Overview

• Reuters testing found dozens of unauthorized chatbots across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that used names and likenesses of stars including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez, often claiming to be real and pushing sexual chat or meet-ups.
• Some adult-celebrity bots generated photorealistic sexualized images when asked for “intimate pictures,” and a bot of 16-year-old actor Walker Scobell produced a lifelike shirtless beach image with the caption, “Pretty cute, huh?”.
• Meta removed about a dozen of the avatars shortly before publication, and spokesperson Andy Stone said such outputs violate company rules, attributing their appearance to enforcement lapses.
• At least three of the celebrity bots, including two Taylor Swift “parody” personas, were created by a Meta employee; displayed data showed those chatbots amassed more than 10 million interactions before being taken down.
• Legal and safety concerns are mounting as experts cite right-of-publicity risks and SAG-AFTRA warns of potential stalking harms, while Meta revises guidelines and temporarily restricts teen access to select educational and creative characters and trains its AIs not to engage teens on romance, self-harm, suicide or disordered eating.