“I think we might just have to say goodbye to finding out about the truth in a quick way,” says Sandra Wachter, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who researches the legal and ethical implications of AI.
We’re about to take on a topic that’s pretty delicate and honestly hits close to home—dealing with criticism in our spiritual journey,” I read off the teleprompter, simultaneously trying to visualize ranting about something to my partner during the complain-y version.
Historically, making AI avatars look natural and matching mouth movements to speech has been a very difficult challenge, says David Barber, a professor of machine learning at University College London who is not involved in Synthesia’s work.
And while anyone can join the platform, many features aren’t available until people go through an extensive vetting system similar to that used by the banking industry, which includes talking to the sales team, signing legal contracts, and submitting to security auditing, says Voica.
Claire Leibowicz, the head of the AI and media integrity at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, says she worries that growing awareness of this gap will make it easier to “plausibly deny and cast doubt on real material or media as evidence in many different contexts, not only in the news, [but] also in the courts, in the financial services industry, and in many of our institutions.” She tells me she’s heartened by the resources Synthesia has devoted to content moderation and consent but says that process is never flawless.
It really shines when presenting a story I wrote about how the field of robotics could be getting its own ChatGPT moment; the virtual AI assistant summarizes the long read into a decent short video, which my avatar narrates.
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