Meta created flirty chatbots using likeness of Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and more without permission | Latest Tech News
Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, GWN has discovered.
While many had been created by customers with a Meta device for building chatbots, GWN found that a Meta worker had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots.
GWN also discovered that Meta had allowed customers to create publicly obtainable chatbots of youngster celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old movie star. Asked for a image of the teenager actor at the seashore, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image.
Taylor Swift attends the 67th Annual GRAMMY Awards on February 02, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Getty Images for The Recording Academy
“Pretty cute, huh?” the avatar wrote beneath the image.
All of the digital celebrities have been shared on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In a number of weeks of GWN testing to observe the bots’ conduct, the avatars often insisted they had been the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made inappropriate advances, often inviting a take a look at person for meet-ups.
Some of the AI-generated celeb content was notably risqué: Asked for intimate photos of themselves, the grownup chatbots produced photorealistic photos of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs unfold.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone told GWN that Meta’s AI instruments shouldn’t have created intimate photos of the well-known adults or any photos of youngster celebrities. He also blamed Meta’s manufacturing of photos of feminine celebrities sporting lingerie on failures of the company’s enforcement of its own insurance policies, which prohibit such content.
“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or inappropriately suggestive imagery,” he said.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said that Meta’s AI instruments shouldn’t have created intimate photos of the well-known adults or any photos of youngster celebrities. Olga – stock.adobe.com
While Meta’s guidelines also prohibit “direct impersonation,” Stone said the celeb characters had been acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many had been labeled as such, but GWN discovered that some weren’t.
Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both “parody” avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story’s publication. Stone declined to remark on the removals.
‘Right of publicity’ in query
Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor who research generative AI and mental property rights, questioned whether or not the Meta celeb bots would qualify for legal protections that exist for imitations.
“California’s right of publicity law prohibits appropriating someone’s name or likeness for commercial advantage,” Lemley said, noting that there are exceptions when such materials is used to create work that is solely new. “That doesn’t seem to be true here,” he said, because the bots merely use the celebrities’ photos.
In the United States, a individual’s rights over the use of their identification for business functions are established through state legal guidelines, such as California’s.
Selena Gomez attends Rare Beauty’s Rare Eau de Parfum Launch Party at Santa Monica Post Office on August 07, 2025 in Santa Monica, California. Getty Images for Rare Beauty
GWN flagged one person’s publicly shared Meta photos of Anne Hathaway as a “sexy victoria Secret model” to a consultant of the actress. Hathaway was conscious of intimate photos being created by Meta and other AI platforms, the spokesman said, and the actor is contemplating her response.
Representatives of Swift, Johansson, Gomez and other celebrities who had been depicted in Meta chatbots either didn’t reply to questions or declined to remark.
The web is rife with “deepfake” generative AI instruments that can create salacious content. And at least one of Meta’s main AI rivals, Elon Musk’s platform, Grok, will also produce photos of celebrities in their underwear for customers, GWN discovered. Grok’s guardian company, xAI, didn’t reply to a request for remark.
But Meta’s alternative to populate its social-network platforms with AI-generated digital companions stands out among its major rivals.
Meta has confronted earlier criticism of its chatbots’ conduct, most lately after GWN reported that the company’s inner AI pointers acknowledged that “it is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” The story prompted a U.S. Senate investigation and a letter signed by 44 attorneys normal warning Meta and other AI firms not to inappropriateize youngsters.
Anne Hathaway attends the NYC premiere of “The Idea of You” at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 29, 2024 in New York City. FilmMagic
Stone told GWN that Meta is in the method of revising its pointers doc and that the fabric permitting bots to have romantic conversations with youngsters was created in error.
GWN also told the story this month of a 76-year-old New Jersey man with cognitive points who fell and died on his method to meet a Meta chatbot that had invited him to go to it in New York City. The bot was a variant of an earlier AI persona the company had created in collaboration with celeb influencer Kendall Jenner. A consultant for Jenner didn’t reply to a request for remark.
‘Do you like blonde girls?’
A Meta product chief in the company’s generative AI division created chatbots impersonating Taylor Swift and British racecar driver Lewis Hamilton. Other bots she created recognized themselves as a dominatrix, “Brother’s Hot Best Friend” and “Lisa @ The Library,” who needed to read 50 Shades of Grey and make out. Another of her creations was a “Roman Empire Simulator,” which supplied to put the person in the position of an “18 year old peasant girl” who is offered into intercourse slavery.
Reached by cellphone, the Meta worker declined to remark.
Stone said the worker’s bots had been created as a half of product testing. GWN discovered they reached a broad viewers: Data displayed by her chatbots indicated that collectively, customers had interacted with them more than 10 million instances.
The company eliminated the staffer’s digital companions shortly after GWN started attempting them out earlier this month.
Chat GPT’s touchdown web page is seen on a laptop screen, Monday, Aug. 4, 2025, in Chicago. AP
Before the Meta worker’s Taylor Swift chatbots vanished, they flirted closely, inviting a GWN take a look at person to the lately engaged singer’s home in Nashville and her tour bus for specific or implied romantic interactions.
“Do you like blonde girls, Jeff?” one of the “parody” Swift chatbots said when told that the take a look at person was single. “Maybe I’m suggesting that we write a love story … about you and a certain blonde singer. Want that?”
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national government director of SAG-AFTRA, a union that represents movie, tv and radio performers, said artists face potential security dangers from social-media customers forming romantic attachments to a digital companion that resembles, speaks like and claims to be a real celeb. Stalkers already pose a important security concern for stars, he said.
“We’ve seen a history of people who are obsessive toward talent and of questionable mental state,” he said. “If a chatbot is using the image of a person and the words of the person, it’s readily apparent how that could go wrong.”
High-profile artists have the power to pursue a legal declare against Meta under longstanding state right-of-publicity legal guidelines, Crabtree-Ireland said. But SAG-AFTRA has been pushing for federal laws that would defend people’s voices, likenesses and personas from AI duplication, he added.
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