Why Meta has a curious addiction to celebrities like Dame Judi Dench

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

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

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

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

Celebrities could help AI be less threatening

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

Or maybe Meta has a really weird relationship with the concept of celebrity: It’s not a brand like Doritos that uses celebrities in Super Bowl commercials or a fashion house that has an actress as the face of a perfume. Instagram has been so embedded in the concept of fame and celebrity over the past 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, there was a real buzz: big, top celebrities—the kind who hadn’t used Twitter in years—suddenly flocked to the new platform, bringing with them huge followings . But most of those celebrities went silent after a day or two, probably realizing that a text-based medium wasn’t really their jam. A few months later, Meta launched a program to offer cash bonuses to reality stars in exchange for posting on Threads.

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

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

There have been other failures in the world of celebrity-meta-ads. In 2019, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez, two celebrities whose endorsements usually don’t come cheap, starred in three TV spots to promote the Facebook Portal. The portal was discontinued at the end of 2022.

How celebrities can help Meta

So Meta relying on celebrity voices for its AI products feels a little off strange to me Meta products are usually very good to sell because people like to use them. Celebrities use them even without getting paid!

But bringing together the “Modern Family” cast for a WhatsApp ad suggests that Meta could use celebrities to reach norms that don’t typically use AI or WhatsApp. And with these latest AI assistant voices, Meta doesn’t go with Gen Z’s hottest influencers; it does use Judi Dench after all.

I mean, at least Meta didn’t “accidentally” hire a well-known celebrity-like soundbite to be the voice of an AI partner like other AI competitors. It could be worse!

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

My final guess at Meta’s play here is that these decisions come from deep within the company, perhaps a decision based on an executive’s gut about what’s going to come out, mixed with some input from the marketing team. I’m sure there have been many meetings!

I’m still sticking to my personal pet theory: Yann LeCun is a frothing fan of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” franchise and asked for Dame.