While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift "parody" bots.
Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image. "Pretty cute, huh?" the avatar wrote beneath the picture.
All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots' behaviour, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meetups.