Like what even is a legitimate use case for these? It just seems tailor made for either misinformation or pointless memes, neither of which seem like a good sales pitch
I could see a few uses, but the biggest would probably be advertising. Tailored ads that look like they’re coming from a real person.
Imagine Jake from State Farm addressing you personally about your insurance in an ad.
Not that I endorse advertising, I’d like to see it all banned.
I think it could be useful to humanise some things though and talking to a “person” AI in a video call might be more comfortable for some people wanting to do tasks such as say navigate my mobile phone carriers shitty AI help system.
Really any sort of AI assistant device could benefit from a human imprint.
Say you’re a movie studio director making the next big movie with some big name celebs. Filming is in progress, and one of the actor dies in the most on brand way possible. Everyone decides that the film must be finished to honor the actor’s legacy, but how can you film someone who is dead? This technology would enable you to create footage the VFX team can use to lay over top of stand-in actor’s face and provide a better experience for your audience.
I’m sure there are other uses, but this one pops to mind as a very legitimate use case that could’ve benefited from the technology.
Maybe a historical biopic in the style of photos of the time. Like take pictures of Lincoln, Grant, Lee, etc., use voice actors plus modern reenactors for background characters, and build it into a whole movie.
Combine this with an LLM with speech-to-text input and we could create a talking paintings like in harry potter movies. Heck, hang it on a door and hook it with smart lock to recreate the dorm doors in harry potter and see if people can trick it to open the door.
I was actually discussing this very idea with my brother, who went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, Orrrlandooooo recently and while he enjoyed himself, said it felt like not much is new in theme parks nowadays. Adding in AI driven pictures you could actually talk to might spice it up.
A long time ago, someone from a not free country wrote a white paper on why we should care about privacy, because written words can be edited to level false accusations (charges) with false evidence. This chills me to the bone.
Freddie, this is your mom. Look all I want for my birthday is for you to please start using teams new. It's so much better than teams classic. I alread... Microsoft already installed it for you. Okay honey? And could you also start using a microsoft.com account so you can get financially hooked like all the Gmail users? It's pretty smart. Don't you want to be smart like Jonny? Tata!
Since it’s trained on celebrities, can it do ugly people or would it try to make them prettier in animation?
The teeth change sizes, which is kinda weird, but probably fixable.
It’s not too hard to notice for an up close face shot, but if it was farther away it might be hard - the intonation and facial expressions are spot on. They should use this to re-do all the digital faces in Star Wars.
Yes I hate what AI is becoming capable of. Last year everyone was laughing at the shitty fingers, but were quickly moving past that. I'm concerned that in the near future it will be hard to tell truth from fiction.
The "why would they make this" people don't understand how important this type of research is. It's important to show what's possible so that we can be ready for it. There are many bad actors already pursuing similar tools if they don't have them already. The worst case is being blindsided by something not seen before.
Microsoft’s research teams always makes some pretty crazy stuff. The problem with Microsoft is that they absolutely suck at translating their lab work into consumer products. Their labs publications are an amazing archive of shit that MS couldn’t get out the door properly or on time. Example - multitouch gesture UIs.
As interesting as this is, I’ll bet MS just ends up using some tech that Open AI launches before MS’s bureaucratic product team can get their shit together.
On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track.
In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.
To show off the model, Microsoft created a VASA-1 research page featuring many sample videos of the tool in action, including people singing and speaking in sync with pre-recorded audio tracks.
The examples also include some more fanciful generations, such as Mona Lisa rapping to an audio track of Anne Hathaway performing a "Paparazzi" song on Conan O'Brien.
While the Microsoft researchers tout potential positive applications like enhancing educational equity, improving accessibility, and providing therapeutic companionship, the technology could also easily be misused.
"We are opposed to any behavior to create misleading or harmful contents of real persons, and are interested in applying our technique for advancing forgery detection," write the researchers.
The original article contains 797 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!