Meta has discontinued its artificial intelligence-powered celebrity chatbot, which featured images of A-list stars and social media influencers like Tom Brady, Charli D’Amelio, Mr. Beast and Paris Hilton, after it failed to generate interest a year after its release.
The tech giant, which came under fire this week after AI-trained software spit out inaccurate statements about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, has reportedly paid an unnamed influencer $5 million for what was meant to be a two-year pilot program.
However, due to disappointing response from the public, including social media users, who found the alternate persona strange and creepy, Meta executives decided to drop the project. According to The Information.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the campaign last year, and it reportedly pays celebrities millions of dollars a year to license their images for chatbots that interact with users on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Despite the celebrities’ online popularity, their AI chatbots struggled to attract many followers.
Snoop Dogg’s AI character, “Dungeon Master,” has just 15,000 followers, but the rapper’s real Instagram account has 87.5 million followers.
Kendall Jenner’s AI character, Billy, has the most followers of any of the 28 AI characters, with 179,000, but that’s still far behind the influencer’s Instagram following of 194 million.
As of Tuesday, links to the celebrity chatbot accounts on Facebook and Instagram returned messages indicating the pages were no longer available.
Meta confirmed the removal of the chatbot.
A spokesperson told The Information: “Through the development of our chatbot and Meta AI, we have gained a lot of insight into how people use AI to connect and create something unique.”
Earlier this week, Meta announced it was releasing a new tool called AI Studio that will allow users to create, share and design personalized AI chatbots.
AI Studio will allow users to create customized AI characters, and will also allow Instagram creators to use AI characters “as an extension of themselves” to handle common DM questions and Story replies, Meta said.
Users can share their AI characters across the social media giant’s various platforms.
The new tool builds on Meta’s Llama 3.1, released last week, the largest version of its largely free artificial intelligence models, available in multiple languages, with performance metrics that rival paid models from the likes of OpenAI.
ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, is working on a project codenamed “Strawberry,” details of which are being kept closely guarded even within the company, as the company races to demonstrate that the kinds of models it offers can provide advanced inference capabilities, Reuters reported exclusively earlier this month.
