Instagram recently rolled out a new AI feature in collaboration with about two dozen celebrities using their faces to promote fictional character chatbots. Among these are Paris Hilton as a detective, Snoop Dogg as a dungeon master, and Kendall Jenner as Billie, normal girl.
Most of the attention online has been focused on the videos posted to these Instagram accounts, with concerns being raised ethically about deepfakes and copyright. Billie clarifies in a comment that this is the real person Kendall Jenner corporeally playing Billie. The AI generated part of the account is the chatbot itself as well as the other posts to the profile, all of which have a little logo in the corner that says they were “imagined with AI.” If the goal is to present a believable real person, these other posts are really not that impressive.
They all feel like a dated version of an influencer from about 10 years ago when it was more trendy to post a heavily filtered picture of a coffee cup taken with a DSLR than the current pretend-you-don’t-care approach to Instagram posting. They’re all paired with lowercase, casual, in-character captions, making for an uncanny dissonance between text and image. It seems like the aspects of the account that are text-based present a completely different character to those that are image-based, though I’m not sure if this is the result of AI not yet being able to replicate candid photo dump style posts easily, the real people who help run the account being a bit out of the loop, or a combination of both.
Where is the line between the real Kendall and Billie if they share a face?
Even if the visuals of Kendall Jenner are not AI generated, she’s still attached her likeness to this bot and many users will see it as an extension of her celebrity persona. There aren’t the same clear boundaries between actor and character that there are in TV and movies due to the nature of the chatbot as interactive and its medium being Instagram which is filled with real people. Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with The Verge talks about the possibility of using AI bots as an extension of celebrities. He says, “People want to interact with Kylie (Jenner). Kylie wants to cultivate her community, but there are only so many hours in a day.” Billie, though, is meant to be a separate character from Kendall. Is she more like fictional characters on TV only played by real actors or, like Zuckerberg suggests, a tool for the influencer to use to nurture parasocial relationships?
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen the distance between fan and celebrity shrink as we’re more privy than ever to the personal lives of social media influencers and movie stars alike. Maybe the officially licensed celebrity AI chatbot is the next step in this pattern, where the fan can have the illusion of actually speaking with their idol and their idol responding all while the actual person whose image is being used is none the wiser. This possibility of course opens the door to a whole other conversation on the ethics of fan/celebrity relationships and the extent to which real people are commodified. For now, though, all we have is yoursisbillie and her uncannily professional looking pictures of pizza. What do you think of her? Is there a future where you could imagine yourself talking to a celebrity chatbot?
Hi! This blogpost was really interesting because it revealed to me these new celebrity identities that I haven’t seen yet.
Furthermore, it makes me really question this relationship between identity and technology. It is a clear example of how through the use of new digital media, we are able to falsify our characteristics of the sake of likes and clicks on social media pages. These celebrities are completely stripping away their own identity and applying this new, sometimes more down to earth, identity in order for fans to connect with them more.
It also resurfaces complex questions about these online relationships, specifically parasocial relationships. I feel that the billie identity prays on these parasocial relationships as this character is meant to appear as more down to earth and like an older sister. But should these parasocial relationships be created?
Moreover, how will these new AI Identities change our social media pages and the way we interact with new media?