Also Microsoft.....
Microsoft warns deepfake election subversion is disturbingly easy
I know the genie's out of the bottle, but goddamn.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Also Microsoft.....
Microsoft warns deepfake election subversion is disturbingly easy
I know the genie's out of the bottle, but goddamn.
Microsoft: I know this will only be used for evil, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna pass up on the hype-boost to my market share.
Every other big corp: same!
“At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus”
Can we maybe stop making these? XD
This coming from the guy who turned himself into a fly for fun
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.
Imagine your dead relative selling you extended warranty for your vehicle.
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.
We've already recreated dead actors or older actors whole cloth with VFX. Plus it still seems like a niche use case for something that can be done by VFX artists that can also do way more
this is so dystopian. Imagine spending your career honing your skill as an actor, dying and then having a computer replace you with just a photograph as a source. How is that honoring an actor??
An actual, practical example is generating video for VR chats like Apple has somewhat tried to do with their headset. Rather than using the cameras/sensors to generate and animate a 3d model based on you, it could do something more like this, albeit 2d.
Gotta crank up that dystopia meter.
This is slowly moving toward having Content On Demand. Imagine being able to prompt your content app for a movie/series you want to watch, and it just makes it and streams it to you.
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.
I dunno, I'm probably reaching.
I think you're falling for the overblown fearmongering headline, and pointless memes is a great reason to make things.
Vasa? Like, the Swedish ship that sank 10 minutes after it was launched? Who named that project?
They developed an ai to name all future ai. Ironically it is unnamed.
There are a lot of flying vehicles named after birds who famously plummet to the ground at breakneck speeds.
No, like the crispbread.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Harry Potter wasn't a fantasy movie, it was a SciFi and we just didn't know it.
It was midichlorians all along.
You're a Jedi 'Arry!
Imma wot?
I like your optimism where this doesn't result in making everything worse.
These vids are just off enough that I think doing a bunch of mushrooms and watching them would be a deeply haunting experience
This is why I don't post my picture online and I never talk to anyone ever, while hiding my head inside a nylon stocking (unrelated).
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!
I mean, I know it's scary, but I'll admit it is impressive, even when I watched it with jaded "every day is another AI breakthrough" exhaustion.
The subtle face movements, eyebrow expression, everything seems to correctly infer how the face would articulate those specific words. When you think of how many decades something like this would be in the uncanny valley even with a team of trained people hand -tweaking the image and video, and this is doing it better in nearly every way, automatically, with just an image? Insane.
It's pretty wild that this is the tech being produced by the trillion dollar company who has already been granted a patent on creating digital resurrections of dead people from the data they left behind.
So we now already have LLMs that could take what you said and say new things that seem like what you would have said, take a voice sample of you and create new voice synthesis of that text where it sounds a lot like you were actually saying it, and can take a photo of you and make a video where you legit look like you are saying that voice sample with facial expressions and all.
And this could be done for anyone who has a social media profile with a few dozen text posts, a profile photo, and a 15 second sample of their voice.
I really don't get how every single person isn't just having a daily existential crisis questioning the nature of their present reality given what's coming.
Do people just think the current trends aren't going to continue, or just don't think about the notion that what happens in the future could in fact have been their own nonlocal past?
It reminds me of a millennia old saying by a group that were claiming we were copies in the images of original humans: "you do not know how to examine the present moment."
Edit - bonus saying on the topic: "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"
And you can run it on a single 4090, that's crazy.
uh, are graphics cards supposed to be 2500 bucks? (I play boardgames)
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.
One photo? That’s incredible.
Yeah. Incredibly horrific.
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.
Paranoia vibes starting in 3, 2, 1..
Feed it Microsoft Merlin. What will happen?
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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!
One use of this I'm in favour of is recreating Majel Barret's voice as an AI for computer systems.
This project doesn't recreate or simulate voices at all.
It takes a still photograph and created a lip synched video of that person saying the paired full audio clip.
There's other projects that simulate voices.