A month in the past, the consulting firm Accenture offered a possible shopper an uncommon and attention-grabbing pitch for a brand new undertaking. As a substitute of the standard slide deck, the shopper noticed deepfakes of a number of actual staff standing on a digital stage, providing completely delivered descriptions of the undertaking they hoped to work on.
“I needed them to satisfy our crew,” says Renato Scaff, a senior managing director at Accenture who got here up with the thought. “It’s additionally a method for us to distinguish ourselves from the competitors.”
The deepfakes have been generated—with staff’ consent—by Touchcast, an organization Accenture has invested in that gives a platform for interactive displays that includes avatars of actual or artificial folks. Touchcast’s avatars can reply to typed or spoken questions utilizing AI fashions that analyze related info and generate solutions on the fly.
“There’s a component of creepy,” Scaff says of his deepfake staff. “However there’s an even bigger factor of cool.”
Deepfakes are a potent and harmful weapon of disinformation and reputational hurt. However that very same expertise is being adopted by firms that see it as a substitute as a intelligent and catchy new technique to attain and work together with prospects.
These experiments aren’t restricted to the company sector. Monica Arés, government director of the Innovation, Digital Training, and Analytics Lab at Imperial School Enterprise Faculty in London, has created deepfakes of actual professors that she hopes might be a extra participating and efficient technique to reply college students’ questions and queries exterior of the classroom. Arés says the expertise has the potential to extend personalization, present new methods to handle and assess college students, and increase pupil engagement. “You continue to have the likeness of a human talking to you, so it feels very pure,” she says.
As is usually the case lately, we have now AI to thank for this unraveling of actuality. It has lengthy been doable for Hollywood studios to repeat actors’ voices, faces, and mannerisms with software program, however lately AI has made comparable expertise extensively accessible and just about free. Apart from Touchcast, firms together with Synthesia and HeyGen provide companies a technique to generate avatars of actual or faux people for displays, advertising and marketing, and customer support.
Edo Segal, founder and CEO of Touchcast, believes that digital avatars might be a brand new method of presenting and interacting with content material. His firm has developed a software program platform referred to as Genything that can enable anybody to create their very own digital twin.
On the similar time, deepfakes have gotten a significant concern as elections loom in lots of international locations, together with the US. Final month, AI-generated robocalls that includes a faux Joe Biden have been used to unfold election disinformation. Taylor Swift additionally just lately grew to become a target of deepfake porn generated utilizing extensively accessible AI picture instruments.
“Deepfake photographs are actually one thing that we discover regarding and alarming,” Ben Buchanan, the White Home Particular Adviser for AI, informed WIRED in a latest interview. The Swift deepfake “is a key knowledge level in a broader pattern which disproportionately impacts girls and women, who’re overwhelmingly targets of on-line harassment and abuse,” he mentioned.
A brand new US AI Safety Institute, created underneath a White Home government order issued final October, is at present growing requirements for watermarking AI-generated media. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and different tech firms are additionally growing technology designed to spot AI forgeries in what’s changing into a high-stakes AI arms race.
Some political makes use of of deepfakery, nevertheless, spotlight the twin potential of the expertise.
Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, delivered a rallying address to his social gathering’s followers final Saturday regardless of being caught behind bars. The previous cricket star, jailed in what his social gathering has characterised as a navy coup, gave his speech utilizing deepfake software program that conjured up a convincing copy of him sitting behind a desk and talking phrases that he by no means truly uttered.
As AI-powered video manipulation improves and turns into simpler to make use of, enterprise and shopper curiosity in reputable makes use of of the expertise is more likely to develop. The Chinese language tech big Baidu just lately developed a way for customers of its chatbot app to create deepfakes for sending Lunar New Yr greetings.
Even for early adopters, the potential for misuse isn’t totally out of thoughts. “There’s no query that safety must be paramount,” says Accenture’s Scaff. “Upon getting an artificial twin, you can also make them do and say something.”