🧙🏼‍♂️ All about Meta's new AI characters

Howdy, wizards.

A note on friend, the Tamagotchi-like AI wearable I mentioned the launch of yesterday. It seems that there was very similar product already on the market with the same name, so there’s now a bit of a beef going on between the two founders about who ripped of who.

Anyways – today i’m inviting you to explore Meta's new AI studio with me. It might be a big deal, as mr Zuckerberg is essentially launching what would be the most widely distributed consumer AI product so far, including to Instagram’s 2.4 billion user base.

I know a lot of you are already familiar with custom GPTs in ChatGPT, so I’ve tried to make some comparisons between the two platforms along the way.

Deep dive: Meta’s AI Studio

Two days ago, Meta launched AI studio, which lets you create and discover AI characters. AI studio is essentially refining the concept of custom GPTs, but making it more fun like character.ai, and combining it with the vast distribution of well, Meta.

Characters can be made discoverable on Instagram and on the AI studio website. The AI characters run on top of the new Llama 3.1 model, and its all rolling out in the US first.

Here’s some AI characters you can already test (if you’re in the US):

• The Scholar’s Editor

• Story Starter

• Philosibot

• Chat Noir

• College Entry-Test Tutor

• Grade Hacker

Below, I’m breaking down the different parts of AI studio to help you understand the concept better.

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AI studio lets you create two types of characters

Creator AI: Create an AI character on whatever topic you want (as long as it doesn’t Meta’s policies) – it can be built from scratch, or can be created based on a template.

AI Character: There’s also the option of Creator AI, for making a character that’s an extension of yourself; this option is intended for content creators and is available to those with a professional Instagram account.

Meta has also put out AI Studio Handbook, a guide to help you make useful characters.

Characters are easy to share

You can share your AI character with followers and friends on Meta’s social apps; characters can also be made available and discoverable in AI studio and anywhere on the web with a sharing link.

Meta’s AI characters can be shared with:

• Everyone

• Close friends

• Only me

AIs that are set to Everyone or Close friends are submitted to a review queue, and only goes live once it’s reviewed. This indicates Meta is taking quality control up a notch compared to OpenAI’s custom GPTs. Public characters will be available to anyone in the AI studio website.

You can also toggle on discoverability in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and even show the AI character directly on your Instagram profile.

Creating a character in AI studio

The interface for creating characters in AI studio is quite similar to ChatGPT’s GPT editor.

Meta’s editor for AI character is divided into two tabs, Knowledge and Introduction & Capabilities:

• Knowledge: One difference to the custom GPT editor is that instructions aren’t just added in a single text field, but rather individually, which makes it easier to get an overview of the instructions at a glance as well as edit them. There’s also a separate section for adding example responses.

• Introduction & Capabilities:

  • Introduction: This part is used for adding a welcome message and conversation starters (prompts).

  • Capabilities: Similar to when creating custom GPTs, you can toggle on/off capabilities of image generation and web browsing (search). There’s also an option of “long term memory” which lets the AI remember previous conversations with the user. Contrary to ChatGPT, it does not have code interpreter, so it’s likely that custom GPTs are still better suited for reasoning and math tasks.

Creator AI: characters based on your Instagram content

• Along with the option to build a character with an editor, AI studio also gives you the option to build a “Creator AI”. This option is suited for content creators who want to build an AI that can interact with their audience on their behalf. The idea here is to let creators leverage the influence to let people interact with “them” whenever, and at scale.

• It requires a professional Instagram account to use, and has a separate set of terms.

• You can train it on your Instagram and Threads content, and customise it further with facts about you or topics to avoid. You can select posts, reels, comments, stories, channels and threads posts as sources. You can also restrict who can interact with it, ie followers, everyone or only specific people.

• Creator AIs can only be created in the Instagram mobile app. Once you: Professional dashboard —> Your tools —> See All —> Your AIs —> Create an AI based on you. Instagram takes a few minutes to prepare your AI based on your profile, then it shows up in your inbox.

• You’ll get a dashboard where you can see the number of accounts engaged by your AI and the number of messages sent.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Meta has just launched an ecosystem that’s likely to get regular folks using and building small AI apps/characters. Given character AI’s massive popularity among young people, it’s not unlikely that this feature would take off, as it has many similarities and is available right inside Meta’s social apps.

It’s also a promising feature for content creators to broaden their reach, as they can “interact” with fans and followers on an big scale without spending their time on it; Meta didn’t mention monetisation opportunities, but remember that creators can restrict who can chat with their AIs, which would likely mean they could paywall their characters.

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