Meta AI Studio

In late 2023, in a bid to compete with other AI character apps (character.ai, Talkie) in the market, Meta's GenAI org started work on a platform for people to create, discover, and chat with AIs. I led content design for this 0 to 1 effort, collaborating with PM, PD, UXR, Eng, DS, Comms, Policy, et al to launch a two-sided MVP experience across Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and the web in July 2024.

My work went deeper than traditional UI/UX content design due to the dynamic nature of shaping AI products. A particularly fun project was the creation experience, in which we iterated countless times on an ideal system prompt to teach our core model (built on Llama 3) to behave like a quality AI character (defined by UXR-informed human evals), then mapped it to a set of templates and a quick custom creation option that took a creator's initial description and autogenerated finer details that could be edited before publishing.

Editing an AI character's avatar leverages Emu, Meta's image generation model. Hopping into advanced settings allows you to add and adjust the way your AI speaks, how it behaves, and what it can do. The open-ended options like icebreakers and example dialogue are directly pulled from components of the system prompt. I framed them in simple language in the UI to educate creators directly about how inputs impact the output.

Whenever someone enters AI Studio or chats with an AI character for the first time, they see an the introductory bottom sheet I wrote that balances value props with transparency into how messages with AIs are used to improve Meta's foundational models. In the canonical thread there are suggested prompts to start a conversation, and anyone can share snippets of it to their stories.

The web version of AI Studio combines a discovery surface with a creation experience that leverages the additional real estate for a test chat alongside controls. I strove for consistency with the mobile experience in all content and navigation here to connect the core brand and product across surfaces.

As the product has evolved, we've refined creation to pull even more specific model behavior levers into the UI like role and personality traits, expanded interactions with AIs to interactive group scenes, and introduced a broad range of voices to lend more expressivity to AI conversations. A year after launch, Meta AI Studio has tens of millions of users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web.