Meta's fake Instagram profiles are the most depressing AI development yet

The phrase 'AI slop' has been growing in ubiquity, thanks to the sheer amount of low quality artificially generated content that's increasingly plaguing the internet these days. Hats off to Meta, then, for taking the idea to a whole new level.

Just days after we reported that Meta was planning to create fully autonomous AI profiles on its platforms, users have begun to discover that AI profiles are already lurking on Instagram – and they're even more dystopian than we imagined. Meta is already scrambling to delete them, and for good reason – these things are just depressing.

From Liv, the "proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller," to Brian, who describes himself as "everybody's grandpa," (steady on, Brian), the characters and bios are all very generic. But the photos they've posted are downright sad, simply because they obviously don't exist.

From a fake textiles class with OAPs to, perhaps the most depressing example, non-existent donated coats, the images shared by these AI bots are as dystopian as it gets, especially when accompanied by their generically sunny captions.

It looks like these AI bots were created and managed by Meta a while ago, and haven't shared any new content since early last year. Most only have a few thousand followers. With their recent hasty deletion by Meta, we're getting a pretty compelling picture of a failed initiative from the company. Indeed, Meta recently confirmed to The Verge that its AI bots were created in 2023, and were managed by humans.

At least it would seem like the project was, like the bots themselves, dead and buried – if the company hadn't literally just shared its intention to flood its platforms with AI bots. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” Connor Hayes, vice-president of product for generative AI at Meta, told Financial Times. “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.”

With that context, these now deceased bots look like a terrifying (and hilariously incompetent) vision of what Meta might have in mind for the not-so-distant future. The future's bright. The future's sloppy.