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Meta is going all-in on the AI craze, showcasing more than two dozen different chatbots with “personalities” loosely based on celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner. The tech giant announced its latest artificial intelligence and virtual reality projects at Meta Connect on Wednesday, confirming a rumored effort to encourage younger users to use various artificial intelligence characters.
The event also launched Meta AI, the company’s first virtual personal assistant, which can access real-time information and be used across the brand’s WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram apps. It’s one of the next generation of such tools, designed to improve tools like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.
But Meta differs from its Silicon Valley rivals by creating legions of AI bots that have “more personality, opinions and interests, and are more fun to interact with,” according to a press release. The features launched in beta on Wednesday (users must join a waitlist to try them out). The initial set consists of 28 characters, all of whom have profiles on Facebook and Instagram where users can send them messages. Each is personified by a celebrity or influencer — a stunt Meta hopes will boost engagement and keep users on their app longer.
Among the high-profile names are Tom Brady as “quippy sports debater” Bru and Paris Hilton as Amber, ” A detective’s sidekick in a whodunit,” MrBeast plays Zach, “the big brother who laughs at you—because he cares,” and Snoop Dogg plays Dungeon Master, a “choose your own adventure” role-playing game robot. Other characters are played by Charli D’Amelio, Dwayne Wade, Kendall Jenner and Chris Paul.
Mark Zuckerberg showed off some of the robots during Wednesday’s Meta Connect keynote, showing how the AI assistant Max (played by chef Roy Choi) can provide cooking tips and tricks, while an assistant named Dylan (played by YouTuber LaurDIY) How robots will provide cooking tips. Helping you figure out your Halloween costumes. However, the biggest response so far has been to Snoopy’s Dungeon Master, who appears on screen in a bizarre costume and exhorts viewers, “Let’s get into the Middle Ages, gamers.”
But Zuckerberg warned that Meta is still in the “early” stages of developing such a product, and that in most cases celebrity personas are simply cycled through a few common expressions, such as above a ChatGPT-like text field. image. The goal, he said, is to add more voices, perhaps by next year. Zuckerberg further noted that these applications have “limitations” that will be apparent once users try them, and that unlike Meta AI, these applications rely on information that may be more outdated.
Meta appears to be bullish on the concept, promising new characters at launch including Bear Grylls, Chloe Kim, Josh Richards, and more . The company recently posted a job posting on LinkedIn and is looking for a full-time “character writer” to work on their generative AI team. Hollywood experience is one of the top qualifications for applicants.
Prior to Meta Connect, discussions about AI personalities suggested that these issues might resurface as they become more widely used on Facebook and Instagram.according to a wall street journal According to reports in internal company documents, unintended side effects of giving chatbots more personality included misogynistic comments from a bot named Gavin, while one employee worried that an alien-themed robot eager to understand the human experience might be viewed as ” Purposefully designed to collect personal information.” Neither bot was ultimately included in Wednesday’s deployment.
But whatever troubles the new robots bring, Meta won’t suffer alone.Probably the most similar to their AI persona is Snapchat’s My AI, a bot that behaves just like your close friend and has been shown to produce inappropriate reactions, telling Washington post The reporter pretended to be a teenager, masked the smell of alcohol and marijuana, and even wrote him a homework assignment.
Regardless, big tech companies continue to look for ways to augment existing platforms with AI, even though they claim to be only “experimenting” with the technology, as Zuckerberg said before showing off his famous AI bot. In some ways, you can bet that the future of the internet will be dominated by human interaction rather than human conversation. Soon you may not need to be “friends” with or follow any real people anymore.