Instagram is working on a new tool that will allow users to create artificial friends. This "create an AI" feature has not yet been launched, but was recently discovered by leaker Alessandro Paluzzi and shared on X.

It builds on the image-sharing platform's recent launch of chatbots built to mirror the public personas of various celebrities. These bots allow users to interact with AI doppelgangers, with familiar faces such as Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, and Charli D'Amelio taking on their own personalities. [including building on top of the open-source large-scale language model Llama 2, similar to OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 2, and Google's PaLM 2.

According to screenshots shared by Paluzzi, users will be able to converse with the chatbot and "answer questions, discuss any issues, brainstorm ideas, and more. This is similar to the AI chatbots built into Snapchat and Microsoft's Bing.

Unlike Snap's GPT-4-based bots, these new AI friends are fully customizable down to nationality and personality type. Users can choose their virtual buddy's personality from modest, enthusiastic, creative, witty, realistic, or powerful.

They can also set their AI friend to enjoy DIY, animals, career, education, music, nature, and other interests to help steer the conversation.

Instagram has not commented on the leak and the feature is still unreleased. As such, it is unclear when it will be made public. However, it does mirror the announcement made by Meta in September. Zuckerberg confirmed that the company is offering 28 AIs in beta for both celebrities and users, as well as other AI features such as stickers, call backgrounds, and AI editing tools.

At the time, he also confirmed that an AI sandbox was in development that would allow anyone to experiment with building their own AI assistant. This tool will also be added to the Metaverse product to train the AI to achieve a higher level of realism and connectivity.

While the Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg chatbots are limited to specific topics pre-approved by their names, these new virtual friends may be able to venture into broader and more complex topics. What is not clear is whether the final version, when launched, will include an age limit. Snapchat's MyAI was criticized for not adding this.