Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reigned the conversation surrounding technology for the past few years. It can be easy to get lost in the successes associated with major companies like OpenAI, who invented ChatGPT, a program that has changed the face of asking questions online, and Character AI, which allowed many people to engage in stimulating conversations with their favorite characters.
Within a growing field also comes ideas that cannot thrive and do not have as much inherent interest. One of these ventures happened to be Meta’s AI celebrity chatbots, which were slowly and quietly shut down in the past few months due to lack of engagement.
The AI Chatbots, which had the faces and voices of online and real-world celebrities like Kendell Jenner, Snoop Dogg, Mr. Beast and Charlie D’Amelio, had distinct personalities that strayed from their famous counterparts where people could get advice on their cooking, Dungeons and Dragons tips and jokes among other social topics. The characterization away from the celebrities may be part of the reason for the lack of success in the product, since people did not feel connection to the characters because they were not embodying the celebrities that shared their voice and face. Therefore, for fans of the celebrities it did not have an appeal. Then, for those who were not fans of the celebrity, they didn’t want to interact with an AI with a certain famous person’s face.
“You can no longer interact with AI characters embodied by celebrities,” Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney said to The Verge. “We took a lot of learnings from building them and Meta AI to understand how people can use AIs to connect and create in unique ways. AI Studio is an evolution, creating a space for anyone including people, creators and celebrities to create their own AI.”
This switch away from character AI accounts may display that not everything that is AI is bound to succeed and that companies should be cautious before throwing their money into what seems to be the future of technology. Social media apps may specifically not benefit from increasing ways to interact in ways that are not social, even at first it seemed appealing. On the other hand, Meta has kept AI in its search bar without allowing users to have a choice in whether or not they want the AI assistant present. Other social media platforms, like X, have followed suit by implementing AI, called Grok 2 into the service for its premium users. The successes of these ventures have not been fully explored.
Additionally, Meta has not gotten rid of their interest in pursuing celebrity voice involvement in AI. The Bloomberg report from late September said that, “Meta is offering Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars for the right to record and use their voices for artificial intelligence projects, according to several people familiar with the negotiations. The company is talking with Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project is confidential.”
Therefore, Meta is encouraging its presence in the AI scene in ways that other social medias are not and are not taking the losses personally.
Overall, the experimentation into AI has led to a lot of public successes and a lot more private losses. However, every major company wants to be at the front of this wave and the money and time invested offers consumers a multitude of opportunities to interact and utilize AI in their day to day lives in ways that years ago were not imaginable.
