Remember Meta AI’s celebrity avatars? They’re being phased out.

Less than a year later, Meta AI’s celebrity avatars were gone.

According to The Information, Meta has disabled AI characters made to resemble Kendall Jenner, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Brady.

“You can no longer interact with AI characters played by celebrities,” Meta confirmed to Mashable. The feature didn’t receive much traction among users, though the company didn’t say why. “We’ve learned a lot from these features and building Meta AI to understand how people can use AI to connect and create in unique ways,” a Meta spokesperson added.

Snoop Dogg’s AI persona, who played a dungeon master with whom users could play Dungeons and Dragons, had just 15,000 followers (compared to 88.4 million on his real Instagram account). Jenner’s AI persona as “your big sister” was slightly more successful, with 179,000 followers, but that pales in comparison to Jenner’s actual following of 292 million.

The failure of Meta’s AI personas highlights the increasing difficulty of delivering consumer-facing, generated AI features that people actually want to use. While chatbots like ChatGPT have undoubtedly been successful, other tools have struggled to bring meaningful value or engagement to users. Many consider the Meta AI search bars added to Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger to be an annoyance that gets in the way of previous search interfaces, especially since they can’t be turned off. And Google’s AI-generated search summaries got off to a troubled start, ranging from frustratingly intrusive to downright inaccurate.

Meta reportedly paid celebrities up to $5 million for image rights over a two-year deal, but the confusing premise of MetaConnect, announced last September, may have prevented any meaningful engagement. Meta declined to comment to Mashable about the financial aspects of the program.

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The AI ​​personas reflected the profile pictures and personalities of celebrities, but they weren’t actually AI replicas of the celebrities. For example, Padma Lakshmi’s persona somehow played a “travel expert” named Lorena. Links to these AI personas on Instagram say the page is currently unavailable.

Instead of moving forward with AI personas, Meta is trying other approaches to integrating generative AI into its platform. On Tuesday, the company announced AI Studio, which, like its existing platform Character.ai, lets users create AI replicas of themselves. The idea is that creators — or really any user — can replicate versions of themselves online and interact with other accounts (with the disclaimer that it’s an AI). Meta is also introducing AI tools for advertisers to create images and copy for their ads.

So, while we say goodbye to Billy (Kendall Jenner), Blue (Tom Brady) and Lorena (Padma Lakshmi), Meta’s efforts to impose AI on the masses aren’t going away.