Star quality
Meta is asking real celebrities to contribute synthetic voices for future AI projects, according to reports from The New York Times and others. The tech giant reportedly is 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 is apparently looking to get the deals done before its Connect 2024 event.
Notably, Scarlett Johansson’s name isn’t on the list of names pursued by Meta. That might be because of recent furor between the actress and OpenAI regarding whether one of its synthetic voices was trained to sound like her a la the movie Her. The company said it wasn’t, but it would understandably make her a hard get for Meta.
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because Meta only recently made a big push for celebrity likenesses backing AI features. The Celebrity AI chatbots were only text-based but were integrated across Meta platforms like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Unfortunately for Meta, the Snoop Dogg Dungeonmaster and Paris Hilton detective didn’t draw a lot of interest, and those chatbots, though still around, are no longer branded with any celebrity’s likeness.
