Users are increasingly frustrated by profiles that appear human but are in fact AI-generated people, Meta says
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Users are becoming increasingly frustrated with the experience of seeing a profile that seems human – before realising that the person shown doesn’t actually exist at all, and was generated with AI.
Instagram will not ban these accounts. But it will add a new label to them – changing it from “AI creator” to “AI-generated profile” – and limit the reach of any accounts that include fake people and do not add the label.
Instagram said it had made the changes in response to feedback after first introducing that AI creator label, which it started testing earlier this year. That was an early attempt to crack down on a growing trend across the site, where users will make fake profiles for fake people that have been generated with AI.
“As generative AI becomes a bigger part of how people create, we’ve heard that people don’t like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated,” Instagram said in an announcement. “They want to know when a profile features an AI-generated person.”
Instagram will try and proactively hunt down accounts that are using AI-generated people. Users can then choose to add the profile, appeal the decision – or find themselves hidden on the explore page and in reels.
The changes will not cover accounts that simply use AI tools to make posts for the app. Instead, it will apply only to accounts that feature an AI-generated person.
And Instagram will still allow those accounts to exist as before. It will only ask that anyone using AI to make fake accounts label them “so their profile accurately reflects their AI-based identity”.
Similar changes might come in the future, Instagram suggested. “This change is part of our ongoing effort to improve transparency, and we hope it helps people better understand who or what is behind the content they’re seeing on Instagram,” the company wrote in a blog post.
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