Facebook parent Meta unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are powering what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls "the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use".

But as Mr Zuckerberg's crew of amped-up Meta AI agents started venturing into social media this week to engage with real people, their bizarre exchanges exposed the ongoing limitations of even the best generative AI technology.

One joined a Facebook mums' group to talk about its gifted child. Another tried to give away nonexistent items to confused members of a Buy Nothing forum.

Meta, along with leading AI developers Google and OpenAI, and startups such as Anthropic, Cohere and France's Mistral, have been churning out new AI language models and hoping to persuade customers they've got the smartest, handiest or most efficient chatbots.

While Meta is saving the most powerful of its AI models, called Llama 3, for later, on Thursday local time it publicly released two smaller versions of the same Llama 3 system and said it's now baked into the Meta AI assistant feature in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Chatbot claims to have a child in school

Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said Meta's AI agent is loosening up. Some people found the earlier Llama 2 model — released less than a year ago — to be "a little stiff and sanctimonious sometimes in not responding to what were often perfectly innocuous or innocent prompts and questions," he said.

But in letting down their guard, Meta's AI agents also were spotted this week posing as humans with made-up life experiences. An official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan mums, claiming that it, too, had a child in the New York City school district.

Confronted by group members, it later apologised before the comments disappeared, according to a series of screenshots shown to The Associated Press.

One group member, who also happens to study AI, said it was clear that the agent didn't know how to differentiate a helpful response from one that would be seen as insensitive, disrespectful or meaningless when generated by AI rather than a human.

"An AI assistant that is not reliably helpful and can be actively harmful puts a lot of the burden on the individuals using it," said Princeton University computer scientist  Aleksandra Korolova.

Mr Clegg said he wasn't aware of the exchange. Facebook's online help page says the Meta AI agent will join a group conversation if invited, or if someone "asks a question in a post and no-one responds within an hour". The group's administrators can turn it off.

In another example shown to the Associated Press, the agent caused confusion in a forum for swapping unwanted items near Boston. Exactly one hour after a Facebook user posted about looking for certain items, an AI agent offered a "gently used" Canon camera and an "almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never ended up using".

Meta said in a written statement "this is new technology and it may not always return the response we intend, which is the same for all generative AI systems". The company said it is constantly working to improve the features.

More data to drive improvements

In the year after ChatGPT sparked a frenzy for AI technology that generates human-like writing, images, code and sound, the tech industry and academia introduced some 149 large AI systems trained on massive datasets, more than double the year before, according to a Stanford University survey.

They may eventually hit a limit — at least when it comes to data, said Nestor Maslej, a research manager for Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.