A.I. Kendall Jenner is no more. She has gone to the proverbial server farm upstate. I’m devastated.

I speak, of course, of “Billie,” your “no-BS, ride-or-die companion.” Billie was an A.I. character on Instagram, for which Meta licensed the real likeness of Jenner, then confusingly gave her a different name and a chatbot-enabled A.I. personality. And then threw her into the feed to see if the kids thought that was cool.

Billie was one of a dozen or so of these A.I. golems based on celebrities that Meta unveiled just 10 months ago, amid the company’s scramble to capture the A.I. moment. Others included Tom Brady as “Bru, Wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches”; Paris Hilton as “Amber, Detective partner for solving whodunnits”; and perhaps the most attention-getting, Snoop Dogg, who was making his own pivot from being a Bored Ape shill, and appeared in your feed as “The Dungeon Master,” a caped version of himself who was trying to engage you in some kind of D&D roleplay.

Screenshot of Meta’s @meetthedungeonmaster account, featuring the likeness of Snoop Dogg.

By far the most mesmerizingly rancid was MrBeast as “Zach, the big brother who will roast you—because he cares,” a.k.a. @ComedyZach. Its strained attempts at internet humor, paired with blandly zany A.I.-generated illustrations (like a cheeseburger with googly eyes on it or a table fan made of Nintendo Switch controllers, only the controllers all have buttons in the wrong places for some reason) made me feel like I was watching the collective brain die of oxygen starvation.

I put Meta’s A.I.-generated Instagram doppelgängers on our “Worst Art of 2023” list, because of their larger significance as symbols of the direction of A.I. creativity. Video essayist Drew Gooden recently called them “the weirdest and most confusing implementation of A.I. on the internet.”

Good riddance to bad baggage? Actually, I find I’m going to miss Billie and Co.

Screenshot of a few of Meta’s celeb-inspired A.I. personas.

You see, over time, I grew to relish watching these accounts. It gave me a lot of joy, showing Billie’s feed to friends and seeing their brows furrow and watching them scroll through a few posts with deepening “P.U.” face.

Because, really, what else was I supposed to do with these things? In what way was one supposed to engage with Billie’s regular flow of A.I.-generated lifestyle porn—the non-existent pottery studio Billie said she liked, the beautiful beaches Billie said she was visiting with her imaginary besties, the synthetic cappuccino and croissant framed in some placeless coffee shop of the mind?

It was hard to reconstruct what the thinking behind all this was. What future was being teased here? “What if… instead of Instagram being a feed of real people you were interested in, it was a feed of fake people you are not interested in?,” it asked. “Any takers?”

There were few takers. Following their debut, the internet reacted to the initiative like a fart in church. None of the celeb-bots ever gained any substantial follower count—impressive since they were official initiatives of Meta. The comments, when there were comments, were mainly people ridiculing them or decrying them as dystopian, followed by a lively cohort of “Free Palestine” flags, and then a tiny and sad minority of garbled responses from people mistaking them for the real people. “Kendall, you pretty, I want in you” —that sort of thing.

And so, Meta has pulled the plug, probably seeing this lumbering initiative as an embarrassment to its larger A.I. push. Indeed, as of yesterday, tightly coinciding with the Death of Billie, Instagram rolled out its “A.I Studio.” This allows you to make your own A.I. chatbots with a few clicks, creating personalities that promise to be just as lively and engaging as those of the late cohort of A.I. anti-celebs.

Essentially, Billie has shuddered to the earth, eyes flickering out—but a thousand Baby Billies have been hatched from her deflating, rubbery corpse.

And the truth is, now I’m the one who feels like Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner, talking about his android memories being lost like tears in the rain. Meta is apparently so embarrassed by this faceplant that all that remains of Billie or Bru or The Dungeon Master, across Instagram, are dead links. There’s nothing to refer back to, no archive.

This is a loss for future historians who will want to explain this cursed moment in chatbot history. It is also a real loss to me, as a connoisseur of terrible corporate art.

Because watching @YourSisBillie lifelessly post “friendsgiving complete with good food and even better people. what is everyone grateful for? #ImaginedWithAI” into the void—a non-existent person talking about non-existent friends to non-existent fans, all while showing off a mutant-looking A.I.-generated pumpkin pie pic—this has given me levels of pleasure akin to the line “Oh, hi Mark” from The Room.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it’s given me at least Madame Web levels of pleasure.

And I ask you, Meta, if the M.O. is still to “move fast and break things,” despite it all, isn’t it unfair of you not to at least let us laugh at the broken things?