It’s no secret that I started to learn to sing back in 2014 because I had been very bad a Karaoke. Eight and a bit years later I’m “competent” as a singer. What’s mildly annoying about it that, in far less time, researchers have taught AI entities to sing, and even have them accepted as students in a musical academy.
A deepfake allows us to animate any face and have it say whatever we want that face to say. Useful in resurrecting long dead actors (or recently dead to finish a movie), but incredibly dangerous when it – inevitably – it moves into the political arena. Exonet describes the problem in great detail in this video. From 2017 when you needed a lot of money and a lot of source material to base the deepfake on, to 2022 where only 20 seconds of video are required to make a believable deepfake.
While video dominates most communication and entertainment, it seems like Artificial Intelligence thrives on text. There’s a lot of new and quite diverse tools for using text prompts for image generation, 3D model creation, Human avatar movement, Animation and editing, all driven with text prompts. While text prompts are the current interface, they are not the end game. After all we already have, in various stages of development and availability.
With examples like James Earl Jones “signing over rights to” his Darth Vader voice to an artificial intelligence startup, and Bruce Willis selling rights to his “image/personea” to a Deepfake company so his digital twin can continue to perform (and earn income for his family), it seems there is a career for your digital likeness long after a normal acting career would be over.