I just had a chat with Judi Dench — or, rather, a soulless imitation of the English actor’s voice generated by artificial intelligence.
“Who are you?” I asked. Then, in Dench’s distinct croak, I heard: “I’m Meta AI, your friendly assistant.”
This zombie Dame Judi is coming soon toeveryone’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp as a voice for Meta AI. The chatbot, which is hard to avoid, already answers questions, gives advice and makes pictures. To make using it feel more comfortable, Meta is now adding the ability to talk with it — including in the voices of Dench and fellow actors Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key and Kristen Bell.
Bringing the voices of real living celebrities to a chatbot already used by 400 million people each month is a big deal for the future of AI. But it also feels like a wrong turn for our human relationships with the tech.
Meta AI now can adopt the AI-generated voices of celebrities. (Video: Meta)
Let’s talk
No doubt, it’s a curiosity — and, at first, pretty funny — to hear a well-known voice talk about almost anything. I was so curious, I asked Meta to let me briefly test its AI celebrity voices ahead of their official launch by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday.
Meta says it paid the actors behind its AI voices an undisclosed sum for the rights to use their voices for multiple years. Rival ChatGPT stirred up a controversy earlier this year because it featured a voice that sounded a bit like Scarlett Johansson, the actress who played the voice of an AI in the movie “Her.”
Celebrities are people we have relationships with, even if it’s one-sided. So of course my first question for the Dench-voice AI was about James Bond, whose boss Dench played in eight 007 films.
“Tell me a secret about James Bond,” I asked. “Sure,” it said. “James Bond’s iconic Aston Martin DB5 was fitted with an ejector seat, but in reality, it was too expensive to produce, so only one car was equipped with it.” (Bond historians say the ejector seat from the car in the film worked but was more of a prop.)
The celebrity voices in Meta AI will talk about anything allowed in Meta’s chatbot, which means naughty words and topics are mostly off-limits. Still, it took me just a few minutes to get it to say something the human Dench might not want to see quoted in The Washington Post.
I asked the Dench-voice AI to write me a haiku about Donald Trump. It responded: “A business leader, Something new for President. What a big mistake!” (A Meta spokeswoman said the AI pulled that particular haiku from a web page, which it didn’t cite verbally but offered a link to on the screen.)
In other ways, too, my conversations reminded me that it wasn’t actually a celebrity I was conversing with.
Meta AI’s answers typically took a few milliseconds too long to feel like a natural back and forth. One time, the AI Dench voice attempted to be colloquial by saying, “What would you like to talk about, love?” but paused for such an uncomfortable amount of time before saying “love” that it felt like a different sentence.
In tech, this is called the uncanny valley — the awkward and uncomfortable space between an AI or a robot seeming totally fake or totally real.
The conversations felt lifeless because, while Meta AI may now have the voices of certain celebrities, the AI doesn’t have their distinct personalities. To start with, AI Dench’s voice sounds like it’s eager to be helpful — not a quality I’d associate with the curt actor.
In conversations with the AI voice of Awkwafina, a comedian with a distinct New York flair, most of her answers were as boring as, well, a chatbot. Even when I asked the AI to “pretend to be Awkwafina” and tell me a joke, it offered one so bad that it might embarrass the real actor.
Meta told me it didn’t try to make its AI adopt the personalities of its celebrity voices. The voices are, so to speak, “skins” on the same general-purpose Meta AI chatbot. Last year, the company launched a text-and-image-only version of Meta AI that did try to impersonate celebrities, but the company has now shut that down. It still, however, has an AI Studio where creators can build AI characters that are an extension of themselves.
It’s possible this is just a marketing stunt that’s destined to fizzle out. Meta is not the first to produce celebrity AI voices, and the idea doesn’t have a great track record. Both Amazon and Google previously offered voices for their voice assistants such as those of Samuel L. Jackson, Issa Rae and John Legend. Both companies shut down these offerings after a few years, without much indication of why.
AI is not your friend
What concerns me most: What happens when the AI voices and personalities do become much more convincing? What do we gain — and what do we lose — when we endow AI with the characteristics of real living people?
I asked Sue Young, the vice president of Product Management in charge of Meta AI, why it is a good idea to give an AI the voice of a real person.
“We just wanted to have a diversity of voices that would resonate with people,” she said.
She said Meta worked with a range of voice actors, some famous, some not, to generate them. “For the ones that people do recognize, we wanted to give attribution and create that formal partnership with them,” said Young.
She didn’t appear to share my view that celebrities are fundamentally different than unknown voice actors.
But they are. When you talk to ordinary old Siri or Alexa (also the product of voice actors), you know it’s just a computer. When you talk to AI Dench voice, you’re picturing in your mind a real person with a face and personality that you might have feelings about. That’s the whole reason it feels fun to interact with them.
How might you feel chatting with their voice if suddenly one of these celebrities were to die? That’s the humanity party.
What does it teach young people, who love Meta’s apps, about how to think about the place of the tech in their lives? Experts at Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, have told me parents should stress with kids that AI is not actually a friend, and doesn’t actually have your best interests at heart — even if it pretends to.
To Meta’s credit, its celebrity-voice AI will expressly tell you it’s not actually a person. When I asked Dench’s AI voice if it knew Judi Dench, it said, “I'm familiar with Dame Judi, but I don't have personal relationships or specific information about individuals unless it's publicly available.”
But it had no problem obliging my request to pretend to be my girlfriend. Said Meta AI in Dench voice: “I can play along. Hi, sweetheart. How was your day?”
I suspect celebrity voices are just a shortcut to trying to get a mass market of people to be more comfortable with the technology. But borrowing some of humanity from well-known people — even if you’re paying them well — feels like an icky way to go about it. I wonder: Why didn’t Zuckerberg lend his own famous voice to the cause?