According to foreign media reports, Google is building a new artificial intelligence chatbot based on celebrities and YouTube celebrities. The idea isn't groundbreaking—startups like Character.ai and companies like Meta have launched such products—but it's not Google's AI strategy to date.
According to The Information, Google’s celebrity chatbot will be powered by the company’s Gemini series of large-scale language models. The company is trying to forge partnerships with influencers and celebrities, and is also developing a feature that will let people create their own chatbot simply by describing their personality and appearance.
It's unclear which celebrities or influencers Google might partner with. Meta's chatbots, for example, are modeled after celebrities such as TikTok star Charli D'Amelio, YouTube star Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton, while Character.ai's characters include politicians, philosophers, fictional characters and even objects like talking cheese cubes.
Google's bots may sound like just an experiment — according to reports, the bots may only appear on Google Labs (the company's site for experimental products) rather than being used more widely.
It's unclear why Google did this. Although Meta built celebrity AI chatbots into every product it produced, the company's celebrity-based chatbots never really caught on. According to The Information, the company's SnoopDogg-based chatbot has only 15,000 followers on Instagram, compared with the human rapper's 87.5 million.