Meta has turned more than a dozen celebrities and influencers into robots.
The tech company, at the Meta Connect 2023 confab Wednesday, announced partnerships with “cultural icons and influencers” to play and embody AI-powered chatbots that will have profiles on Instagram and Facebook. Those include Snoop Dogg, Charli D’Amelio, MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson), Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade and Paris Hilton.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in unveiling the new AI chatbots, said the company wanted to create AIs that have distinct personalities, opinions and interests. “This isn’t just gonna be about answering queries,” he said. “This is about entertainment and about helping you do things to connect with the people around you.”
For now, the celebrity chatbots respond in text — their avatars don’t actually speak their responses. Zuckerberg said voice for the AIs will come probably early next year.
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The celebrity chatbots are in addition to others based on Meta AI, which the company calls “an advanced conversational assistant,” available on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram (and will be coming to the Quest 3 headset, priced starting at $500, and Ray-Ban Meta smart-glasses, which start at $299). Meta AI can give you “real-time information” through Meta’s search partnership with Microsoft’s Bing and is able to generate photorealistic images based on your text prompts, which you can share with friends. Initially, it’s available only in the U.S.
Currently, the chatbots’ knowledge base (with the exception of Meta AI, Tom Brady’s Bru and Chris Paul’s Perry) is “limited to information that largely existed prior to 2023, which means some responses may be dated,” Meta noted. The Meta AI chatbots are powered by Llama 2, the company’s large language model (LLM) database.
Here’s the full list of celeb AIs that Meta announced, along with their characters’ descriptions:
- Charli D’Amelio as Coco, dance enthusiast
- Chris Paul as Perry, pro golfer helping you perfect your stroke
- Dwyane Wade as Victor, Ironman triathlete motivating you to be your best self
- Izzy Adesanya as Luiz, showy MMA prospect who can back up his trash talk
- Kendall Jenner as Billie, no-BS, ride-or-die companion
- LaurDIY as Dylan, quirky DIY and Craft expert and companion for Gen Z
- MrBeast as Zach, the big brother who will roast you — because he cares
- Naomi Osaka as Tamika, anime-obsessed Sailor Senshi in training
- Paris Hilton as Amber, detective partner for solving whodunnits
- Raven Ross as Angie, workout-class queen who balances fitness with meditation
- Roy Choi as Max, seasoned sous chef for culinary tips and tricks
- Sam Kerr as Sally, free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath
- Snoop Dogg as Dungeon Master, choose your own adventure with the Dungeon Master
- Tom Brady as Bru, wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches
The celebrity AIs will launch in beta in the U.S. starting Wednesday. Meta said it will add new characters in the coming weeks played by Bear Grylls, Chloe Kim and Josh Richards, among others.
Meta announced that over time it will make AI chatbots available for businesses and creators, and said that it will release its AI studio tool for people to build their own AIs.
The company also is rolling out new customized, AI-generated stickers for WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Stories. Using technology from Llama 2 and Emu, its foundational model for image generation, the tool turns text prompts into multiple unique stickers (i.e., “pizza playing basketball” or “super happy racoon on a motorcycle”) in a few seconds, Meta said.
In addition, Instagram is launching two new AI image-editing features: “restyle,” which lets you apply different visual styles based on a text description (e.g., “watercolor” or “collage from magazines and newspapers, torn edges”); and “backdrop,” which changes the scene or background of your image based on prompts (such as “surrounded by puppies”).
In announcing the Instagram AI image tools, Meta noted, “We know how important transparency is when it comes to the content AI generates, so images created with restyle and backdrop will indicate the use of AI to reduce the chances of people mistaking them for human-generated content. We’re also experimenting with forms of visible and invisible markers.”
