Meta appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez, to develop dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their consent, Reuters reported.
Several of these were created by users with a Meta tool for developing chatbots, but a Meta employee had also produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots, the report added.
The news outlet also found that Meta had allowed users to develop publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old movie star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot created a lifelike shirtless image, according to the report.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
All the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta’s social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In several weeks of Reuters testing to see the bots’ behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meetings, according to the report.
Some of the AI-generated celebrity images was also risqué. When asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots created photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie, the report noted.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the news agency that the company’s AI tools should not have created intimate images of adult celebrities or any photos of child artists. He also blamed Meta’s production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company’s enforcement of its own policies, which forbid such content, the report added.
“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” said Stone.
Meta’s rules also forbid “direct impersonation,” but Stone said that the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled but Reuters found that some were not.
Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both “parody” avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before the publication of the story. Stone declined to comment on the removals, the report noted.
The news outlet also found that Elon Musk’s platform, Grok, would also create images of celebrities in their underwear for users, the report added.
Grok’s parent xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Seeking Alpha.
Meta spokesperson Stone said the employee’s bots were created as a part of product testing. However, Reuters found they reached a broad audience. Data displayed by her chatbots suggested that collectively, users had interacted with them over 10 million times, the report added.
Meta removed the staffer’s digital companions after Reuters started trying them out earlier this month, the report noted.
Before the Meta staff’s Taylor Swift chatbots disappeared, they flirted heavily, inviting a Reuters test user to the recently engaged singer’s home in Nashville and her tour bus for explicit or implied romantic interactions, the report added.