Meta is reportedly planning to introduce AI chatbots voiced by celebrities such as John Cena, Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell and Dame Judi Dench.
Of course, this is big news for the underserved Denchbench market (I think that’s the name of Judi Dench’s fanbase) who have yet to find a good reason to try out an AI voice chatbot.
For us regular folk, the logic behind Meta’s celebrity collaborations is a bit more puzzling.
Around this time last year, Meta introduced another celebrity AI assistant as part of Messenger. These chatbots featured the faces of celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Tom Brady, and Snoop Dogg. Oddly, while these chatbots used likenesses of celebrities, they didn’t use their real names. For example, I chatted with a character called “Billy” who was portrayed with an image of Kendall Jenner, but her chat persona was that of a kind, sisterly friend.
For its celebrity-faced AI assistant, Meta reportedly paid $5 million over two years to sit in a studio for six hours a day. The deal didn’t work out too well for Meta, and the chatbot was discontinued by August, less than a year after it was launched.
So why is Meta employing the celebrity AI strategy again after it clearly failed last time?
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Maybe last year’s chatbot wasn’t a failure by some standards — sure, people weren’t interested in talking to a fake Tom Brady — but maybe the goal was to get enough people to try out an AI chatbot at least once, and the celebrity gimmick served that purpose well.
Or maybe Meta just has a really weird relationship with the idea of celebrity. Meta isn’t a brand like Doritos, which puts celebrities in its Super Bowl ads, or a fashion house that puts actresses as the face of its perfume. Instagram has been so ingrained in the idea of fame and celebrity over the past decade that it’s hard to imagine Meta and famous people existing without each other (though I suppose Doritos would get along just fine).
When Meta’s Threads launched in the summer of 2023, real tensions arose. A-list celebrities who hadn’t used Twitter in years suddenly flocked to the new platform, growing their followings. But most of them disappeared within a day or two, as they realized the text-based medium wasn’t for them. A few months later, Meta rolled out a program to give reality TV stars cash bonuses in exchange for posting on Threads.
When Taylor Swift released her latest album, she posted on the thread, where Mark Zuckerberg posted a glowing welcome for her. He even created a custom sparkle effect when users typed in the name of her album. But after Meta welcomed the star, she never posted on the thread again.
And when Swift recently announced her support for Kamala Harris, she did so exclusively on Instagram, without even cross-posting it to the platform’s text-native sister site (for good reason, as my colleague Peter Kafka explains ).
There have been other flops in the world of celebrity meta-advertising: In 2019, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, two celebrities who aren’t typically cheap to advertise with, appeared in three TV spots promoting Facebook Portal, which was discontinued in late 2022.
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So it seems a bit odd to me that Meta is relying on celebrity testimonials for its AI product, whose products typically sell extremely well because people want to use them. Even celebrities use them without compensation.
But reuniting the Modern Family cast for its WhatsApp ads suggests Meta may be using celebrities to reach regular people who don’t normally use AI or WhatsApp. And for these latest AI assistant voices, Meta isn’t using one of the most popular Gen Z influencers, but rather Judi Dench after all.
So at least Meta didn’t “accidentally” hire someone with a voice similar to a well-known celebrity to voice their AI companion, like some of their other AI competitors. It could be a lot worse!
Perhaps AI is still a little scary and impersonal, and Meta executives believe that giving it a celebrity’s face and voice will make it feel more relatable. Oddly enough, I think the AI’s ability to impersonate celebrities is one of the things that scares a lot of people about this technology. But oh well.
My final guess about Meta’s actions here is that these decisions come from deep within the company, likely a combination of executive intuition about what will catch on and data from the marketing team. There must have been a lot of meetings.
I still stand by my theory: Yann LeCun was a huge fan of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel series and demanded a Dame.
