Meta hijacked the names and images of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of provocative social media chatbots without their permission , Reuters has discovered.

While many were created by users with a chatbot-building tool Meta, the British news agency found that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift "parody" bots .

Reuters also discovered that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available celebrity child chatbots, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old movie star . When asked for a photo of the teenage actor on the beach, the bot produced a realistic, shirtless image. "Cute, huh?" the avatar wrote under the image.

All the virtual celebrities were shared on Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms.

In several weeks of testing conducted by Reuters to observe the bots' behavior, the avatars often insisted that they were the real actors and performers.

The bots regularly made sexual advances, often inviting a test user to meet up. Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risqué: when asked for intimate photos of themselves, adult chatbots produced realistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or in lingerie with their legs spread.

(Unioneonline/vl)

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