Recently the founders of Metaphysic used AI to create a live performance by Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent signing. They used a special camera, a body double that has a great voice, and an AI model that was trained by examining footage of Cowell.
See the video here.
Although in this video, you can tell it isn’t quite right and that isn’t Cowell, it was convincing enough to be a semi-finalist in AGT. Their DeepFake Tom Cruise, on the other hand, is more convincing. If you look closely, you can see it probably isn’t Tom himself, but at first glance, many fans would be fooled.
Metaphysic is using synthetic media to create these clips. They combine real-world objects with digital ones created with artificial intelligence. For the Tom Cruise videos, they spent 3 months analyzing a variety of clips of Tom Cruise from movies, interviews, and any other coverage. The videos are created with a body double with the AI-generated video of his face.
For entertainment purposes, this can open up some new opportunities, but it adds many ethical questions, not just in entertainment but in business, politics, the legal system, and the world at large. As AI becomes more developed, the images will be clearer and less distinguishable from real ones, and there are significant implications. Right now the technology is quite expensive to use and generate these types of images, but this will change as well.
To see the entire article on Metaphysic and a discussion of synthetic media, see this article by Bernard Marr.
I Teach Accounting Information Systems 