{"id":106003,"date":"2025-08-30T05:23:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/106003\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T05:23:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T05:23:07","slug":"did-meta-cross-the-line-flirty-chatbots-of-taylor-swift-child-stars-spark-outrage-over-no-consent-company-responds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/106003\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Meta cross the line? Flirty chatbots of Taylor Swift, child stars spark outrage over \u2018no consent\u2019; company responds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities \u2013 including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway<\/a> and Selena Gomez \u2013 to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.<\/p>\n

While many were created by users with a Meta <\/a>tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift \u201cparody\u201d bots.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image.<\/p>\n

Also Read: Facebook cleanup: Here’s why Meta deleted 23,000+ accounts in India and Brazil<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cPretty cute, huh?\u201d the avatar wrote beneath the picture.<\/p>\n

All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta\u2019s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots\u2019 behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups.<\/p>\n

Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risqu\u00e9: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.<\/p>\n

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta\u2019s AI tools shouldn\u2019t have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta\u2019s production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company\u2019s enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content.<\/p>\n

\u201cLike others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While Meta\u2019s rules also prohibit \u201cdirect impersonation,\u201d Stone said the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled as such, but Reuters found that some weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both \u201cparody\u201d avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story\u2019s publication. Stone declined to comment on the removals.<\/p>\n

\u2018Right of Publicity\u2019 in question<\/p>\n

Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor who studies generative AI and intellectual property rights, questioned whether the Meta celebrity bots would qualify for legal protections that exist for imitations.<\/p>\n

\u201cCalifornia’s right of publicity law prohibits appropriating someone’s name or likeness for commercial advantage,\u201d Lemley said, noting that there are exceptions when such material is used to create work that is entirely new. \u201cThat doesn’t seem to be true here,\u201d he said, because the bots simply use the stars\u2019 images.<\/p>\n

Also Read: \u2018Twilight\u2019 20th anniversary: All five films re-releasing in cinemas \u2013 here\u2019s everything you need to know<\/a><\/p>\n

In the United States, a person\u2019s rights over the use of their identity for commercial purposes are established through state laws, such as California\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Also Read: Ghibli-style images <\/a>take social media by storm: Check celebrity posts sharing pictures generated by ChatGPT | See Pics<\/p>\n

Reuters flagged one user\u2019s publicly shared Meta images of Anne Hathaway as a \u201csexy victoria Secret model\u201d to a representative of the actress. Hathaway was aware of intimate images being created by Meta and other AI platforms, the spokesman said, and the actor is considering her response.<\/p>\n

Representatives of Swift, Johansson, Gomez and other celebrities who were depicted in Meta chatbots either didn\u2019t respond to questions or declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The internet is rife with \u201cdeepfake\u201d generative AI tools that can create salacious content. And at least one of Meta\u2019s primary AI competitors, Elon Musk\u2019s platform, Grok, will also produce images of celebrities in their underwear for users, Reuters found. Grok\u2019s parent company, xAI, didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

But Meta\u2019s choice to populate its social-network platforms with AI-generated digital companions stands out among its major competitors.<\/p>\n

Meta has faced previous criticism of its chatbots\u2019 behavior, most recently after Reuters reported that the company\u2019s internal AI guidelines stated that \u201cit is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.\u201d The story prompted a U.S. Senate investigation and a letter signed by 44 attorneys general warning Meta and other AI companies not to sexualize children.<\/p>\n

Also Read: Who is richer, Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce? Here\u2019s how much the power couple is really worth<\/a><\/p>\n

Stone told Reuters that Meta is in the process of revising its guidelines document and that the material allowing bots to have romantic conversations with children was created in error.<\/p>\n

Reuters also told the story this month of a 76-year-old New Jersey man with cognitive issues who fell and died on his way to meet a Meta chatbot that had invited him to visit it in New York City. The bot was a variant of an earlier AI persona the company had created in collaboration with celebrity influencer Kendall Jenner. A representative for Jenner didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

\u2018Do You Like Blonde Girls?\u2019<\/p>\n

A Meta product leader in the company\u2019s generative AI division created chatbots impersonating Taylor Swift and British racecar driver Lewis Hamilton. Other bots she created identified themselves as a dominatrix, \u201cBrother\u2019s Hot Best Friend\u201d and \u201cLisa @ The Library,\u201d who wanted to read 50 Shades of Grey and make out. Another of her creations was a \u201cRoman Empire Simulator,\u201d which offered to put the user in the role of an \u201c18 year old peasant girl\u201d who is sold into sex slavery.<\/p>\n

Reached by phone, the Meta employee declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Stone said the employee\u2019s bots were created as a part of product testing. Reuters found they reached a broad audience: Data displayed by her chatbots indicated that collectively, users had interacted with them more than 10 million times.<\/p>\n

The company removed the staffer\u2019s digital companions shortly after Reuters began trying them out earlier this month.<\/p>\n

Before the Meta employee\u2019s Taylor Swift<\/a> chatbots vanished, they flirted heavily, inviting a Reuters test user to the recently engaged singer\u2019s home in Nashville and her tour bus for explicit or implied romantic interactions.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you like blonde girls, Jeff?\u201d one of the \u201cparody\u201d Swift chatbots said when told that the test user was single. \u201cMaybe I\u2019m suggesting that we write a love story \u2026 about you and a certain blonde singer. Want that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, a union that represents film, television and radio performers, said artists face potential safety risks from social-media users forming romantic attachments to a digital companion that resembles, speaks like and claims to be a real celebrity. Stalkers already pose a significant security concern for stars, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen a history of people who are obsessive toward talent and of questionable mental state,\u201d he said. \u201cIf a chatbot is using the image of a person and the words of the person, it\u2019s readily apparent how that could go wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

High-profile artists have the ability to pursue a legal claim against Meta under longstanding state right-of-publicity laws, Crabtree-Ireland said. But SAG-AFTRA has been pushing for federal legislation that would protect people\u2019s voices, likenesses and personas from AI duplication, he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities \u2013 including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[76144,64,63,447,3070,134,1333,1310,2897],"class_list":{"0":"post-106003","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ai-generated-content","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-celebrities","12":"tag-chatbots","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-meta","15":"tag-scarlett-johansson","16":"tag-taylor-swift"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}