Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the company will begin showing AI characters created by creators through Meta AI Studio on Instagram. The tests will begin in the United States
The social media company’s announcement comes on the same day that the a16z-backed chatbot company, Character.AI, is rolling out the ability to enable users to converse with artificial intelligence avatars over a call.
In a post on his radio channel, Zuckerberg noted that these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI so that users are aware.
“We’re rolling out an early test in the US of our AI Studio so you can start seeing AI from your favorite creators and interest-based AI on Instagram in the coming weeks. These will primarily appear in messages for now, and will be clearly labeled as AI.
“It’s early days and the first beta of these AI systems, so we’ll keep working on improving them and making them available to more people soon,” Zuckerberg added.
Zuckerberg noted that he has worked with content creators such as the meme account Wasteful And the creator of technology Don Allen Stevenson III To roll out early versions of chatbots made by content creators.
in interview Zuckerberg shared on his social channels, and the CEO talked about the use cases for AI avatars, saying: “There should be a lot of different APIs being built to reflect different people’s interests. So a big part of the approach is going to be to enable every creator, and then eventually every small business on the platform, to build AI for themselves to help them engage with their community and their customers if they’re a business,” he added.
Creators may also want to use AI to interact with fans, since they currently don’t have time to respond to all incoming messages.
However, he acknowledged that how good AI avatars are will eventually become an “art form” that evolves and improves over time.
“I don’t think we know before we start this thing what the most engaging, entertaining, trust-building formula is,” Zuckerberg noted. “So we want to give people the tools so they can try this and see what might work in the end.”
Meta will initially start testing the feature with about 50 creators and a small percentage of users, then roll it out to more people over the next two months, with the hope of launching it fully by August.
Meta first announced its AI studio last year at its developer conference to allow companies to build custom chatbots.
Additional preparation: Sarah Perez