Fake 176

Fake 176 arrived in the form of an email covering reference 1 earlier today. An article in which an early titbit was a short video of a digitally reconstructed version of the author declaiming Hamlet's famous soliloquy about being or not-being, to be found starting at line 56 of Scene I of Act III of the famous play of the same name, presumably after the computer had been fed said soliloquy in the form of text, supplied below for the convenience of the curious reader.

A soliloquy which has attracted a good deal of scholarly ink over the years.

The good news is that the quality was not much better than that of the on-train announcer on a Southwestern Train, where the (often annoying) announcements sound as if they are made by cunningly stringing together digitally recorded snippets of a real voice. Ian McKellen and his tribe need not get too worried just yet.

[Kent House, 14/17 Market Place, London W1W 8AJ]

The bad news is that there is a private limited company (No.10933652) called Synthesia, worth around £1 billion on paper on the strength of faking videos. A company which appears to headquartered very near a place we know well, that is to say the branch of All Bar One at the top end of Regent Street.

The faking appears to involve taking the person you want to fake, spending a fair bit of time and effort taking them to pieces digitally (as it were), and then using those pieces to build whatever it is that you want to fake. Just like Lego - or moveable type for that matter. At the moment, just talking heads, but they have plans to do more.

The business model seems to be that young people, brought up on YouTube and TikTok, find reading a bit of a bore and get on much better watching videos. So if you are a company and you want to get some message across to your younger employees, you don't sent them a memo, you send them a video.

Going further, rather than paying an old-fashioned production company using actors to make the video, you pay your IT department to fake it up. The bet being that Synthesia can make this cheap enough and good enough to fly. That the Internet, already full of all kinds of fake text, will soon be full of fake moving pictures.

With the response from somewhere in Oxford being snapped above. Which I find rather depressing: the Internet and the search engines which came it with have been extraordinarily empowering - but now we seem to be rolling that back. Spending lots of money, lots of rare earth metals and lots of electricity to go backwards. And, at the same time, replacing people with machines at a time when the world contains far, far too many people - but nowhere near enough money, rare earth metals or electricity.

While from Bing I learn that: ‘Synthesia, founded in 2016, is a technology company in the field of artificial intelligence-driven video production. Synthesia seeks to allow users to create professional-quality videos without the need for cameras or a production crew. Synthesia's technology strives to enable the synthesis of realistic digital humans, with the goal of transforming the way content is created and shaping the future of the video production industry. Synthesia is headquartered in England, United Kingdom’. Synthesia is a private company and is not publicly traded – but it has a £1bn plus valuation for all that. While private limited company means that it is known to Companies House and gets the useful protection of being limited liability - so the founders will not be out of pocket if it all goes pear shaped - but does not have to file the sort of accounts which would give a layman any idea of what it is up to.

PS 1: in fairness, I should say that Synthesia are not ethics-blind and do put quite a lot of effort into trying to corral within safe limits the very thing which they want to make a lot of money out of.

PS 2: I might also add that the business model does not work for me. I would usually much rather read something than have to watch someone saying it on a screen. So it annoys me when the FT serves up some news item - which might otherwise have interested me - in the form of a video.

PS 3: According to Wikipedia (which remains pretty trustworthy, at least for the moment), Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a former Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute. She also looks a good deal younger than my children - that is to say very young! See also reference 5.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/fake-175.html.

Reference 2: An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary: Synthesia's new technology is impressive but raises big questions about a world where we increasingly can’t tell what’s real - Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review – 2024.

Reference 3: https://www.synthesia.io/. The website where all can play.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/geriatrix.html. Recent notice of Mr.McKellen.

Reference 5: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/sandra-wachter/.