At this point, we’re not sure what Meta’s take on AI chatbots is.
Last September, at the Connect Conference where the company showcased its latest tech advancements and projects, Meta made the big reveal of celebrity-inspired chatbots that, using the magic of AI, users could interact with via direct messages (DMs).
This means you can send a message to a bot voiced by Snoop Dogg and receive a reply from the same bot – except, of course, the reply won’t come from Snoop Dogg, but from an AI character based on the rapper that doesn’t even have Snoop Dogg’s name on it.
So, if you send a message to “Dungeon Master,” you’ll get a reply in Snoop Dogg’s voice.
Why Meta thought this would be interesting to people I don’t know.
Sure, some people have found these bots useful — Chef Bot (modeled after Roy Choi), for example, seems pretty good at giving recipe tips — but wouldn’t it have been just as good without the celebrity profile picture? Who cares about a bot modeled after a celebrity if the celebrity themselves never responds?
Are people really so obsessed with celebrities that even a hint of input from a celebrity is enough to get them excited about interacting with a bot?
Apparently not: Last week, Meta began quietly phasing out its celebrity-based chatbots because no one was using them.
This isn’t surprising, but related to this is a Bloomberg report from last weekend:
“Meta The company is offering Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars for the rights to record and use their voices for artificial intelligence projects, according to people familiar with the negotiations. It is in talks with Judi Dench. Awkwafina and Keegan Michael Key“The project is being developed in a number of different ways, and we are looking forward to seeing it,” said the person, who requested anonymity because the project is confidential.
A bot with a celebrity’s face didn’t work, but would a bot with a celebrity’s voice work?
I’m not sure, but it feels like Meta doesn’t understand the value of bots and is prioritizing cheap gimmicks to get more people using them and maximize interest.
And they might be right: Presumably, creating an AI bot that resembles a celebrity, including in appearance and voice, will at least encourage fans of that celebrity to use Meta’s AI tools, helping to grow adoption over time.
But guess what, it certainly seems like a lot of money spent on what amounts to gimmicks and novelty elements that might generate a little interest, but the effect will fade quickly.
This may be fine, in that Meta only needs to stimulate initial adoption and interaction to get off the ground, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that the current Meta AI chatbot is already “on track to become the world’s most used AI assistant.”
This isn’t surprising, given that Meta has put Meta AI prompts at the forefront in all of its apps, and I almost always accidentally use them when searching Facebook or Instagram.
It’s not hard to imagine that the millions of queries sent to Meta AI are just confused Facebook users who don’t understand why their queries are getting such longwinded answers, but the statistics don’t lie: Meta claims that there are more users using Meta AI than using ChatGPT.
But it also seems to suggest that Meta doesn’t really need a celebrity gimmick to promote its AI tools.
right?
Maybe I’m missing the point, and maybe people would be more inclined to use Meta’s AI tools if the answers to their questions were spoken with the swagger of Dame Judi Dench.
But it still seems a bit misguided. Outside of ad creation and targeting (and to some extent search), I’ve yet to see a truly valuable use case for an AI chatbot within a social media app. I don’t think interacting with a bot is what users of an app designed to facilitate human connection really want, and generating a fake AI image of yourself just seems like an invitation to misleading representation that will be anathema to many social media users.
I suppose an AI bot with a celebrity voice wouldn’t be much different, but I think it would have more novelty value than just a celebrity’s face.
