Instagram is starting to let some creators make AI versions of themselves

Instagram’s new “AI Studio” will let creators make AI chatbot versions of themselves, and Meta is starting to roll it out as an “initial test” in the US, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his broadcast channel On thursday.

As part of the test, “you may start to see AIs from your favorite creators and interest-based AIs in the coming weeks on Instagram,” according to Zuckerberg. “For now, they will mainly appear in messages and will be clearly labeled as AI.”

Zuckerberg shared some videos of conversations with creator-created AI chatbots as examples. On a creator’s Instagram, you can tap the “Message” button to start a conversation. A warning at the top says the messages are AI-generated and “some may be inaccurate or inappropriate.” (Let’s hope Meta’s systems can prevent these creator-created AIs from saying something terrible.) Meta also includes “AI” in front of the creator’s name. It isat least for now, a “beta” tag after the person’s name.

“We’ve been working closely with creators to build them so they’re useful for answering questions they get from their followers and can talk to people in a way that’s useful and fun,” says Zuckerberg. “We are still in the early days and in the first beta version of these AIs, so we will continue working to improve them and make them available to more people soon.”

On a new interview, Zuckerberg spoke more about the company’s AI strategy. He says: “We think people want to interact with lots of different people and companies and there needs to be lots of different AIs created to reflect people’s different interests.” Meta wants to enable creators and eventually small businesses to “create an AI for themselves” to interact with their communities and customers. “We think this will create a much more engaging experience and will be more dynamic and useful than just having a single thing that people use.” He also says that Meta will allow people to create AI characters that are not necessarily representations of themselves.

Broadly speaking, this is a vision the company has had for some time – Zuckerberg made similar comments in an interview with my colleague Alex Heath last year, when the company announced its Meta AI assistant and celebrity-themed chatbots. Now that the company is actually testing AI Studio, we’ll see if people actually want to chat with AI versions of their favorite creators.