Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company will begin releasing creator-created AI characters to Instagram through its Meta AI Studio, with testing starting in the US.
The social media company's announcement comes on the same day that a16z-backed chatbot company Character.AI rolls out a feature that lets users converse with an AI avatar over the phone.
In a post on his channel, Zuckerberg said these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI so that users can recognize them.
“We're rolling out initial tests of AI Studio in the US, and you'll start seeing AI from your favourite creators and interest-based AI on Instagram in the coming weeks. These will appear primarily in messages for now and will be clearly labelled as AI,” he said.
“These AIs are still in their early stages and are in their first beta, so we'll be working on improving them and making them available to more people soon,” Zuckerberg added.
Zuckerberg said he worked with creators, including meme account Wasted and tech creator Don Allen Stevenson III, to roll out early versions of creator-built chatbots.
In an interview shared on his social channels, Zuckerberg further elaborated on the use cases for AI avatars, adding, “We need to create different APIs to reflect people's different interests. So a big part of this approach is empowering every creator, and ultimately every small business on the platform, to build their own AI that helps them interact with their community or, if they're a business, their customers.”
Creators can also use AI to engage with their fans, as they currently don’t have the time to reply to every incoming message.
Still, he acknowledged that how good the AI avatars will ultimately be will be something of an “art form” that will evolve and improve over time.
“As we start this journey, I think we still don't know what's going to be the most compelling and interesting and how to build trust,” Zuckerberg said. “So I want to give people the tools, let them experiment with this and see what works in the end.”
Meta will initially test the feature with around 50 creators and a small number of users, before rolling it out to more users over the next few months, with a full release planned by August.
Meta first unveiled its AI Studio, which lets businesses build custom chatbots, at its developer conference last year.
Additional reporting by Sara Perez
