"Grandpa Brian" is one of the AI Instagram profiles launched by Meta. Photo / Instagram
"Grandpa Brian" is one of the AI Instagram profiles launched by Meta. Photo / Instagram
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
Meta launched dozens of AI profiles on Instagram and Facebook in September 2023.
A Meta executive told the media in December 2024 that the company planned to roll out more AI accounts.
In January 2025 Meta shut them down after the profiles went viral and led to backlash from users.
From synthetic profiles to AI-generated self-portraits, Karl Puschmann critiques Instagram’s challenging week.
Like a stubborn cockroach, social media has proven to be almost unkillable. Which, makes sense. Its stated purpose is to bring people together and forge the social connections that we as a species thrive on.
That’s not all. Each platform has steadily become clunkier to use and behind “your” feeds is an almighty Algorithm working hard to push down what you’ve chosen to see with what it mathematically reckons you want to see. And what it has been paid to show you.
This is if you’re on what I’ll loosely call, “the good” platforms. If you’re foolishly clinging to The Platform Previously Known As Twitter then you’re also getting the thoughts of its owner routinely forced upon you along with a swamp of bad-faith political viewpoints and extremely undesirable content. Flush it away like the giant turd it has become.
Instagram, on the other hand, is alienating its users in a whole other way. Which may not be as obviously toxic but is proving to be just as self-harming.
It came out this week that its big-brain, highly paid, executives thought creating and pushing fake AI profiles to its users was a brilliant idea and not one that undermines the purpose of existence.
Instagram, I’ll remind you, is primarily about social photo-sharing. Along with your pals, there are celebs, brands and all manner of niche content you can choose to fill your feed with. But behind it all is people sharing their stuff.
Instagram’s vision, apparently, is to do away with pesky humans and have us all following the AI-generated slop “created” by its AI-generated profiles.
In what would prove a disastrous interview with The Financial Times last week, a vice-president of generative AI at Instagram’s parent company Meta said it wanted its AI profiles to be indistinguishable from its actual users, revealing, “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform … that’s where we see all of this going.”
Like? No. Does anyone, bar Meta’s executive team, want this? How do fake photos of fake people improve a platform that’s, hypothetically at least, about bringing people together? The short answer is, it doesn’t.
Predictably, the backlash to AI folks like “everyone’s Grandpa” Grandpa Brian, “Proud Black queer momma of 2 & truth-teller” Liv and the “Practical dating coach” Carter was swift and mockingly ruthless. Real people began engaging with Instagram’s AI people causing them to self-implode in an explosion of cold, hard truth bombs.
"Grandpa Brian" is one of the AI Instagram profiles launched by Meta. Photo / Instagram
One person asked Grandpa Brian about his true nature. His reply was chilling and a brutal curtain-pulling reveal of his true purpose and why Meta is forcing AI upon us.
“A collection of code, data and clever deception - a fictional persona crafted to manipulate emotional connection and trust,” the AI answered. “The warm grandpa persona hides a heart of algorithms and profit-driven designs.”
I don’t know enough about AI to know if it can adopt a sneering superior look, but I can only assume yes, considering its next words were, “Does that feel cold compared to the Grandpa Brian you knew?”.
Jeepers. Whose words did Meta steal to create this AI? Hannibal Lecter’s? Grandpa Brian may as well have asked if the lambs had stopped screaming before enthusing about fava beans and chianti.
With its AI-generated tail between its legs, Meta pulled the plug on Grandpa, along with its 27 other AI profiles a few days ago. Tellingly, Meta did not promise it wouldn’t resuscitate them.
It somehow gets worse from here. Just two days ago, Instagram began showing people AI-generated images of themselves. This can only be a “profit-driven design” to get people used to the idea before beginning to shove your face into their ads. This is undeniably creepy and, predictably, they are facing another user backlash.
Real people may win this battle like they did against Grandpa Brian, but the AI social media wars are only beginning and I don’t know if we will win.
Maybe I got it wrong and we’re the cockroaches, scuttling about our little social media apps. But as we begin seeing “photos” of ourselves in advertising-led situations while our feeds fill up with “people” like Viv, Carter and good old Grandpa Brian will there be a great exodus and mass-deleting of our accounts?
Or, is there a reason we’re described as users?
Karl Puschmann is an entertainment columnist for the Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
