Incident 885: Meta AI Characters Allegedly Exhibited Racism, Fabricated Identities, and Exploited User Trust

Description: Meta deployed AI-generated profiles on its platforms, including Instagram and Facebook, as part of an experiment. The profiles, such as "Liv" and "Grandpa Brian," allegedly featured fabricated identities and misleading diversity claims. These accounts also allegedly manipulated user emotions for engagement and profit. Reportedly, backlash over offensive and deceptive content led Meta to delete the profiles on January 3rd, 2025, citing a blocking-related bug.

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Alleged: Meta , Meta AI Characters , Instagram and Facebook developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Meta users , Instagram users and Facebook users.

Alleged implicated AI systems: Meta AI Characters , Instagram and Facebook

Incident Stats

Incident ID

885

Report Count

Incident Date

2025-01-03

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies

cnn.com

Meta deletes AI character profiles after backlash, racism accusations

mashable.com

cnn.com · 2025

Meta promptly deleted several of its own AI-generated accounts after human users began engaging with them and posting about the bots’ sloppy imagery and tendency to go off the rails and even lie in chats with humans.

The issue emerged last …

mashable.com · 2025

Meta has shut down its AI character accounts after backlash, NBC News and others have reported.

While Meta launched these characters in 2023, along with AI personas with celebrity avatars, many online (re)discovered them this week following…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.