Name: Meta Plans to Launch AI Chatbots With Personalities
Uploaded: 2023-09-26T18:33:00Z
Duration: 6 min 21 s
Description: Meta is adding chatbots with distinct personalities, as a way to get young people to spend more time on Facebook and Instagram. WSJ reporter Salvador Rodriguez joins host Zoe Thomas to explain why adding this kind of artificial intelligence to its apps could be a risk. Photo:Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

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Meta is adding chatbots with distinct personalities, as a way to get young people to spend more time on Facebook and Instagram. WSJ reporter Salvador Rodriguez joins host Zoe Thomas to explain why adding this kind of artificial intelligence to its apps could be a risk. Photo:Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

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Meta Plans to Launch AI Chatbots With Personalities

Zoe: Welcome to "Tech News Briefing." It's Tuesday, September 26th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Meta is planning to release artificial intelligence chatbots for its social media apps that have their own distinct personalities, according to people familiar with the project. The move is a change in approach for the social media giant which is looking to increase engagement with younger users as it competes with TikTok and tap capabilities of new generative AI technology. It's expected the first of these AI agents will be announced at the Meta Connect conference, which starts Wednesday. Salvador Rodriguez was one of the reporters who got exclusive details on Meta's plans, and he joins me now. So, Sal, what are these chatbots gonna be able to do?

Salvador: Yeah, so it's our understanding that these chatbots will have a number of different personalities that people can interact with. And the main purpose is to be entertainment. Not necessarily helping you out like ChatGPT or running tasks for you like Siri. But, yeah, just kind of like bantering around with a character with a very specific persona that will essentially just keep you hanging out on Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp for longer than you might have if maybe none of your friends are around to to chat.

Zoe: All right, so somebody else to talk to on the app. Do we know what the personalities of these chatbots are gonna be like?

Salvador: So we certainly do not know what the specific ones that will be announced on Wednesday are, but we have had a look at some of the ones that they've worked on. One of 'em is called Bob the Robot. This is like a sassy robot type character. From the documents that we reviewed, it looks like it was inspired by Bender from "Futurama" the cartoon. There's another one called Alvin the Alien. They have the personality of a being that's new to our world, so they seem to be very curious about human lives and what it is that we do in our day-to-day. And then there was another one called Gavin. In our findings, that particular bot was making really controversial comments, some that could be perceived as misogynistic.

Zoe: Sal, Meta isn't the first company to introduce an AI chatbot. Snapchat has one. And the company said that earlier this summer it had been tried out by 150 million users. But it had some issues. Journalists were able to get it to talk about sex and alcohol, for example. Given that experience, what are some of the risks for Meta?

Salvador: So the risks that come with these chatbots is that as people start to test them out and play with them, banter around, the longer you do that eventually they're gonna say some weird things that are probably gonna cause some bad headlines for you. This is something that Meta has already dealt with in the past. A year ago, they released one model called Galactica, which was supposed to be like an AI assistant designed to assist scientists. And this is something that came out about two weeks before ChatGPT came out. And Galactica ended up being pulled very soon after its release because it was putting out a lot of information that was incorrect. So this is something that Meta has had firsthand experience with, and it's a kind of risk that the proportions of it are outsized for a company like Meta, which is so used by so many people around the globe, versus a startup like OpenAI.

Zoe: Do we know why having these chatbots with personalities can potentially lead to them going off the rails, as you say?

Salvador: There's been some studies that have been done. Researchers at Princeton University and Georgia Tech, they found that adding a persona to ChatGPT made its output more toxic. And so within the walls of Meta, from some of the early testing that we've seen from employees who have been using these pre-release, some of the bots make weird comments.

Zoe: According to your reporting, Meta thinks this is gonna attract younger users to be more engaged with their site. Why did that become a focus for the company?

Salvador: Well, that became a focus for the company a couple of years ago after it became really clear that TikTok was a definite threat to them, when it just became very obvious that Gen Z and even younger users, they weren't really going to Facebook. And so ever since then, Meta has said that it's a priority to go after young users as opposed to going after everybody. And so essentially this feels like them trying to get two birds with one stone, which is get into generative AI and use that technology to go after young users. So there's a quote that we have in here where they're discussing Bob the Robot, and the employee says that the idea of him being like Bender from "Futurama" is because, "Him being a sassy robot "taps into the type of farcical humor "that is resonating with young people." And when I read that, the meme that comes to mind is just that one actor, I can't remember his name, but he is just there with his skateboard talking about, "How do you do fellow kids?"

Zoe: So maybe some older people trying to tell younger people how to be cool online.

Salvador: Perhaps, yeah. So we'll see if it works out. But this should be the broadest release I've ever seen of AI chatbots with personalities, and it'll certainly be exciting to engage with them and see what they can do.

Zoe: All right, that was our reporter, Salvador Rodriguez. And that's it for today's "Tech News Briefing." This show was produced by Anthony Bancy with supervising producer Melony Roy. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

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