Would You Create AI Characters on Instagram to Impersonate You?

Instagram is introducing AI characters via their AI Studio, where you can chat with an artificially created version of yourself. If you don’t have time to chat with it but want to give your followers a chance to interact with this being that you personally designed, you can just share it with them too. The Instagram custom AI can act as an extension of your own persona, and you can equip it with some auto-responses for questions that your fans frequently ask you. 

This might relieve you of the burden of getting back to every adoring follower who just wants to know where they can find the dress you wore on your 26th birthday or what your recommendations for top travel destinations are. The custom AI by Meta is not the first instance of the company trying to cram AI into the app, and it likely won’t be the last.

Get Talking with Your Own Instagram AI Characters

Built with Llama 3.1 and designed in a simplistic way to allow anyone—even those without fancy tech skills—to create an AI, Meta claims the service is meant to “make you laugh, generate memes, give travel advice and so much more.” 

With this tool, users can choose to use AI to create a perfect conversation partner for themselves if they find the world lacking in decent options for them. Alternatively, they can duplicate themselves to create an AI that can be present when they can’t. The upcoming release of the Friend AI pendant and other similar chatbots that promise to provide a listening ear suggests that such use of artificial intelligence is growing more commonplace.

Using the AI Studio, users can create Instagram avatars that go being emoji versions of themselves. There are two types of custom AI that can be created via the studio—Creator AIs and AI characters. 

What Is Instagram’s Custom Creator AI?

The Creator AIs are meant for creators and influencers who want to have an artificially generated version of themselves to interact with their fans. These AI personas can be linked with an Instagram account and taught to mimic the creator’s tone and speech style so followers can treat it as an extension of their idols. 

A creator can select the social media content that their custom AIs on Instagram are trained on so that it depicts some sense of sentience and mimics them better. Friendly, snarky, funny, serious—you can give your AI a personality that reflects you. The creator has the freedom to control who can engage with the AI and they can monitor its responses if they want.

This tool will allow creators to have a more hands-free experience so they don’t feel the pressure to get back to every frequently asked question, like their go-to makeup brand or the camera they use for their photography. Just like businesses have the “Can I Help You?” chatbot every time you dare to open up their website, creators can enjoy some of that automation as well. 

Many Instagram creators have already adopted some degree of automation where they ask you to comment “link” to get a link to their free crochet pattern or whatever else they might be selling, so Instagram’s custom AIs will only take that a step further.

Content creator Violet Benson has signed up to promote Meta’s custom AI according to their website and her own posts on Instagram. Sending her a message may send you to her chatbot and you’ll know when it’s AI because of the “AI” and “Beta” tag on top. She states that the AI can be trained to avoid topics that are inappropriate for your page, and this should ensure your AI doesn’t sign you up for any dates with a stranger by mistake. There is also the risk of people seeking medical, financial, or social advice so creators need to be careful about banning their AI from responding to any risky topics.

How Are Character AIs Different from the Creator AI?

Creator AIs are more useful for those who need a chatbot assistant to handle all their fan communications, but for the rest of us, there aren’t as many people reaching out for our attention. While you may still be able to set up the creator avatars, you might find the AI characters to be a lot more useful. You can now create AI characters tailored to your interests on Instagram and these avatars will act as expert accounts on the subject.

Customizing this AI to suit your preferences, you can then turn to it for a recipe or general information on a topic of interest. If you like dissecting Formula 1 predictions or want an AI to provide some daily affirmations, then you can customize you AI character to do just that.

Want your close friends to also be able to benefit from the Instagram AI characters? You can share access with them as well. 

How Does Instagram’s Custom AI Work?

AI Studios provides some templates for you to use for your character if you’re not sure what you want it to do just yet. If you have an idea in mind for your character, you can use AI Studio to add a profile image for your Instagram avatars, give it a name, provide a tagline, and then go into the knowledge section to shape its personality and behavior. Moving to the instructions, you can reshape how it behaves and in what format it provides responses. 

When asked “What does your AI do?”, you can give it a personality such as “creates travel guides” or “provides me with daily trivia about flags” to help set it up. Meta advises users to write in the third person for best results, so you can format your recipe generator chatbot with “NotChefRamsay provides snarky remarks on the list of ingredients shared with it and then generates a recipe.” The more specific the instructions, the better it will be able to give you the results you want.

You can also give your custom Instagram AI characters some sample dialogues and responses to teach them how to operate and communicate. If you want it to embrace your love for emojis, go ahead and throw a few of those into the sample text. You can similarly teach the AI how it’s expected to greet people and also include some prompts that will help a new visitor start a conversation with the AI.

The instruction page for AI Studio’s Instagram avatars suggests it will also be capable of image generation and there’s a Beta search mode that can be added to help the AI draw information from the internet. The AI also has long-term memory so a returning user can continue a conversation when they interact with the AI. It’s quite a lot for social media AI bots to take on and we have to wonder about how their servers are designed to hold up with the thousands of AI avatars that will likely come to life soon.

Can Everyone Use the AI Studio Instagram Avatars?

For now, the Instagram AI character feature is only being released in the U.S. so a limited number of users will have access to the tool. If the Beta tests go off successfully, we could possibly see a more global launch but it’s unclear if this will remain free or not. Users can share their AI with friends via Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp only, but this too could expand in the future.

Different countries have different regulations when it comes to the use and spread of AI and while they aren’t as extensive as they need to be, they do get in the way of such AI inventions. Apps like Snapchat have had their own exploration with AI and smartphones are capitalizing on AI as the next big thing but no one is hot in pursuit of AI quite like Meta. There’s a new tool or feature to look out for every other day and the company keeps pushing users to try it out. 

This new AI Studio with its Instagram avatars and characters appears to be interesting, even if it’s ultimately over the top. Creators who want to stay relevant will be forced to adopt it like they were forced to transition from photos to reels and now expected to use the broadcast channels on the app. There’s quite a bit of room for misuse of such AI as there’s inevitably going to be a few who sit down to try and make the most “dank” and inappropriate AI avatars they can think of. Will this new social experiment succeed? Let’s see.