WHAT THE ZUCK

Mark Zuckerberg Cooks Up Dystopian Way to Speak to Staff

The Facebook chief is said to be personally involved in training and testing Meta’s new innovation.

Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of its billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to interact with employees on his behalf, according to the Financial Times. The $1.6 trillion group behind Facebook and Instagram has been developing photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters that users can interact with in real time, according to four people familiar with the matter. The company is prioritizing a Mark Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said. Zuckerberg is personally involved in training and testing the animated version of himself, which is being built on his mannerisms, tone, publicly available statements, and his own thinking on company strategy—so that employees “might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it,” one person said. The character is also being trained on images and his voice. Zuckerberg has been spending five to ten hours a week coding on AI projects and sitting in on technical reviews. If the experiment succeeds, influencers and creators could eventually build their own AI versions. Some staff, already being pushed to adopt AI to streamline internal processes, fear the initiative is a prelude to job cuts.