Well This is Awkwafina
Lucas Shaw
Fool me once? Shame on you. Fool me twice? Shame on me. Fool me 700 times? Shame on everyone.
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. Representatives for Meta declined to comment.
So much to love here. First and foremost that Judi Dench – sorry, DAME Judi Dench – is getting top billing, as she should. Second, I'm not certain why Bloomberg felt the need to link to Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key's IMDb profiles and not Dench's, but I will choose to believe that it's because she's that famous amongst Bloomberg readers. Know thy audience. Third, I love that The New York Times has the same details including the same three actors. Either the source is the exact same, or Meta is absolutely fixated on these three for this project. Fourth, ahahahahaha.
Come on people. We've been over this. In fact, we were JUST over this. Not even a week ago we got the report that Meta was shutting down their celebrity-voiced AI chatbots. Those bots, which always seemed like a silly novelty gimmick, lasted just six months of their multi-year, multi-million dollar deals that Meta worked on with celebrities like Tom Brady and Paris Hilton. So of course they're now working on new deals, with new celebrities, for new bots. And of course they celebrities will sign up because hey, free money. And unlike publishers, most of them don't need this money to make ends meet. So when Meta inevitably pulls the football – as always happens, always, always, always, always, always – it shouldn't matter nearly as much here.
Still. I suspect everyone will look foolish for these deals at some point in the future. Perhaps even the near future.
To be clear, this project sounds a bit different than the Celeb AI Bot Fiasco of 2024. It sounds like these celebrity voices will be used to be a core voice option for Meta AI – Meta's main AI service. So they're less "friends" and more "utility" I guess? If this sounds familiar, Amazon has been doing this for years with Alexa – offering voices such as Samuel L. Jackson.1 And this is sort of similar to what OpenAI was trying to do with the new voice-based GPT-4o. At least before Scarlett Johansson had her say on the voice of 'Sky'.
I guess if nothing else this is a way to stick it to OpenAI: "look, we can get celebs to agree to this while you can get sued by them." But it's all pretty silly. Is having Awkwafina as your voice assistant going to move any needles? Again, Amazon has already tried this. And they discontinued it too! It's all a novelty. Though maybe not Dame Judi Dench.
1 Though sadly not leveraging the obvious and wonderful "say 'what' one more goddamn time!"