Meta has a curious addiction to celebrities

For the rest of us, the logic behind Meta’s celebrity collaboration is a little more perplexing.

Around this time last year, Meta introduced a different round of celebrity AI assistants as part of Messenger. These chatbots had the faces of celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, and more. Strangely, these chatbots used the likenesses of the celebrities, but not their real names. For example, I chatted with “Billie,” the character portrayed with an image of Kendall Jenner, whose chat persona was of a helpful sister-like friend.

For the celebrity-faced AI assistants, Meta reportedly paid as much as $5 million over two years — for six hours of work sitting in a studio. The deal didn’t seem to work out too well for Meta. The chatbots were discontinued by August, less than a year after their launch.

So why is Meta using the celebrity AI playbook again if it apparently crashed and burned last time?

Celebrities might help AI be less threatening

Maybe last year’s chatbots weren’t a failure by some metrics. Sure, people didn’t seem interested in sticking around talking to fake Tom Brady, but maybe the goal was to get enough people to try using an AI chatbot just one time — and the celebrity gimmick worked for that.

Or maybe Meta just has a really strange relationship with the concept of celebrity: It’s not a brand like Doritos that uses celebrities in Super Bowl ads or a fashion house where an actress is the face of a perfume. Instagram has been so embedded in the concept of fame and celebrity for the last decade that it’s impossible to imagine Meta and famous people existing without each other (whereas I can imagine Doritos getting along just fine).

When Meta’s Threads launched in the summer of 2023, a real tension appeared: Big, A-list celebrities — the kind who hadn’t used Twitter in years — suddenly flocked to the new platform, bringing big follower counts with them. But most of those celebrities went silent after a day or two, perhaps realizing that a text-based medium wasn’t really their jam. A few months later, Meta rolled out a program to give cash bonuses to reality stars in exchange for posting on Threads.

When Taylor Swift released her latest album, she did post to Threads, where Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically posted to welcome her. There was even a custom sparkle effect made for users when they typed her album name. But after Meta rolled out the welcome mat for the star, she never posted again on Threads.

And recently, when Swift made her announcement supporting Kamala Harris, she did it only on Instagram — not even a cross-post to the platform’s text-native cousin (for good reasons, as my colleague Peter Kafka explains).

There have been other flops in the celebrity-Meta-ad world. In 2019, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, two celebrities whose endorsements usually aren’t cheap, starred in three TV spots to promote the Facebook Portal. The Portal was discontinued in late 2022.

How celebrities can help Meta

So, Meta relying on celebrity voices for its AI products feels a little odd to me. Meta’s products are usually really good at selling themselves because people love to use them. Celebrities even use them — without getting paid!

But reuniting the cast of “Modern Family” for a WhatsApp ad suggests Meta might be using celebs to reach normies who might not typically be using AI or WhatsApp. And with these latest AI assistant voices, Meta is not going with the hottest Gen Z influencers; it’s using Judi Dench, after all.

I mean, at least Meta didn’t “accidentally” hire a soundalike of a well-known celebrity to be the voice for an AI companion like, uh, some other AI competitors. Could be worse!

Perhaps it’s just that AI is still a little scary and impersonal, and Meta execs think putting a celebrity face — or voice — to it will help make it feel more accessible. Oddly, the ability of AI to impersonate celebrities is one of the things I think many people fear about the technology. But, ah well.

My final guess as to Meta’s play here is that these decisions come from somewhere deep inside the company, perhaps a decision based on an executive’s instinct about what will pop, mixed with some data from the marketing team. I’m sure many meetings were held!

I still hold on to my personal pet theory: Yann LeCun is a frothing fan of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” franchise and demanded the Dame.