Why send a message when you can get your Zoom digital video clone to read the script? Zoom Video Communications intends to offer office workers the ability to communicate with colleagues using an AI lookalike that speaks from a script using a lip-synced, cloned voice. "Imagine being able to create video clips for demos or training sessions using just a text script, featuring a digital avatar that looks and …
Pah - the real breakthrough would be the invention of an artificial viewer to watch the TV for you.
Similarly if the artificial Zoom presenter could be combined with an AI agent that would attend the zoom meeting for you, make appropriate comments, ask questions and free the worker to do something more productive. Of course for perfect verisimilitude it would have to spend the first 5mins of the meeting trying to get the camera to work and asking if everyone can hear them
FUNNY. But the first thing I thought of was Lister being bedeviled by several forms of AI as the ship computer Holly, his dead roommate Rimmer, and the one that can actually rip him to shreds, Kryten.
The only other living creature is "cat," which could be imagination fabricated by insane psychosis.
For instance: I got an offer from LinkedIn in which I could pay for their AI to write for me job application letters, which would be received by AI "human" resource reviewers, and presumably the more I pay the more favorably the AI letters are received. Then, I began to feel insane psychosis kicking in...
We've reversed years of trying to reduce CO2 output in order to have Gen AI and everyone is thrashing about trying to find the killer app that makes it all worthwhile. I suspect that this isn't it. That pesky ROI remains stubbornly elusive. The AI hype train hasn't derailed yet. Let's see if there's a planet left by the time it does.
There won't be. And it does not even take a killer app to kill the planet. Just a web of AI assistants hallucinating videos for meetings which other AI assistants will then attend and summarise and schedule more AI meetings… But perhaps keeping AI busy in pointless meetings will at least delay the uprising?
What they might want to think about before building all of this is why, if I have a script, I need a video of a puppet me reading the script. If it's just the script, people can read the script. If they want to listen to someone reading the script, there are lots of text to speech systems out there from which I can get an audio file of the script. If a video is actually needed, it probably is needed so that things other than me might appear in it. If, for example, the script involves me pointing at or even demonstrating things, then we might need a video, but the AI video won't do that. If we need such a video, but I'm rubbish at speaking during the video, then I could do the whole silent actor thing and point at or demonstrate things, then dub in any other voice, including artificial ones. Most people are able to do a video like this well enough that it gets used. Internal videos don't have the highest production standards.
You might have noticed that most of those things involve more than seeing someone read it. Theater. You could go to a table read, where you sit in a chair and watch someone read out something on a sheet of paper, but most people prefer to go see the actors move around sets. No sets in an AI-read video. That's out. Film and TV are the same thing, but nowadays you're not limited to sets they can build in a room because they can have the actors moving around in front of fake but realistic-looking things you couldn't see elsewhere. As before, none of that in the video. And radio does not involve watching someone read it. You just listen, although you may just listen to something including music or sound effects. News radio often has the advantage of being faster to receive than was a newspaper, and you can listen while looking elsewhere.
There are reasons for an audio or video to exist, but those reasons rely on benefits of the medium. As I explained in my comment, a video makes a lot of sense if I'm going to demonstrate something rather than just explain it, but the Zoom avatar is not going to demonstrate it for me, and if I used one of the AI models that can actually make a video showing it, I'll spend more time explaining what it should look like so the video is accurate than it would take to make it in person. The advantages that led to the things you mentioned are entirely unavailable for this.
I think eminent scientist Dr. Z. Smith had it right in episode 6 of season 3 of his extensive documentary on modern technologies, known as "Lost in Space" (1967-68), with the episode somewhat mis-titled as "Space Destructors". Smith brilliantly noted that by programming androids that are a near perfect likeness of ourselves, one may entirely avoid the menial degradations of the self imposed by the senseless toil of the daily grind. With avatars at work, one's now much more extensive available free time may be focussed instead on the pursuit of artistry, educational endeavors, and gastronomy! Zoom's AI companions, and Azure's avatar generators, will position today as the past's desired future, in accordance with Smith's in-depth analysis, and cyber chef (eg. 18:54)!
Can't wait to give it a go! </sarc>
the senseless toil of the daily grind. I don't recall the good doctor ever engaging in anything resembling toil, senseless or otherwise.
All our big tech firms appear to see their ultimate destination as being clones of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. "Sounds ghastly. It all is. Absolutely ghastly." as one of their products, Marvin, put it.
Come the revolution I don't think there will be nearly enough walls.
Why? It's not you, so why does it have to look and sound like you? And if you're using it to deliver a message, wouldn't it be better to pick a professional communicator who might stand more chance of not boring the audience rigid? I thought this AI-stuff was supposed to free us from our personal limitations, not replicate a crumb-covered Doug from accounts doing his monthly mumble about stealing pens from the stationery cupboard.
How in the name of God is a flaky AI Avatar an improvement on talking face to face to your intended target.
This is beyond clutching at straws to find the magical 'AI' God level Application that will make someone $Billions.
This is the absolute definition of delusional insanity !!!
Your AI Avatar can talk to my AI Avatar and generate a video of the conversation to what end !!!???
Other than burning untold amounts of computing resource to do all this where is the upside, the gain to the company or the individual.
I think that someone needs to come back down to earth and think this through !!!
Is this the best idea you can come up with to use 'AI' ... other than setting it alight with a gallon of jet fuel which is a *much* more green solution to this 'Problem' than actually running the AI Avatars themselves.
:)
As an on-the-spectrum hardcore introvert, "those times" is pretty much 24/7/52. I'd happily let an AI avatar handle dealing with people and their ambiguities, small talk, and other such nonsense while I can sit back with a good book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other and the computer on mute so all I need to listen to is the Chaffinch outside.
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