Meta to Let Some Instagram Users Create AI Chatbots as ‘Extension of Themselves’

Instagram parent Meta Platforms Inc. will let users create their own AI-powered chatbots and add them to their profiles, an effort to court creators and further integrate the company’s artificial intelligence software into its most popular consumer products.

The feature, called AI Studio, lets creators with professional accounts make a custom AI chatbot that is “an extension of themselves” and can answer common questions from fans or followers. People can tell their bot what types of questions to answer, or which topics to avoid, Meta wrote in a blog post.

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The broader universe of Instagram users will be able to make a themed chatbot for their profile, for example a bot focused on mixed martial arts, dining or pets. 

Both features will roll out more broadly in the coming weeks.

Meta first announced AI Studio last September. On Monday, the company started shipping the features for some users, timing that will coincide with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance alongside Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Denver this week.

Meta has been spending aggressively on AI in recent years, and Zuckerberg has been open about his expectation that the company will develop some of the best chatbots in the world. It already offers its own AI chatbot, called Meta AI, inside Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook.

Meta released its most recent large language model, the technology used to power chatbots, earlier this month. That new model can solve complex math problems and analyze entire books almost instantly, and also allows users to generate new images of themselves in various scenarios using only a text prompt.