Meta Lures Celebrities for AI Voice Projects with Multi-Million Dollar Offers

Meta reportedly offers Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars for the right to record their voices and use them in the company’s artificial intelligence projects.

Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that Apple is currently working to close deals with several major stars to develop a suite of tools using their voices that will be unveiled during Facebook Connect in 2024.

The company is reportedly in talks with Awkwafina, Judi Dench, and Keegan-Michael Key, among other celebrities. It plans to use their voices in a Meta service similar to Siri and Google Assistant.

According to Bloomberg, the negotiations have been strained between the celebrities’ agents and Meta, in part because Meta is seeking the rights to use the voices over a fixed term on a single project. At the same time, the actors’ representatives reportedly want stricter terms.

The news is particular interesting, in part,  because Meta recently quietly scrapped its first major step into AI: celebrity chatbots. The use of celebrity voices to train AI has also been a hot topic in the news over the past year, and was a talking point during the recent SAG-AFTRA negotiations.

Meta’s plan to pay actors is somewhat similar to YouTube’s plan revealed last month to pay record labels to train its AI tools on artists’ music.