For all the hype around AI, and the undeniable potential in various applications, it sure does seem like social apps are grasping for truly valuable use cases.

Or maybe I’m just not seeing it yet, but for me, AI bots that reply in the style of celebrities, or in the voice of celebrities, as per Meta’s latest update, really aren’t it.

Meta’s initial experiment with celebrity-styled AI chatbots in text form failed to resonate with users, which led to it recently shutting down that project.

Because it’s not that interesting, right? A chatbot that gives you the impression that you’re speaking to some celebrity isn’t particularly engaging when you know that it’s not really that celebrity, or indeed any human at all, at the other end of the discussion. It’s just you speaking to the Matrix, and the codebase calculating then returning your answers.

 
 
That’s also true for celebrity voiced bots, because whether its dressed up as Billie Eilish, or just responses attached to some generic profile pic, those answers are still gonna be the same. Sure, hearing John Cena respond to random questions is going to be funny among your friends, but that novelty’s going to wear off pretty quick. And again, then it’s just you giggling to yourself. Or maybe trying to convince yourself that you actually are friends with Kristen Bell as her robot voice rings in your ears.

It’s also not social, at least not in the way that we generally understand that term. Social generally refers to human connection, which the whole concept of social media was founded upon.

These offerings are not social, in fact they’re the opposite, in that they invite engagement with nobody else.

And while, again, you might be able to develop a form of relationship with an AI system (and some people already have), that also seems potentially unhealthy, and not something that we should be looking to build for, at least till we know the potential dangers of such.

But that’s not even the limit of Meta’s AI bot projects.

In his Connect keynote yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also previewed the next stage of the company’s AI character platform, which will eventually enable creators to build AI versions of themselves in video form.

So you could be video chatting to your favorite celebrity, and they’ll be able to answer any question you ask them.

Cool, right?

Except, again, this is not actually social, in that you’re not engaging with other people, and it’s not really anything at all. It’s just a video game, with real life characters, which will increasingly look and sound like people you recognize.

And that’s not what the allure of social media has traditionally been.