'We're entering...a post-truth era, where it's almost impossible to tell if something's real or not"; Cameo CEO on the uncharted territory of AI

There's a place where you can have Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) wish you happy birthday, Elmo lift your spirits, or Chuck Norris round-house kick your question into an answer. That's the magic of Cameo, the destination for personalized celebrity video messages. But it, like so many others, faces growing and not insignificant challenges in the age of AI.

"We're entering...a post-truth era, where it's almost impossible to tell if something's real or not," Cameo CEO and Co-founder Steve Galanis told me during a recent, wide-ranging conversation.

Cameo has been around for almost a decade and, in that time, become almost shorthand for celebrity shoutouts. The videos that the stars make on the platform and are delivered by Cameo to paying customers (Cameo takes a 25% cut) have become a sort of cultural touchstone, and the messages are sometimes viral and newsworthy in their own right (with the occasional home-grown controversy thrown in).

The platform's heyday was arguably in 2020, during the pandemic, but Cameo persists, and there are still countless A-, B-, C-, D-List and beyond celebrities making anywhere from six figures to – likely – lunch money on the platform. The world it faces now, though, is significantly different than the one in which it launched in 2017. It's different to the world that existed six years, or even one year ago.

Trust and verify

Cameo's onboarding process asks you to submit images of your photo ID (they also gather bank information) to, as Galani told me, verify they're real people, but that may no longer be enough. "We weren't worrying about this a year ago or two years ago; we didn't see this happening. Now, when there's someone I know is real, I need to know, is the video that they're making real?"

This is the "post-truth era" Galanis was referring to. It's a point he hammered home repeatedly and something that Cameo is grappling with right now.

While the platform verifies every celebrity on the platform, it does not automatically catch AI-generated content and, in fact, relies on customers to report it.

Galanis told me about a "long-time talent" on Cameo where customers noticed they were "clearly doing fake videos". Cameo investigated and "even though it's the real person that's on Cameo, they were uploading AI versions of their video, sending it to customers, and that is not something that we allow on our platform," he told me.

It's not that Cameo does nothing to authenticate its content, though the authentication largely revolves around verifying that the celebrity you're engaging with is actually that person. To guard against AI deep fakes of its stable of celebrities, Cameo uses C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) digital watermarks.

Galanis, though, knows that's not the end of it and sees authenticity as "a continuum and it really is a big problem, and we're thinking a lot about it here".

What he'd like, though, is for the world at large to think more broadly about content verification and truth, "As a society, it's vital that we go and solve these issues of real versus fake, authentic, or not," he told me.

Fighting a giant

One party that might not be helping Galanis's cause, though, is OpenAI. The AI giant is famous not just for its powerful ChatGPT generative chatbot, but for the Sora app, which is letting anyone create short, vertical AI videos featuring themselves and "cameos".

Yes, that's right, OpenAI stepped right on the Cameo brand to introduce a platform that can take AI avatars of almost anyone (who gives permission) and create videos of them doing almost anything.

Cameo and Galanis, naturally, sued.

The reasons for fighting OpenAI were obvious to Galanis. Cameo's been responsible for creating what he calls "10 million magical moments," but there's also the concern about what happens to his brand. What "if, suddenly," he explained, "you had a product called Cameo that was all fake AI slop videos as opposed to the real ones. You look at what that would do to our Google rankings, or when the social media suddenly gets flooded with Cameos that aren't real. That would be existential for us as a brand."

Cameo's won some early legal battles, and there's no mention in the Sora app of "cameos", but Galanis is still concerned: "We are in a David versus Goliath battle for our very existence."

Despite everything, Galanis sounds net-positive about AI. He says he uses it often in his daily life, and he worries about "luddites" who try to avoid it.

Galanis recounted a recent visit to his alma mater, Duke University, where he was a history major, and how the professors quizzed him about letting students use AI. For him, it seems less a question about what happens in university than what comes after for these students.

"The reality is, if they come work for me or they come work for any company, companies are demanding their people are using these tools."

Even on Cameo today, there is a new class of AI celebrities that are gaining traction, including Marcus the Worm, a wholly AI-generated creation that can charge $150 per personalized message.

The new Cameo frontier

AI's transformative nature also stands to open up new opportunities for Cameo and its partners. Years ago, Illumination Animation (makers of the popular Despicable Me franchise) wanted to put Minions on Cameo but realized there was just one voice actor to do it, and it would've been impossible to scale the personalized requests.

"Now, what you can do with companies like Eleven Labs, and others that have done amazing work on generative AI and then voice models, you can now go and take that voice actor, and he can continue, [and] he or she can monetize by having their voice out in the marketplace."

In other words, the original voice actor could put his voice in, say Eleven Labs, let it create a model that can then have him recite personalized responses (maybe with a generative AI Minion video from Illumination), and, with his permission, he gets paid for each generative, yet personalized, response.

That's the potential upside, but Galanis is less sanguine about how AI companies build and train their models and generate IP-related content. His business doesn't own the videos of its celebrities' posts and won't train AI models based on them.

"Our entire business relies on people being able and willing to pay a premium for the IP of the talent that we work with. So in a world where all the content that they've ever made gets stolen, and people could kind of use this stuff for free, that would be existentially bad for our talent and, by extension, it would be existentially bad for us."

Cameo and Galanis's role, he told me, is to maintain the Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) of his clients (celebrities) even as platforms like Sora indicate that NIL, perhaps, doesn't matter anymore.

Galanis believes Cameo can act as stewards of the talent's IP, but he's also a realist about the challenges they (and the rest of us) face.

"This stuff is getting exponentially better every day, right? So, while you might easily be able to pass that, like, 'real or fake?' test today, I've seen things that are coming, and I'm telling you, like, you don't know."

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