Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company will start showing AI characters made by creators on Instagram through Meta’s AI studio. The tests will start in the U.S.
This news comes as another company, Character.AI, is also letting users talk to AI avatars over calls.
Zuckerberg said in a post that these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI so people know they are talking to a bot.
“We’re starting a test in the U.S. with our AI studio, so you might see AIs from your favorite creators on Instagram soon. For now, they will mostly appear in messaging and will be labeled as AI,” he said.
“It’s early, and this is the first beta version, so we’ll keep improving them and make them available to more people soon,” Zuckerberg added.
Meta worked with creators like the meme account Wasted and tech creator Don Allen Stevenson III to create early versions of these chatbots.
In an interview, Zuckerberg talked about different uses for AI avatars. He said, “There needs to be many different APIs to reflect people’s interests. We want to enable every creator, and eventually every small business, to create their own AI to interact with their community or customers,” he said. Creators might also use AIs to talk to fans, as they don’t have time to reply to all messages.
He also said that making good AI avatars will become an “art form” that will improve over time.
“We don’t know yet what will be the most engaging and trust-building formula for this,” Zuckerberg noted. “So we want to give people tools to experiment and see what works best,” he said.
Meta will start testing the feature with about 50 creators and a small group of users. They plan to roll it out to more people over the next few months and hope to fully launch it by August.
Meta first announced its AI studio last year at its developer conference to let businesses build custom chatbots.
Source: techcrunch
