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 have all reportedly been asked to be used for an AI chatbot or other unspecified AI product.
Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says Mark Zuckerberg’s Vision for the Future of AI Is a ‘Home Run Idea’
Insiders say that Meta is on a time crunch to secure the celebs needed as it looks ahead to its September Connect 2024 event. Last year’s event featured AI chatbots with recognizable faces, including Kendall Jenner, Tom Brady, and Paris Hilton. Meta reportedly paid those celebrities millions of dollars to use their likenesses but stopped the project last week after the AI chatbots failed to gain traction on social media in the year since they debuted.
Snoop Dogg’s “Dungeon Master” Meta AI character, for example, only had 15,000 followers. Kendall Jenner’s “Billie” AI older sister reached 118,000 followers on Instagram. 
Judi Dench. Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images for BFI
Celebrity voice cloning has been under the spotlight this year after Meta competitor OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, demoed GPT-4o in May and the AI chatbot sounded “eerily similar” to Scarlett Johansson. Johansson noticed the similarity, hired legal counsel, and OpenAI took down the voice.
Related: Can ChatGPT Help Start a Business? I Tried the Latest Version, GPT-4o, to Find Out.
Meta’s AI strategy seems to be less of a one-stop chatbot like ChatGPT and more of a community of AI chatbots with tailored purposes.
Last month, for example, Meta released a new AI studio that allows anyone to make an AI bot that they can talk to. Some popular AI characters in the studio now are therapist coach Luna and Career Catalyst, a bot to talk to about careers.
“It’s all part of this bigger view we have that there shouldn’t just be one big AI,” Zuckerberg said last week at the 2024 SIGGRAPH conference. “We just think that the world will be better and more interesting if there’s a diversity of these different things.”
