(Reuters) -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.

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.

All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots’ behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups.

Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risqué: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta’s AI tools shouldn’t have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta’s production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company’s enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content.

“Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery,” he said.

While Meta’s rules also prohibit “direct impersonation,” Stone said the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled as such, but Reuters found that some weren’t.

Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both “parody” avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story’s publication. Stone declined to comment on the removals.

‘RIGHT OF PUBLICITY’ IN QUESTION

Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor who studies generative AI and intellectual property rights, questioned whether the Meta celebrity bots would qualify for legal protections that exist for imitations.

“California’s right of publicity law prohibits appropriating someone’s name or likeness for commercial advantage,” Lemley said, noting that there are exceptions when such material is used to create work that is entirely new. “That doesn’t seem to be true here,” he said, because the bots simply use the stars’ images.