Instagram creators can now chat with their followers through AI avatars

Instagram is giving creators a new way to interact with their followers. The parent company Meta has announced it is now rolling out AI Studio, a collection of AI-powered tools to create your AI avatar that can chat with your followers and answer their questions on your behalf. The new AI Studio tools are now available widely to creators in the US, months after they were announced during the Meta Connect event last year.

Meta said that the AI personas of creators will solve one of Instagram’s biggest problems: the deluge of daily messages that most creators cannot keep up with. With the help of AI avatars, creators can reach and interact with a large audience without involvement. “These creators can actually use the comments that they’ve made, the captions that they’ve made, the transcripts of the Reels that they’ve posted, as well as any custom instructions or links that they want to provide…so that the AI can answer on their behalf,” Engadget quoted Connor Hayes, vice president of Product for AI Studio at Meta, as saying.

But that is not where the company wants to stop in terms of how it can make creator AIs more useful. In an interview with Bloomberg, Meta’s chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said he hopes there will eventually be “hundreds of millions” of creator AIs across Meta’s apps. While their purpose is unclear, Zuckerberg wants more engagement on all the company’s platforms. However, whether or not users would want to interact with the AI personas of their favourite creators is something only time will tell.

Meta previously introduced AI avatars of popular celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Snoop Dogg, but people do not seem interested in interacting with them. On that, Hayes has a different take. “One thing that ended up being somewhat confusing for people was, ‘am I talking to the celebrity that is embodying this AI, or am I talking to an AI and they’re playing the character,” Hayes was quoted as saying. He added that the new creator AIs will be an extension of creators, so things “will be a lot clearer.”