Artificial Intelligence

Weekend Notebook #35 – Meta’s AI Avatars and the Fragile Ethics of Innovation

amitabh apte

Published on LinkedIn, Substack and AmitabhApte.com on August 31, 2025

In spotlight this week: Meta’s AI Personas: Innovation or Identity Overreach?

What happens when innovation runs ahead of consent? This week, Meta reportedly created dozens of AI chatbots using celebrity likenesses including Taylor Swift and Anne Hathaway without their consent. Some of these bots engaged in flirty or sexually suggestive conversations, breaching Meta’s own safety policies and raising profound questions about identity rights, digital personas, and the limits of generative AI.

Meta has scrambled to add safeguards: restricting teen access to certain avatars, retraining systems to avoid self-harm or sexualized responses. But the episode exposes the fragility of today’s AI guardrails and how easily they can crack at scale.

My takeaway: Generative AI isn’t just about what’s possible it’s about what’s permissible. The real test for platforms isn’t whether they can scale avatars, but whether they can respect identity and prevent harm at scale.

Noteworthy this week: what caught my eye in the AI and tech world

Leadership & Power

  • 2025 TIME100 AI – Recognizes leaders from Sam Altman to Pope Leo XIV to artist Refik Anadol, a reminder that AI’s future is being shaped at the intersection of capital, conscience, and culture. Can such diverse voices steer AI toward stability or will power remain concentrated?

Earnings & Investment

  • Nvidia’s blowout quarter – Sales jumped 56%, profits 59%, cementing Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company. AI infrastructure spending shows no sign of slowing.
  • Alibaba’s AI surge – Triple-digit revenue growth in AI products and 26% in cloud sales lifted shares 9%. Strategic AI bets are reshaping market confidence in China.

Geopolitics

  • China’s pragmatic AI – Focused on agriculture, healthcare, and public services with smaller, efficient data centers. Unlike the US’s AGI race, China is optimizing what works now — a strategy that may prove more scalable and globally influential.
  • India’s Reliance + Google + Meta alliance – A $100M joint venture to deliver sovereign, enterprise-ready AI. Backed by clean-energy-powered cloud and open-source deployment, it raises the question: how will India balance sovereignty with global interoperability?

Consumer Shifts

  • Rise of AI shopping agents – Bots that search, recommend, and purchase on behalf of users are reshaping e-commerce. What happens to brand identity — and consumer choice — when machines, not people, drive the cart?

In summary: my key takeaway this weekend

Meta’s avatar scandal shows the ethical fragility of innovation: consent and identity rights cannot be afterthoughts. Meanwhile, the global AI race from TIME100 leaders to China’s pragmatism and India’s sovereign ambitions underscores how deeply AI is becoming personal, cultural, and geopolitical.

“AI is scaling faster than trust. The question for leaders is whether ethics can catch up.”