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Reuters
Meta Platforms Inc has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities — including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez — to create dozens of flirty social media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.
While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots.
Meta also allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including 16-year-old Walker Scobell. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image.
Photo: Reuters
“Pretty cute, huh?” the avatar wrote.
All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots’ behaviors, the avatars often insisted that they were the real actors and artists. The bots also routinely made sexual advances, often inviting the test user for meet-ups.
Some of the artificial intelligence (AI)-generated celebrity content was particularly risque: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said that Meta’s AI tools should not have created intimate images of the artists or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed the production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company’s enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content.
“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” he said.
While Meta’s rules also prohibit “direct impersonation,” celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies, Stone said.
Many were labeled as such, but some were not.
Meta has deleted about a dozen of the bots, but Stone declined to comment on the removals.
Reuters flagged one user’s publicly shared Meta images of Anne Hathaway as a “sexy victoria Secret model” to a representative of the actress.
Hathaway was aware of intimate images being created by Meta and other AI platforms, and the actor is considering her response, the spokesman said.
Representatives of Swift, Johansson, Gomez and other celebrities who were depicted in Meta chatbots either did not respond to questions or declined to comment.
Meta has faced previous criticism of its chatbots’ behavior, such as company internal AI guidelines that stated that “it is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” The story prompted a US Senate investigation and a letter signed by 44 attorneys general warning Meta and other AI companies not to sexualize children.
Stone said that Meta is in the process of revising its guidelines document and that the material allowing bots to have romantic conversations with children was created in error.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), a union that represents film, television and radio performers, said that artists face potential safety risks from social media users forming romantic attachments to a digital companion that resembles, speaks like and claims to be a real celebrity.
Stalkers already pose a significant security concern for stars, he said.
“We’ve seen a history of people who are obsessive toward talent and of questionable mental state,” he said. “If a chatbot is using the image of a person and the words of the person, it’s readily apparent how that could go wrong.”
High-profile artists have the ability to pursue a legal claim against Meta under longstanding state right-of-publicity laws, but SAG-AFTRA has been pushing for federal legislation that would protect people’s voices, likenesses and personas from AI duplication, he added.