Unlike OpenAI, which just went and hired an actress who sounded like Scarlett Johansson after ScarJo declined to voice an AI model for them, Meta appears to be actually paying some big-name celebrities to lend their voices for its new AI voice tool.

Some features of Meta AI were revealed at the company's conference, Meta Connect 2024, this week — though the news on Wednesday was a touch overshadowed by some ongoing upheaval over at competitor OpenAI. Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to introduce Meta AI's new suite of voice personalities, which include the voices of Awkwafina, Kristin Bell, John Cena, Dame Judi Dench, and Keegan-Michael Key.

As CBS News reported, Zuckerberg asked the AI onstage, "Hey, are live demos risky?" And the voice of Awkwafina chimed in saying, "Live demos can be risky, yes. They can be unpredictable, prone to technical issues and potentially embarrassing..."

Zuckerberg told the audience, in his usual awkward high schooler way, "I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text. It is just a lot better." And he said the use of these familiar, famous voices are there to "make this fun."

The Meta AI tool is now available to use in Messenger, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, and on Facebook, and as this blog post outlines, it allows to do things like add a photo in a chat and tell the tool to alter it in some way — like taking a photo of a goat and putting it on a surfboard, as the example goes. Such fun.

You can also share a photo of some food you'd like to cook, and the AI will theoretically find a recipe for you. Or you can just tell the AI to look something up, identify a flower, or tell you a joke.

Of course, the introduction of AI at Meta, and the implications of this for longtime users of Instagram and Facebook, has sent (mostly older) users of the internet scrambling and sharing a new copypasta hoax — basically a copy-paste bit of graphic text telling Meta you don't consent to having your entire archive of photos and chats and posts used to feed the AI monster.

You can, in fact, opt out of this — but pasting this dumb thing on your feed isn't going to do it, and this harkens back to many, many similar paranoid copypasta memes of the past couple decades, as Wired outlined Wednesday. You need to send an email to Instagram or Facebook specifically opting out of their use of your posts — there's an explainer of where to find the links here.

Anyway, isn't it fun that you can have John Cena tell you what that weed is that keeps growing by your front door? Assuming the information it spits back is correct?

Meta hasn't discussed how much it is compensating these celebs for their voice likenesses, but the New York Times suggested back in August, as negotiations were occurring, that it was in the millions of dollars, and that "all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations" with Meta about this.

Zuckerberg said in August that the company was upping its spending on AI — no more metaverse malarkey! — from a planned $30 billion this fiscal year to $37 billion. And sounding a lot like Sam Altman, Zuckerberg was quoted as saying he'd rather be "too fast than too late" when it comes to building AI tools, because of the fierceness of the competition right now.

Previously: Some Upheaval at OpenAI as Company Announces Plan to Become a For-Profit Enterprise

Top image: Awkwafina, winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie for Quiz Lady, attends the 76th Creative Arts Emmys Winner's Walk at Peacock Theater on September 08, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)