What is Meta's AI Studio?

Synthetic Media is about to get more weird with real (digital clone) Avatars and fake Avatars

Hello Everyone,

I’ve been thinking this weekend about Meta’s AI Studio.

It appears to be a clone of Synthesia, TikTok Symphony with elements of Character.AI thrown in. While Facebook has a long legacy of cloning others, let’s try to dig into this.

Watch the entire podcast with Zuck and Kallaway.

So in late June, 2024, Meta said via Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on Thursday (June 27th) that the company will begin to surface AI characters made by creators through Meta AI studio on Instagram. The tests will begin in the U.S.

This sounds to me like Synthesia, HeyGen, TikTok Symphony and Avatar building for Creators. But can Meta do it better? Will they offer it for free? And should we trust a version of Mark Zuckerberg that looks like a Hawaiian version of Sam Altman of late? I just don’t know.

But the future of these digital experiences is not something we get to decide, it’s chosen for us by Meta, TikTok, Google and others.

Credit Philippe Beaudoin.

The Next Evolution of Synthetic Media

• The social media company's announcement comes on the same day as a16z-backed chatbot company Character.AI is rolling out the ability for users to talk with AI avatars over a call (TechCrunch).

• As writers have pseudonyms, will we just be creating content at scale of some weird digital persona of us in videos as well? What will TikTok Symphony and Meta’s AI Studio lead to at scale? It’s a serious question if you care about the internet.

As people get tired and exhausted of networks like Meta, TikTok, YouTube and others, is making them more infused with AI and synthetic, a good idea and the right answer? Time will tell, but without competition how can we refuse exactly? There isn’t really any alternative to YouTube, TikTok or Instagram.