Meta just invented Celery Man
On the new Meta AI social profiles
I have dabbled with a few social media accounts for Explainable since launching. Musk-era Twitter is dead for publishers and I’m not feeling Threads so I’m going all in on Bluesky. You can find me at explainable.bsky.social. If you want a code to join then please do get in touch, I have 20 to share with you beautiful readers!
Note: I worked at Meta for over two years as a content expert. It’s full of lovely people whom I really enjoyed working alongside. I’m obviously precluded from writing in any great detail about my time there, so the following is very much from the outside looking in.
The internet’s favorite friend’s boyfriend Paul Rudd has given us a lot over the years, but a sketch he did for Tim and Eric Awesome Show 13 years ago may be the most prescient. In Celery Guy he plays with a number of different versions of himself on a computer. It is a very serious business. Which is why it’s so funny.
Which brings us to Meta. As mentioned previously, in a dive into the early success of Character AI, generative AI that moves beyond tech obsessives and reaches a more mainstream audience is a potential goldmine.
So you can see the thinking behind Meta’s recent pitch of ‘social profiles’.
Here’s Billie, 2.1k followers on Facebook, and a more respectable 103k followers on Instagram, the profile reads, “your local ride or die | nyc”.
Side note - ‘your local ride or die’ as a profile bio reads like it was also written by AI, an AI with no post-2015 cultural references.
Billie is voiced by Kendall Jenner. She looks like Kendall Jenner. She’s freaking the hell out of anyone who likes Kendall Jenner and annoying anyone who doesn’t. It’s also possibly the first time many people have knowingly interacted with AI. If you haven’t been all-in on GPT then of course this is freaky as hell
The celebrity entry point does, albeit in a depressing way, make sense. We’re living in a world where Kim Kardashian is, presumably, the best-paid cast member of the Paw Patrol movies (having sat through both movies I can confirm she has a bit part as a ‘sassy poodle’). Kids do not give a shit about Kim Kardashian, she’s there so adults might be aware of the new movie in a showbiz story. Kendall and Snoop and Mr Beast are AI gateway drugs, a term Meta is welcome to use but absolutely will not.
Here’s the full list of celebrity contributors.
Tom Brady is wisecracking, something Tom Brady is, of course, noted for. It’s a project that is non-living testament to the concept that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Will they get used? A bit, though the all-important Young Adult audience seems to be having too much fun torturing their Character AI characters, something Meta filters understandably doesn’t allow. Meta is network TV for social media, it’s not making Euphoria, it’s making American Idol. It’s possibly too big to fail, but it’s also too big to be edgy or truly innovative.
Of course, it’s easy to dunk on Meta’s new AI social profiles. Easy and fun! So that’s the focus for the rest of the piece today. Look at this guy!
Paris Hilton is Amber, your detective partner for solving whodunnits. Read that sentence again, let it roll around in your mind. Paris Hilton is Amber, your detective partner for solving whodunnits.
Billie AKA Kendall shares an AI-generated image of a pizza and the top comment is “just don’t understand why kendal [sic] is doing this it’s so weird”. The project is very funny from start to finish.
But then describing, say, The Sims to someone 30 years ago, or Madden to someone 40 years ago would probably also elicit laughter. Is this the mainstream future of AI? It probably offers a hint. Messaging in the rollout hasn’t helped. Making AI a little more fun? Cool, sounds good. Creating an army of celebrity facsimiles as stand-ins for human interaction? Burn it to the ground please.
The future of everyday, mainstream AI probably will offer a little more color than Alexa et al, and maybe this cast of characters will eventually be household names. For the moment though it feels like an odd, but at times very funny, diversion off the road to wherever it is we’re going.
Small bits #1: New content labeling thing just dropped
I’ve really liked the recent work done by Adobe and the Content Authenticity Authority to try and standardize a way of labeling digital content so that generative AI work shows its ingredients. Its new Content Credentials label, which essentially tells you when an image contains AI-generated work, is a good move in that direction.
Small bits #2: New problematic AI thing just dropped
Over on Reddit a good proportion of trending AI-generated images are currently of this character, Gumbo Slice. They are all variations on the same theme, an overweight, black man with an alligator and pizza. It’s surreal, it’s at times deeply problematic and it’s Very Online. The always excellent Know Your Meme has a deeper dive into the meme. It’s not the kind of content that’s moving the needle creatively, but you will likely see this character beyond the depths of Reddit over the coming months. And now you will know it’s a dumb AI thing.
Small bits #3: New kind of cool AI design thing just dropped
I delved into the Canva plug in on ChatGPT a few weeks ago. Now last week Canva have launched Magic Studio, which includes a text-to-image function. It’s a solid start, and you can see how intuitive Canva, and its competitors, are going to get over the coming years.