Reply while you sleep: Instagram lets you create an AI version of yourself

Simone Del Rosario: You DM your favorite influencer and a reply comes back lightning fast. WOW! You didn’t even think they checked their DMs! But it might not be a real person behind that personalized message, even if it sounds just like them.

Soon, anyone in the U.S. will be able to create AI versions of themselves on Instagram or the web as Meta rolls out AI Studio. 

The idea is that creators and business accounts will use the AI to talk directly to their followers, responding to comments or replying to messages. 

It’s up to the creator to tell the AI what topics are off limits…like a financial influencer opting not to advise on investing in crypto…Something that could get you in trouble with the SEC. 

But enough from me, let’s hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a chat with NVIDIA’s CEO. 

Mark Zuckerberg: There’s kind of a fundamental issue here, where there’s, there’s just not enough hours in the day, right? It’s like, if you’re, if you’re a creator, you want to engage more with your community, but you you’re constrained on time, and similarly, your community wants to engage with you, but it’s tough. I mean, there’s, there’s just, there’s a limited time to do that. So the next best thing is, is allowing people to basically create these artifacts, right? It’s, it’s sort of, it’s an agent, but it’s you train it to kind of on your material, to represent you in the way that you want. I think it, it’s a very kind of creative endeavor, almost like a like a piece of art or content that you’re putting out there. And no, it’s to be very clear that it’s not engaging with the Creator themselves. But I think it’ll be another interesting way, just like how creators put out content on on these social systems, to be able to have agents that do that.

Simone Del Rosario: Zuck touched on some of the issues surrounding these AI versions of people, like labeling so people know they’re not actually interacting with the creator, but an AI agent. 

Meta’s AI studio also allows people to create their own AI chatbots, and is on top of Meta’s main chatbot offering, Meta AI. 

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s all part of this bigger, I guess, view that we have that there shouldn’t just be kind of one big AI that people interact with. We just think that the world will be better and more interesting if there’s a diversity of these different things.

Simone Del Rosario: Let’s point out some of the obvious concerns here. Privacy’s a big one. Meta is already using your posts and data to develop its AI systems, though you can opt out. Creating your own AI chatbot comes with sacrifice in the form of, how much data are you willing to hand over to replicate yourself?

The other is human connection. Americans have gotten so lonely the surgeon general declared loneliness an epidemic. And social media is a big part of that already. In a study, people who reported using social media more than two hours a day had double the odds of reporting social isolation compared to those who are on the socials less than 30 minutes a day. 

But still, people, especially teens, use social media to connect. And how does that land if the other side of your connection is generated by AI? 

Mark Zuckerberg: With generative AI, I think we’re going to quickly move into the zone where not only is the majority of the content that you see today on Instagram just recommended to you from kind of stuff that’s out there in the world that matches your interests to whether or not you follow the people, I think in the future, a lot of the stuff is going to be created with these tools too.

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