How much would Meta have to pay you to clone your voice for AI?
Meta is offering to pay celebrities millions in exchange for the right to capture their voices and use them for AI, according to separate reports from Bloomberg and The New York Times last week. Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key were reportedly asked to use it for an AI chatbot or other unspecified AI product.
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Insiders say Meta is pressed for time to secure the necessary celebrities as it looks ahead to September’s Connect 2024 event. Last year’s event featured AI chatbots with recognizable faces, including Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton. Meta reportedly paid the celebrities millions of dollars to use their likenesses, but last week halted the project after the AI chatbots failed to gain traction on social media in the year since their debut.
For example, Snoop Dogg’s meta AI character “Dungeon Master” only had 15,000 followers. Big sister Kendall Jenner AI “Billie” has reached 118,000 followers on Instagram. 
Judi Dench. Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images for the BFI
Celebrity voice cloning has been in the spotlight this year after Meta competitor OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, unveiled the GPT-4o in May and the AI chatbot sounded “eerily similar” to Scarlett Johansson. Noticing the similarity, Johansson hired legal counsel and OpenAI withdrew the vote.
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Meta’s AI strategy seems to be less of a one-stop chatbot like ChatGPT and more of a community of AI chatbots with customized purposes.
Last month, for example, Meta released a new AI studio that allows anyone to create an AI bot that they can talk to. Some of the studio’s popular AI characters right now are Luna, a therapy coach, and Career Catalyst, a career-talking bot.
“It’s all part of this bigger view that we have that there shouldn’t be just one big AI,” Zuckerberg said last week at SIGGRAPH 2024. “We just think the world will be better and more interesting if there’s a diversity of these different things .”