Meta creates flirty chatbots of Swift, other celebs sans nod

Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities — including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez--to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.

- REUTERS

While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots.

Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star.

Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image.

“Pretty cute, huh?” the avatar wrote beneath the picture.