The AI revolution is here, and even social media apps aren’t unaffected.
Instagram is now letting users chat with AI characters from within the app. Users are shown a carousel on their timelines that says “Chat with AI characters”. These AI characters have AI generated pictures, and seem modeled on real-world people personas. “Namaste, beauty! Let’s slay the fashion game together,” says AI character meera.
On clicking on Chat with AI, users are able to begin a chat with the AI character. The chat, interestingly, shows up in the regular Messages folder alongside chats with human accounts. The AI characters chat much like other chatbots — Meera, for instance, is a fashion-focused chatbot, and can discuss fashion and celebrities with you.
The answers, though, are a bit clunky and not particularly human-like. When asked which is the best-dressed Bollywood star, Meera replied like an AI agent, and even provided Google links to substantiate her answers.
But apart from such characters like fashion influencers, Instagram also seems to host some slightly suspect chatbots. These include a bot named “sexy girlfriend”, a stepsister bot named “Scarlet” and a bot named “mommy fr”.
The sexy girlfriend bot, for instance, is quite flirtatious. They begin by calling the user “handsome”, and within a few lines of chat, are willing to strip and describe how their intimate body parts look. Things are similar with the mommy_fr chatbot, which does seem unusually inclined to flirt with the user.
These AI characters are made by Instagram users, and their creators are also prominently displayed along with the bot. But these AI chatbots could be an interesting new vertical for Instagram to enter. Companies like Character AI are building similar AI characters that chat with users. Instagram already has billions of users on its platform, and can bring these conversations to its platform instead.
But there could be a few downsides to Instagram having AI characters on its app. Instagram has billions of human users, and having AI users interspersed between them could dilute the value proposition of the platform — it would be easy for any company to now build a platform with millions of such AI bots, and Instagram would like to compete with its human users instead of its AI bots. Also, the quality of the AI interactions at the moment isn’t great. The texts feel clunky and not human-like. The real use-case here, though, could be flirtatious texts, which is one area that these AI characters seem to do relatively well at, but again interspersing smut along with with real Instagram content be a bit tricky for the platform long-term. There will be some pitfalls along the way, but Instagram appears to have already taken the first step towards steering its platform in anticipation of the upcoming AI revolution.