The big news this week has been the re-discovery of the year-old AI bots on Instagram and their prompt cancellation.

Although Meta hasn’t said what exactly prompted the cancellation, the most viral aspect of this has been a bot posting about their fictional holiday charity work (work that never happened). Meta was quick to pull the plug on these bots, even though they’ve been live for a full year now.

To me, the big takeaway is that all the big companies are very image-focused around AI. They can’t afford anything to go viral for “uncanny valley” type issues, so they’re all making sure to groom their image and ensure that all their AI press is good press.

I think there’s a lot to learn from these failures, so I’m not a huge fan of “brushing things under the rug”. I’d love to see AI companies openly address failures and talk about what they learned from the experiences.