CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Instagram said on his broadcast channel on Thursday that Meta is beginning to roll out Instagram's new "AI Studio," which will allow creators to create AI chatbot replicas of themselves, as an "early test" in the US.

Highlights:

• Meta is testing Instagram's "AI Studio" in the US, letting creators make AI chatbots of themselves.
• Users can interact with these AI chatbots, labeled as AI and in beta.
• Meta plans to allow small businesses to create their own AI for better engagement with customers.

As part of the experiment, Zuckerberg said, "in the upcoming weeks on Instagram, you might start discovering AIs from your favorite creators and interest-based AIs." "For the time being, these will mostly appear in messaging and will be clearly labeled as AI."

Zuckerberg gave examples in the form of a few videos showing interactions with AI chatbots created by users. You can initiate a discussion by tapping the "Message" button on a creator's Instagram account. The messages are generated by AI, according to a notice at the top, and "some may be inaccurate or inappropriate." (Perhaps Meta's systems can stop these AIs created by creators from saying something awful.) In addition, Meta places a "AI" prefix before the creator's name and, for the time being at least, a "beta" tag following the name.

Zuckerberg states, "We've been working directly with creators to build these so they can chat with people in a way that's useful and fun and help them answer the questions they get from their followers." "These AIs are still in their early stages and are only in their first beta version, so we'll keep working to improve them and make them accessible to more people soon."

Zuckerberg expanded on his discussion of the company's AI plan in a recent interview. "We think people want to interact with a wide variety of people and businesses, so a wide variety of AIs need to be created to reflect people's different interests," he states. With time, Meta hopes to enable small businesses and entrepreneurs to "create an AI for themselves" in order to engage with their clientele and communities. 

"We believe that will result in a far more engaging experience and be more dynamic and helpful than having just one product that people use." Additionally, he claims that Meta will allow users to create AI personalities who aren't always autobiographical.

In general, this is a goal that the firm has had for some time; last year, when the company debuted its Meta AI assistant and celebrity-themed chatbots, Zuckerberg shared similar thoughts in an interview with my colleague Alex Heath. We'll see if consumers are interested in interacting with AI representations of their favorite creators now that the business is genuinely testing AI Studio.