Remaking Public Service: Can AI Celebrities Save Lives?

What if you could have a one-on-one video chat with Hugh Jackman about your health? It sounds like a Hollywood fever dream, but according to Professor Alan Dennis, it might be the future of how we tackle global public service challenges.

Last week, our research center had the pleasure of hosting Professor Dennis, a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University and one of the world’s most influential Information Systems researchers. His seminar, "From Monologue to Dialogue: Remaking Public Service Communication with Celebrity-as-a-Service," challenged our traditional ideas of how governments and NGOs talk to the public.

The Problem: Monologue vs. Dialogue

Public service communication usually falls into two camps:

The Monologue (PSA): A celebrity film or radio ad. It’s high-impact but one-way. You listen, but you can’t ask questions.
The Dialogue (PSI): A face-to-face meeting with an official. It’s interactive and persuasive, but impossible to scale to millions of people.

Celebrities have always been stuck in the "monologue" phase because, frankly, Hugh Jackman doesn't have the time to video call every person on the planet. Until now.

Enter: "Celebrity-as-a-Service"

Professor Dennis introduced a game-changing concept: using Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with AI-generated voice, facial expressions, and gestures to create "Digital Twins" of celebrities.

By creating a digital version of a star, public health organisations can offer Celebrity-as-a-Service (CaaS). This isn't just a video; it’s an interactive AI that looks, sounds, and moves like a real person, capable of having millions of unique, one-on-one conversations simultaneously.

Does it actually work?

To test this, Professor Dennis’s team ran an experiment comparing a digital Hugh Jackman to a non-celebrity digital human, delivering a message about skin cancer awareness. The results were striking:

Trust and Joy: Both the "celebrity status" and the "interactivity" significantly boosted how much people trusted the message and enjoyed the experience.
Actionable Results: Higher trust led directly to a greater intention to follow the health advice (like getting a skin check), and both trust and enjoyment made people much more likely to share the message with others.

"Celebrity-as-a-service opens the door to drive more effective, scalable, and cost-effective public service communication." — Prof. Alan Dennis

A Deep Dive in the Gillmore Lab

Following the seminar, we were lucky enough to host Professor Dennis in our very own Gillmore Lab. It was an invaluable opportunity to showcase the projects currently brewing in our centre.

We spent the afternoon discussing the intersection of his work on digital twins with our own research. The conversation touched on how these "digital humans" might soon become a staple of our daily digital interactions.

Why This Matters

As we move further into the age of AI, the line between "watching" and "interacting" is blurring. If we can leverage the persuasive power of celebrity through the scalability of AI, we might just find a more effective way to solve the world’s most pressing social and health issues.