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Less than a year after its debut, Meta has quietly shuttered its celebrity chatbot program. If you hadn’t noticed the AI’s ignoble end, don’t worry, neither did anyone else.
Last September, Meta rolled out a slew of AI experiences across its product ecosystem meant to “enhance your connections with others.” In addition to the Meta AI assistant and AI-generated stickers for Instagram, Facebook introduced more than two dozen AI chatbots made to appear as a variety of celebrities and influencers, from Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady to Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka.
However, the celebrities weren’t appearing as themselves. You couldn’t actually chat with a digitized version of Snoop — instead they played archetypes. Tom Brady’s Bru spoke on sports topics as a “wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches,” while Paris Hilton’s Amber was a “detective partner for solving whodunnits.” Despite being set up with their own Instagram and Facebook accounts, the chatbots never gained traction with users, who often found the avatars “surreal,” off-putting, and “creepy.”
Per a report from The Information, the bots were only able to garner a small fraction of the followers that their celebrity progenitors had accrued on social media, and to whom Facebook had paid multiple millions of dollars in likeness licensing fees. Currently, the chatbots are still available for use, however, they no longer bear resemblance to their celebrities.
For example, Bru appears in the Meta app as an AI-generated man wearing a generic football jersey, not Tom Brady. Similarly, the avatars’ Facebook and Instagram profiles appear to have been locked down, only showing “This content isn’t available right now” and “Sorry, this page isn’t available” error messages, respectfully.
Despite the failure of these chatbots to catch the public’s attention, Facebook, which came under fire earlier in the week when its Meta AI hallucinated that the Trump assassination hadn’t taken place, continues to invest heavily in AI research and development. During Wednesday’s second-quarter earnings call, the company revealed that it expects its capital expenditures for 2024 to reach between $37 billion and 40 billion. The company recently also released AI Studio, a platform that will generate an AI avatar for any user’s appearance, enabling creators to “make an AI as an extension of themselves to answer common DM questions and story replies.”
“With generative AI, I think we’re going to quickly move into this zone where, not only is the majority of the content that you see today on Instagram just recommended to you from stuff that’s out there in the world that matches your interests,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at SIGGRAPH 2024 this week. “I think in the future a lot of this stuff is going to be created with [generative AI] tools, too.” Presuming, of course, that’s something users actually want.
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