RIP to the weirdest chatbots to ever do it.
So Long
In a major — though unsurprising — U-turn, Meta-formerly-Facebook has euthanized its confusing celebrity AI clones, The Information reported yesterday.
For those unfamiliar with the unfortunate celeb avatars, Meta last year unveiled a surprisingly large cast of chatbot personas with which Instagram users could interface. These personas bore the faces of real famous people, but were bewilderingly presented as entirely separate fictional characters. Kendall Jenner, for example, was the face of “Billie,” a “ride-or-die” older sister who used phrases like “no problem, boo!” and “spill the tea!”; Tom Brady played “Bru,” a “wisecracking sports debater” with a questionable stance on Colin Kaepernick’s NFL career; Paris Hilton played “Amber,” a detective who helped users “solve whodunnits”; among others.
Did it make any sort of sense? None at all!
The personas were more than confusing, though. They were also expensive — as reported last year by The Information, one celebrity was paid as much as $5 million for the meager six hours of work it took to transform themself into an AI avatar.
But now, not even a year later, it seems that Meta’s multimillion-dollar cashout didn’t quite pay off as the tech giant hoped. You can still chat with the characters, for now, but they no longer have celebrity faces; each now bears a sad-looking AI-generated image as their profile photo instead. A tragic end to an even sadder AI effort.
With a Whimper
Meta’s decision to drop the celebrity faces from its celebrity AI personas coincides with a new Meta AI offering called AI Studio, which allows Instagram users to make AI versions of themselves and other characters.
“You can no longer interact with AI characters embodied by celebrities,” a spokesperson for the company confirmed to The Verge, adding that “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.”
The spokeperson added that the new AI studio is an “evolution” of Meta’s AI experiment with its personas.
We’re glad to hear that Meta was able to find some learnings in its wasted millions of dollars. Still, the fact that this confusing chatbot endeavor existed at all seems sharply representative of the divide between AI companies and the masses they’re hoping to turn into users. AI companies, Meta included, continue to promise the game-changing tech of the future. At present, for all of those big promises, all we’ve gotten are Billie and Bru.
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