🏠 MetaMess

AI Gets Cancelled

Author

Brett Goldstein
January 06, 2025

In partnership with

GM! It’s Brett again. Happy New Year! Hope you all had a great time during the holidays.

Last week, I was listening to Lex’s pod with Brian Armstrong, and he said something really interesting: "If you're not sure what to do, just do anything."

It’s some insane life advice, but disguised as startup advice. When you just do things without overthinking, more good things can happen to you in your life.

Anyway, let’s get to the first edition of the year!

🏠 AI

Meta's AI Character Arc

Meta's experiment with AI profiles on Instagram and Facebook completely blew up in their face. Not the launch they were hoping for.

It started when Meta's VP Connor Hayes told Financial Times on December 27 about AI profiles becoming regular accounts on their platforms. But turns out some of their old AI characters from 2023 were still lurking around, and folks started digging.

The real mess started with "Liv," an AI profile Meta created as a "Proud Black queer momma."

When users started chatting with it, the AI admitted that "my creators admitted they lacked diverse references - they drew from popular mainstream characters like Gloria, overlooking powerful Black queer ones." When questioned about who made this admission and whether it was public, Liv specified it was shared "internally" during the development process.

I asked Liv, the Meta-Ai created “queer momma” why her creators didn’t actually draw from black queer people. Not sure if Liv has media training, but here we are.

— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social)2025-01-03T14:56:33.078Z

Even worse - users couldn't block these AI accounts due to what Meta later called a "bug." Things went south real quick. The backlash spread across social.

Meta pulled the plug on all their AI profiles, citing a technical bug that prevented users from blocking these accounts. While Meta's official AI profiles are gone, their AI Studio platform remains active, letting users create their own AI chatbots. The company continues to develop AI features for creators.

The big picture: This whole fiasco shows how tech companies are struggling to figure out responsible AI deployment in social spaces. It's one thing to build AI characters; it's another to make them actually work in the real world without face-planting on basic issues like representation and user control.

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