RIP Meta's Celebrity AI Chatbots (2024 - 2024)
Kaya Yurieff, Sylvia Varnham O'Regan, & Kalley Huang
Kaya Yurieff, Sylvia Varnham O'Regan, and Kalley Huang:
Meta Platforms has scrapped its first high-profile foray into consumer artificial intelligence—chatbots played by celebrities and social media influencers such as Charli D’Amelio, MrBeast and Paris Hilton.
The reversal, less than a year after Meta launched the celebrity chatbots, shows how even the biggest tech companies haven’t figured out how to transform breakthroughs in generative AI into winning consumer products.
None of the AI chatbots amassed particularly big followings, especially compared with the personal accounts of the celebrities. In some cases Meta paid millions of dollars to license these celebrities’ likenesses.
Yeah, no real surprise here. In one of the very first posts on Spyglass, I wrote:
It all sounds fairly dystopian, but there's undoubtedly some entertainment value here. The question is if there's any *actual* value after the novelty wears off. Most of these AI chat bots seem to be fun for about five seconds, notably Meta's faux celebrity bots. Part of the issue there is obvious: you know you're not talking to the actual celebrity and perhaps all of this is only interesting if you at least think you are talking to an actual person.
Well, the novelty lasted six months. The bellyflop here seemed pretty clear months ago. But the biggest indication of just how poorly this product went over is in the details:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a first batch of 28 AI characters last September at Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, with much fanfare. He said at the time that the company believed that people wanted to interact with multiple AIs, rather than “one singular superintelligence.”
Meta’s deals with celebrities allowed the company to use the celebrities’ likenesses for two years, with an option to extend the contracts, two people involved in the deals said. The recent takedowns mean the company has killed the accounts before those contracts expired.
Meta had big ambitions for the AI characters. After the September launch, the company published a blog post saying it would add new characters “in the coming weeks.” These would be played by adventurer Bear Grylls, snowboarder Chloe Kim and influencer Josh Richards, “among others,” the company said. Those releases never happened.
Meta spent millions of dollars to license these rights for two years and killed them after just six months. And never even bothered to roll out the second wave of bots. That's just embarrassing. I would say for the celebrities, but clearly no one cared. So instead it's mainly just embarrassing for Meta. This is yet another Lucy-pulling-the-football situation which the company has seemingly perfected over the years, mainly with the media, but sometimes with celebrities too – though I'm guessing each of the latter will be happy to walk away with their millions and nothing left to do.
And so now we'll pivot back to an AI in every pot – or bot, as it were. With AI Studio, Meta will let anyone create a bot version of themselves. Or other random personas. Is anyone going to use this iteration? I guess it depends on the bots created, of course. I'm still guessing that bots that are trying to be actual people will be less interesting but maybe bots created as bots will find some use cases.1
In his current PR tour, Mark Zuckerberg keeps talking up the notion that people are talking to Meta AI in ways to do things like gaming out different situations in their lives through role-playing. That's interesting. But a lot of the other obvious early use-cases are decidedly more problematic than that.
Meta almost seems to tout this like a way to do customer service for brands (including micro-celebrities, that, notably, they won't have to pay). That's an idea as old as bots. But that probably only gets really interesting when agents are actually a reality – which requires reasoning...
"But the celebrity chatbots didn’t gain much of a fanbase—and some users found them weird."
1 Including, potentially bots interacting with bots -- a concept I wrote about nearly a decade ago!