In short, actors are in the middle of a big, long fight with Hollywood regarding the role that AI will play in the future of entertainment and how they'll be paid for that when those AIs are basically likenesses of them. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ring, Meta seems to have smoothed out some wrinkles.

Today, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp - and a whole bunch of other products it hopes one day to be like that - is unveiling a new set of celebrity AIs: 28 AI characters based on famous people — built in cooperation with those celebs but running entirely on AI — from across the worlds of sport, music, social media, and more.

The list literally includes every who's-who of personalities renowned for spinning the media wheels of the western world, featuring names like Tom Brady and Charli D'Amelio, Snoop Dog and Paris Hilton. The idea is that Meta's versions of them, these AIs—according to Facebook, based on Llama 2—can be invoked in conversations with users across all of Meta's various platforms (chats, VR experiences, and so on), where they'll give you fun and helpful advice in their areas of expertise.

Tom Brady's Bru (not Bro) will chew the fat about sports; Charli's Coco will help you dance; Kendall Jenner's Billie will give you "ride or die" advice. Some are a little more left field. Paris plays Amber (a character of a character), who will help you solve whodunits, and… Snoop is NOT helping you craft music or build hydroponic enterprises; he is a, um, "Dungeon Master."

Meta has otherwise been mum about all details on how the celebrity characters were created thus far. Here's what we know so far and don't know:
—The company confirmed that it is built atop the Llama 2 large language model which was released earlier this year.

—Not video clips, but rather AI-generate animations: Meta filmed the people that those AIs represent, then took those disparate animations and used "generative techniques" to turn them into unified user experiences. The model's purpose is to maintain a "unique personality and tone" for every character while still also being informative for each. It declined to comment on whether it filmed just the people in question, or whether clips of others were used to supplement the footage.

—That also included what Mark Zuckerberg described onstage as "thousands of hours" of red-teaming and working with prompts to train the characters to steer clear of iffy topics, and so that the video interactions matched up with the text-based responses when the conversations are in chats.

— The chat feature matters: To date, it has no voice attached to it, although apparently one is promised for sometime in 2018. I couldn't help but think: Will it be more of a success than Amazon's celebrity Alexa voices, which it closed down last year?

— Absolutely no detail on the business model behind this. We inquired about how Meta was compensating the celebrities with their likenesses, which elicited an emphatic "no comment" from the spokespeople.

But then, of course, thinking about some of the existing Meta business-that, for example, Instagram has got quite well-established model of paying creators; and the whole company really runs mostly on advertising revenues-you can already hear how this pitch might go. These characters will appear across multiple social platforms and interfaces, from mobile and web to VR. And influencers and other media personalities will be able to use them in order to "stay true" to their brands but also allow Kendall Inc. to scale Kendall's "production" and "engagement".

We are only just starting to really understand how AI can fool us into thinking we are seeing or hearing actual live human subjects doing human things when, in fact, we are viewing likenesses. Sadly, there is no real Pope rocking Balenciaga, and there is no new Drake track.

So when the "characters" were revealed by Zuckerberg during keynote today, it's kind of hard to know what you are looking at. Are these video clips? Is the AI character really responding to what Zuck was writing? Unlike what Meta presumably expects in the form of assistance from its chatbots in the future, the live demo featuring a nodding and smiling Snoop Dog acting as "Dungeon Master" served little to help answer such questions. ("Note: text RPGs make for exceptionally boring and awkward onstage demos," one of my colleagues quipped in Slack.)

If I was to draw some sort of takeaway from today's AI news, it would be this: Leave your dystopia at the door! Meta often has a knack for pulling the uncanny carpet out from under us, and that's what it's aiming for here, playing off the wow factor. We want to know these people, and now, each of us can chat with Tom, Kendall, and Paris-and Meta can build a whole experience, even a business, on that.