META has been paying celebrities millions to be the faces of its new AI chatbots.
Last month, Meta began rolling out its AI chatbot assistant across its apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
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The aim of the chatbots is to enhance the user experience on Meta-owned apps.
The AI-powered tool functions similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
This includes having one-on-one conversations, answering questions, and even offering travel recommendations.
Moreover, Meta’s AI tools feature different personalities – some of which belong to famous celebrities.
These celebrities include reality television star Kendall Jenner, pro football player Tom Brady, and YouTuber MrBeast.
Kendall Jenner’s likeness is used for one AI assistant named Billie, meanwhile, Tom Brady portrays a chatbot named Bru.
However, the celebrities’ likenesses don’t come cheap, costing Meta millions.
In fact, the tech giant has dished out as much as $5million to one celebrity for just six hours of work, according to The Information.
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In an interview earlier this fall, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there’s a huge need for AI celebrities.
“It’ll be clear to people that they’re not interacting with the physical Kylie Jenner, it would be kind of an AI version,” he explained.
This is part of a larger push by the company to utilize AI technology for its platforms.
AI chatbots could also offer the company more user data for targeted advertisements, which is Meta’s main revenue source.
“Once users interact with a chatbot, it really exposes much more of their data to the company, so that the company can do anything they want with that data,” Ravit Dotan, an AI ethics adviser and researcher, told the Financial Times.
Meta has been investing in the AI sector for years, and just earlier this year, the company pledged to spend up to $33billion on new AI tools – specifically, language learning models.
