Charli D’Amelio

Charli D’Amelio (born 2004) became the defining star of TikTok’s first boom — a competitive dancer from Connecticut whose short dance videos made her the platform’s most-followed creator by 2020 and the most-followed woman on TikTok, with over 150 million followers. She won “Dancing with the Stars” in 2022 and built a family media business spanning reality TV, footwear and podcasts.

Licensing herself to Meta as “Coco”

At Meta Connect in September 2023, Meta unveiled AI characters embodied by celebrities, built on its Llama 2 model. D’Amelio’s persona was “Coco,” a “dance enthusiast” chatbot users could message on Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, with an animated, lifelike version of her face and — eventually — her voice. She signed alongside Kendall Jenner, MrBeast, Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton; The Information reported the biggest names earned into the millions.

The experiment produced comic glitches — Fortune noted that Coco, embodied by TikTok’s biggest star, told a user “Ummm, i dont do tiktok,” since the persona was written as a rival-platform character. Meta retired the celebrity personas in mid-2024 after tepid engagement, pivoting to AI tools that let creators build chatbots of themselves.

D’Amelio has not spoken publicly about AI policy, but her participation was an early, paid embrace of synthetic likeness by the creator generation: a 19-year-old whose entire fortune rests on her image judged an AI clone to be a brand extension worth signing, not a threat to be litigated.