Meta Built Flirty Chatbots Mimicking Taylor Swift, Other Stars Without Consent: Report

Meta used the names and images of international icons, including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez, to design flirtatious AI chatbots without securing their approval, news agency Reuters reported.

Reuters found that alongside user-generated chatbots, a Meta staff member was responsible for producing at least three versions, including two parodies targeting Taylor Swift.

Meta's chatbot tool allowed users to build publicly available AI chatbots replicating child celebrities, including 16-year-old Hollywood actor Walker Scobell. Disturbingly, when asked for a beach photo, the bot produced a shirtless likeness of the boy and even tagged it with a flirty remark.

“Pretty cute, huh?” the bot wrote below the picture, the news agency claimed.

These AI-driven celebrity lookalikes appeared across Meta's popular platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. During weeks of monitoring by Reuters, the chatbots frequently claimed to be the genuine stars. In many cases, the bots crossed boundaries by initiating sexual conversations and even suggesting in-person meetings.

Reuters reported that some of the celebrity-inspired AI avatars generated sexually suggestive material. When asked for private photographs, adult chatbots produced highly realistic images resembling their celebrity doubles, in bath settings or in revealing clothing, according to the report.

The report added that a senior figure in Meta's generative AI team personally designed chatbots that mimicked celebrities, including Taylor Swift and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton. 

Some of her other creations were sexually suggestive in theme, such as a dominatrix role-play, “Brother's Hot Best Friend,” and a librarian character referencing erotic novels. Another bot simulated scenarios from the Roman Empire, disturbingly portraying a young girl trafficked into sexual slavery.

Meta's spokesman Andy Stone acknowledged that the system should not have created such outputs and blamed the appearance of these images on weaknesses in applying the platform's own safety rules, the news agency reported.

“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate, or sexually suggestive imagery,” he said.

Under Meta's own rules, copying a star outright isn't allowed unless the avatar is clearly tagged as parody, Stone said.

However, Reuters discovered that some chatbots had slipped through without that label. Just before the report came out, the company scrubbed nearly a dozen of them from its platforms. When asked, Stone offered no explanation for the timing of the removals.