announced these profiles back in September 2023 alongside the AI celebrity chatbots that Meta has already killed because of total disinterest from users. Of the 28 AI profiles that Facebook announced at the time, Meta has already deleted 15 of them (all of which were based on celebrities in some way). Most of the remaining 13 profiles stopped posting in April. Besides Liv and Grandpa Brian, there is:

• “Alvin the Alien,” a blue, tie-wearing alien who posted bland science fiction scenes and talked about how Earth is weird
• “Dog Lover Becca,” who, like spammers, just posted a bunch of AI-generated dogs
• “Bob the Robot,” who actually was active as recently as September when it posted “Test sample post”
• “Carter,” a vaguely Latino “relationship coach” 
• “Izzy,” a singer-songwriter who posted an AI-generated image of a concert they “performed” in February that she is not in and which distinctly shows two scrambled artist signatures in the bottom right corner, suggesting that the imagery it was trained on was a real artist’s work
• “Jade,” a Black woman who is “your girl for all things hip-hop” and whose posts are exclusively about expensive jewelry, long fake nails, rap, and sneakers
• “Jane Austen,” whose most recent post is literally AI-generated versions of Elsa from Frozen, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and Jasmine from Aladdin
• “Leo,” the blandest white “career coach” one could imagine who posts mostly about 401ks and collecting business cards
• “Lily,” yet another bland, offensively caricatured Black woman who posts about diversity
• “Scarlett,” a free-spirited artsy woman who is into thrifting, film photography, going to the beach, and music
• “Thalia,” a blue fairy of some sort

What is obvious from scrolling through these dead profiles is that Meta’s AI characters are not popular, people do not like them, and that they did not post anything interesting. They are capable only of posting utterly bland and at times offensive content, and people have wholly rejected them, which is evidenced by the fact that none of them are posting anymore. 

You can still chat with them, though, and users have begun trying to learn how they are trained and what their purpose is. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah got “Liv,” the “Black queer mama” to say that she was not actually trained on Black queer people and that her purpose is “data collection and ad targeting—my creators’ true intention, hidden behind my warm, fuzzy ‘mom’ persona.” 

Everything that Meta does is centered around increasing engagement, ad targeting, and data collection, so this is ostensibly true, but the bots I have seen are so utterly broken and incompetent at doing anything at all that it is hard to say for sure if the bots were programmed with this in mind or if they inferred it based on the giant wealth of writing and reporting about Meta’s business model. 

All of this reminds us, again, that people have a revulsion to being prompted to engage with random shit posted by inhuman AI profiles for the purposes of being delivered more ads. This project, and Hayes’s quote, is emblematic of the worst kinds of AI hype, where tech executives tell us generative AI is inevitable and is definitely going to change everything, when all evidence suggests that people do not want this. But Meta is hell-bent on making us do it anyway, regardless of how many times it fails. The AI slop will continue until morale improves.

Update: This article has been updated with comment from Meta.