George Rebane

One of the collateral developments to the coming Singularity (here and here) is the advent of AI-generated ‘digital persons’ or avatars that are so realistic that they are indistinguishable from the real thing.  The technology today permits the avatar designer to select either photos or video sequences and audio recording of a real person and generate a video of his/her avatar in any given context/background and deliver an on-camera monologue from a textual input.

Here are two recent examples of this.  One is of a popular Ukrainian singer cast as the spokesperson for the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (here).  The other is of the pop-star Taylor Swift delivering a highly improbable lecture on the generation of the Taylor series approximation of an arbitrary mathematical function. (here)

The obvious problem for the population at large now becomes one of authentication or vetting of such characters encountered online on sites professing to dispense news, commentaries, politicians’ pronouncements, etc.  The industry has yet to settle on common, let alone minimal, authentication protocols for the consumer.  An attempt at this is made in the Ukrainian video where the avatar immediately announces that she is a ‘digital person’ and cites the display of a QR code with a link to the website of the ministry that claims to have launched the avatar, and where the spoken text is posted.

These problems may be bypassed in the entertainment field where now we will see fresh episodes of ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ along with new movies starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe.  It will be a brave new world of long-dormant property rights being litigated from here to eternity – truly a new age of full employment for tort lawyers.