Benefits and risks of synthetic video and audio.

In this one-minute video I am speaking seven languages. In truth, I can speak two of those. None of the audio is actually me speaking, even if it sounds very much like my voice. And the video? Despite what it looks like, that’s not me moving my mouth. In some ways impressive and in other ways quite unsettling.

To make this happen I made a two-minute recording of myself talking in English about random stuff, and uploaded this as input to the generative tool provided by a service known as HeyGen. That video provided a voiceprint that can be used for more than 25 languages and counting. And honestly, the generated English voice really does sound like me.

With regards to the video, the scene where I appear to be standing is where I was actually standing when I recorded the original video. But the head, hand, eye and lip movements are all generated based on what I want my digital twin, or puppet, to say. I type text into a box and then the video with me, speaking in the selected language, comes out.

For purposes of firing up the mind to imagine what’s possible, this will likely suffice.
https://vimeo.com/875449365

In my latest blog post/newsletter I unpack the benefits and risks of this technology:
https://axbom.com/synthetic-video-benefits-risks/

#AIEthics #DigitalEthics #SyntheticVideo #DeepFake