After less than a year, Meta AI's celebrity avatars are no more.
According the The Information, Meta has disabled the AI characters modeled after the likenesses of Kendall Jenner, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady.
Meta confirmed this to Mashable saying "you can no longer interact with AI characters embodied by celebrities." The company didn't give any reasoning, but the feature failed to gain much traction amongst users. "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," added the Meta spokesperson.
Snoop Dogg's AI persona who played a Dungeon Master that users could play Dungeons and Dragons with only had 15,000 followers compared to Snoop Dogg's actual Instagram account that has 88.4 million followers. Jenner's AI persona as "your ride-or-die older sister" had slightly more success with 179,000 followers. But that pales in comparison to Jenner's actual following of 292 million.
The story of Meta's doomed AI personas highlights the growing challenge of shipping consumer-facing generative AI features that people actually want to use. While chatbots like ChatGPT have been undeniably successful, other tools have struggled to bring meaningful value or engagement to users. Many consider the addition of the Meta AI searchbar in Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger an annoying hindrance to the previous search interface — especially since it can't be turned off. And Google's AI-generated search summaries had a rocky start, that ranged from aggravating imposition to downright inaccurate.
Meta reportedly paid its high-profile celebrities up to 5 million dollars for their likenesses over a two-year contract. But the confusing premise, announced at last September's Meta Connect, may have inhibited any meaningful engagement. Meta declined to comment to Mashable about the monetary aspects of this program.
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The AI personas had the celebrities' profile photos and their personality, but weren't actually AI replicas of the celebrities. The Padma Lakshmi persona, for example, inexplicably played a "travel expert" named Lorena. Links to these AI personas on Instagram now say the page is unavailable.
Instead of going forward with AI personas, Meta is trying other approaches to integrating generative AI into its platforms. On Tuesday, the company announced AI Studio, which lets users create AI replicas of themselves, much like the existing platform Character.ai. The idea is for creators, or any user for that matter, to clone versions of themselves online and interact with other accounts (with a disclaimer saying it's AI). Meta has also deployed AI tools for advertisers to create images and copy for ads.
So, we're saying goodbye to Billie (Kendall Jenner), Bru (Tom Brady), and Lorena (Padma Lakshmi), but Meta's efforts to foist AI on the masses isn't going away.
