Google brains plumb depths of the uncanny valley with latest image-to-video tool Google has a new AI trick up its sleeve that can animate a still photo using nothing but a recording of a person's speech, and boy is it widening the uncanny valley. Dubbed VLOGGER in a paper [PDF] by a sextet of Google researchers (without any explanation for the name), the tool allegedly doesn't need any per-person training …
And anybody who has named their imaginary basilisk should talk to HR.
I get the abstract argument that researchers should be free to play with and explore dangerous ideas, but that doesn't work out well. The bounds don't need to be too tight, but they do need to be there. Especially as the researchers almost always look for applications after a discovery, then they try to market those applications. Then the company that bough them decides that they can't bother with any of the ethical considerations because, shareholder value...
Some lines of research, like some researchers need to be nipped in the bud.
Chip maker Qualcomm is looking to create more marketing content for social-media platforms like TikTok. Don McGuire, the company’s chief marketing officer, says he’d likely never get budget approval to hire an army of additional video editors and others needed for such an effort. “I can’t hire enough people to move that fast,” he says. So instead, he has decided to build a new generative-AI creative studio in Mexico City, which is a short flight from Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, but that has a lower cost of living and widespread availability of creative talent. The company plans to hire up to a dozen people there; new AI tools from Adobe and other vendors will allow the marketers to work with 25%-50% greater productivity, reducing the need for massive hiring, McGuire said.
(1) This is also a downside of WFH for those in the US entering the workforce now. As well as a plus for their alter-ego couterparts stuck in Mexico.
(2) Judging the worth of advertising is very hard, especially measuring the effects of running Qualcomm ads on TikTok. With a lack of actual good metrics, combining keywords: Outsource + AI = Genius marketing officer.
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I am quite happy that I can't find any images of myself on the web . There are other people with the same name , who do have images of themselves posted, so I should be a little safer against whatever wave of ransomware/blackmailing that the usual shitheads will come up with next.
Some people have a very large part of their lives posted , they really do need some education about web usage .
You might be reconstructible from the shadow your absence from the miasma of the web, casts. :)
I think River Song made a similar observation to the Doctor some time after Souffle Girl had excised all records of him from the shared Dalek consciousness.
Jests aside, given enough computing resources to analyse every social media post and conversations, emails, blogs, public records and all the rest of the muck on the web I suspect a pretty fair reconstruction of a person who has never had any access to the internet could, in theory, be made.
You might be reconstructible from the shadow your absence from the miasma of the web, casts.
I think not. Because while a physical shadow has definite edges and shape, a lack-of-information-on-the-web about a person could mean anything, everything, or nothing.
For example: "Which sports team does Subject X support?" No relevant web-info means that Subject X may support no team whatsoever, or may support the Post Hill Pennywhistles, or may support every team in the greater London area.
Clearly, Google ingested Eliott and saw that it was good for their bottom line. Also, to simulate the dried voices of any world leader.
(With all due apologies to T. S. Eliot, though maybe he was gifted with a sort of indirect prescience):
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
...
...
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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