Fancy a chit-chat with Abraham Lincoln? AI chatbots coming to Meta

Having absolutely no friends whatsoever will no longer be an excuse for not engaging in online chats. Spare your excuses and embrace modernity, because Meta is working on artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to entertain you.

A Reuters article retells a Financial Times report about Meta’s latest plans on how to keep users involved on their platforms and not switch to rivals like TikTok or Twitter (sorry, sorry – X). We’ve already reported on Zuckerberg’s search for ‘retention hooks’ to mitigate the Threads exodus; maybe these new AI chatbots are part of that plan.

Meta has apparently been very busy and kept a secret in these last few months because the report claims this new feature is to be launched as soon as September. Allegedly, Meta’s developers are coding relentlessly different prototypes for chatbots. The goal is for Meta users to have sort of humanlike chit-chats with machines without realizing they’re interacting with a very sophisticated collection of zeros and ones.

Choose your chat companion

As the report tells, there would supposedly be several personalities to choose from. One of the AI chatbot variants would be coded in such a way that it could answer like… Abraham Lincoln. Other cited Meta AI chatbot would be in the style of a ‘surfer’ – ask him about places to travel and he’ll answer.

What could go wrong?

There are two key questions surrounding these AI chatbots. First, how to be sure that tech giants are making something unbiased and neutral? Second, on a completely technical level, how are they ensuring that they’re implementing the authentic style of a given historical figure?

The possibilities are endless, just like the possibilities for screwing up royally. These AI chatbots could potentially gather so much personal information about the users it interacts with, it’s hilarious.