This text belongs to ‘Artificial’, the AI ??newsletter that Delia Rodríguez sends every Friday.
Dear readers, dear readers: this is sometimes amazing.
Until a week ago, HeyGen was one of many promising start-ups in search of concrete applications of the latest advances in generative artificial intelligence. Founded three years ago by a computer engineer of Chinese origin who worked for a time at Snapchat, Joshua Xu, after a couple of name changes the young company has focused on something very specific, the creation of video avatars for corporate use capable of say things that have not been said at any time. That is, it makes it easy for you to create your own deepfake (or your boss, or an imaginary spokesperson) to make a fool of yourself in your place in marketing videos, social media, or Canva presentations, saving a tremendous amount of effort, time and money. Like similar tools like Studio D-ID, it works very well, with the grace that lip synchronization is especially successful.
It turns out that since last Friday that “other self” can also speak fluently in several languages. The test videos were impressive, but the final version is pure magic. It is difficult to perceive that what we are seeing is not real.
Soon videos began to appear of the first people surprised to hear themselves speaking totally strange languages ??with good accents, videos of celebrities like Elon Musk suddenly multilingual, and translated memes. The tool went viral. On Monday, an audiovisual creator named Jon Finger published a particularly fascinating video, in which he begins speaking in English and then moves on to fluent French and German, languages ????of which he confesses to having no idea.
A couple of days ago, the North Korean humorous tweeter, impressed by Finger’s video, did his own test, but with another less capable tool, Rask.ai. The result is this video of Belén Esteban speaking English in La Resistencia. It doesn’t matter that the result that HeyGen achieves is not as fine: it has 25 million views. The community has dedicated itself to the game and for a couple of days nothing has been seen on our network other than recreations of celebrities demonstrating their abilities in other languages, in addition to mythical translated videos of digital culture. Feijóo speaking English. El Fary elaborating his theory of the soft man in English. Bárbara Rey and Chelo García-Cortés discussing their thing in English. Torrent. The one that is coming. Ibai’s video motivating students. Messi giving a press conference in English.
Right now it is not easy to access the free version of HeyGen to try it: at the time of writing this newsletter there are 160,000 videos being processed. A paid account starts at $48 per month.
The irony that the first thing we do with revolutionary tools is nonsense has not gone unnoticed by tweeters. Xu cites some of the most serious advantages of its development, in addition to corporate uses: for example, YouTubers will be able to communicate with other audiences, and a new multilingual world opens up for online course and education platforms. “But what if there was a platform where all videos could be viewed in any language with native-like fluency? It’s more than just a translation feature; “It is a new paradigm for content consumption,” Xu’s avatar says in a video.
It is impossible not to think about the consequences for translators, dubbers or audiovisual creators. Also in its darkest applications, the most obvious are disinformation and deepfakes. It is the type of tool used on TikTok to create the sinister first-person black chronicle videos that we talked about in a previous newsletter.
Now all these potentialities, positive and negative, multiply their reach by extending to several languages ??quickly and easily. It’s the time for great ideas. The prize is a truly global audience.
What else happened this week
Biographer Walter Isaacson has already published his book about Elon Musk, one of the great actors of the new digital transformation. I haven’t read it yet, but the reviews and excerpts paint the profile of a complex and fascinating person (although not necessarily in a good way) capable of intervening in war actions and unplugging servers at will.
Twenty big names in the technology industry (including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundai Pichar, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman and Bill Gates) have met in Washington with US senators in a closed-door session that would have been very interesting to observe in person. public form. According to Musk it was “a very civil discussion between some of the smartest people in the world.” His opinions are diverse, but as we already know, they agree on the need to regulate and the tendency to think that the European approach is very restrictive and it is better to legislate in a more lax way so as not to hinder innovation.
Good news: ChatGPT gets the right diagnosis for a boy who had been through 17 doctors.
We have seen Ana Rosa Quintana promoting her new space rejuvenated by technology.
Meta is working on a new big language model in the style of OpenAI’s GPT-4. It will be open source.
Interview by Josep Corbella with the founder of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the CSIC Ramón López de Mántaras regarding his new book: “I am more concerned about human stupidity than artificial intelligence.”
Let’s talk about big technology companies and their money: Google allocates $20 million to finance AI projects that investigate big issues such as its security or its impact on the job market. Microsoft will pay for the legal coverage of any trouble its corporate clients get into for using its co-pilot. Apple is spending millions of dollars a day to develop its conversational AI to make its phones understand and execute natural language commands, such as “create an animated gif with the last five photos I took.”
In its latest environmental report, Microsoft revealed that its global water consumption grew by 34% between 2021 and 2022. This is due, according to researcher Shaolei Ren, from the University of California, to its commitment to generative artificial intelligence and its agreement with OpenAI. This same researcher has calculated that ChatGPT consumes half a liter of water in each conversation of between 5 and 50 questions. Google’s water usage has also increased by 20%. In AP.
Time magazine has published a list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
IAnxiety level this week: reduced, the translation videos have been funny.
