Social media. The start of the year means it’s time to make good resolutions and embark on new projects. On this occasion, the Meta company unveiled its roadmap for the year 2025. Unsurprisingly, the team promises to focus on artificial intelligence, by continuing to develop tools on the social networks Instagram and Facebook, notably. In 2023, the company had already imagined chatbots based on influencers and celebrities, such as TikToker Charli Damelio. Then, thanks to their AI Studio tool, unveiled in July 2024, users had the possibility of creating a virtual avatar to help them manage their communities.
For 2025, Meta goes even further and proposes to use artificial intelligence to create real influencers on Instagram and Facebook. So far, nothing new, because virtual influencer profiles already exist almost everywhere in the world, with one exception. Behind every account there is a human.
Already “a hundred thousand characters” have been generated using AI on Instagram and Facebook
It is in front of the journalists of Financial Times that Connor Hayes, VP of Product for Generative AI at Meta revealed this feature. Over time, he realized that these virtual influencer profiles work well on social networks. They create engagement, and therefore generate money through collaborations with brands or via the advertising features offered by Meta. Faced with this observation, the social network therefore said to itself that there was something to do.
Meta’s objective is to attract an ever-younger audience to increase its presence on the market, facing TikTok and Snapchat for example. Moreover, the company stands ready to recover lost users of the social network TikTok, if it ends up banned in the United States.
According to Connor Hayes, “hundreds of thousands of characters” have already been generated, but their accounts are private. They have a profile photo, a description, subscribers, and publications, all imagined with artificial intelligence. “We expect that these AIs will actually exist, over time, on our platforms, much in the same way as accounts,” he says. For the moment, little information is available on this project.