Meta is tapping real celebrities to provide synthetic voices for future AI projects, according to reports by The New York Times and others. The tech giant is reportedly offering millions of dollars to stars like Awkwafina, Keegan-Michael Key and Judi Dench in exchange for the rights to use their voices to train AI voice clones. Meta apparently wants to close the deals before its Connect 2024 event.
Interestingly, Scarlett Johansson’s name is not on the list of names Meta is pursuing. This could be due to the recent controversy between the actress and OpenAI over whether one of their synthetic voices was trained to sound like her in the film Her. The company said no, but it would understandably make things difficult for Meta.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because Meta only recently made a big push into promoting celebrity likenesses that support AI features. The Celebrity AI chatbots were text-only, but were integrated into Meta platforms like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Unfortunately for Meta, the Snoop Dogg Dungeonmaster and Paris Hilton Detective didn’t get much attention, and those chatbots, while still around, no longer feature a celebrity likeness.
What Meta intends to do with the celebrity voices is not certain, but it will likely lead to some form of AI chatbot that could have the voice and presumably a digital version of their personality. However, according to the reports, getting the voices in time for Connect may be a challenge. The celebrities and Meta are apparently having trouble agreeing on how long and for what purpose the AI voices can be used by Meta. While the company obviously wants broad rights, the celebrities and their representatives want some restrictions up front.
Actors and writers have just concluded two major strikes in which AI was a major component. Entertainment executives fear that AI could replace their jobs, or at least that executives think it could. Still, industry unions may find ways to secure benefits for their members when it comes to AI. SAG-AFTRA has reportedly reached its own agreement with Meta for the use of actors’ voices, which could lead to a universal scale of pay similar to that of virtually every other acting contract.
The Elusive Mix of Technology and Celebrity
Meta isn’t the only one looking to the future of AI and celebrities, though. Google has also been busy creating AI chatbots of celebrities and fictional characters. In that case, the AI celebrities will be a template for users to customize personalities and appearances for their own AI chatbots. Both ideas are represented by people like Character.aian early proponent of custom chatbots based on famous and fictional people.
All of those companies might be more cautious considering what happened with Amazon Alexa and the voice assistant’s attempt to invest in celebrity voices. After early experiments with Samuel L. Jackson (in both family-friendly and uncensored forms) proved successful in 2019, Amazon began expanding the program in 2020, adding Melissa McCarthy and Shaquille O’Neal, and Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan in 2021. Amazon even built a recording studio in Shaq’s home as part of the deal. The advent of generative AI may or may not have had an impact on the success of those voices, but by mid-2023, those celebrity voices were DELETED from Alexa. Companies understand that people like fun technology and people like celebrities. They just seem to struggle with finding a mix that has the same appeal.