AI-generated user accounts are the new normal for Instagram and Facebook parent, Meta. Here's how AI influencers and artificial accounts are evolving.

Since late 2023, around a dozen AI Instagram and Facebook accounts created by their social media parent company Meta quietly existed on the platforms.

Something about George Romero’s 1978 film about doomed survivors riding out the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall feels resonant today as I look across Meta’s suite of AI-created profiles. The movie’s blue-skinned corpses don’t know they’re dead. They just wander through the shopping center on autopilot, looking for something new to consume.