Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday that the company will begin featuring AI characters created by creators through the Meta AI studio on Instagram. Testing will begin in the United States
The social media company’s announcement comes on the same day that a16z-backed chatbot company Character.AI rolls out the ability for users to speak with AI avatars during a call.
In a message posted to his channel, Zuckerberg noted that these chatbots will be clearly marked as AI so that users are aware of it.
“We are rolling out a preliminary test in the United States of our AI studio. So you’ll be able to start seeing AIs from your favorite creators and AIs based on your interests in the coming weeks on Instagram. For now, they will mainly appear in messages and will be clearly labeled as AI,” he said.
“We’re still in the early stages and first beta of these AIs, so we’re going to continue working to improve them and make them available to more people soon,” Zuckerberg added.
Zuckerberg noted that he worked with creators like meme account Wasted and tech creator Don Allen Stevenson III to roll out early versions of creator-created chatbots.
In an interview shared on his social media, Zuckerberg explained the use cases for AI avatars: “You have to build a lot of different APIs to reflect people’s different interests. So a big part of the approach is going to be to enable every creator, and potentially 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, as they currently don’t have time to respond to every incoming message.
He nevertheless admitted that the quality of AI avatars would ultimately become a sort of “art form” that would evolve and improve over time.
“I don’t think we know, going into this, what the most engaging, most entertaining, most trust-building formula for this is going to be,” Zuckerberg noted. “So we want to give people tools so they can experiment with this and see what ends up working well,” he said.
Meta will initially begin testing the feature with around 50 creators and a small percentage of users, then roll it out to more people over the next two months, with the hopes of fully launching it by August.
Meta first announced its AI Studio last year at its developer conference to enable businesses to create custom chatbots.
Additional reporting: Sarah Perez
News Source : techcrunch.com
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