Here’s your AI astonishment/nightmare fuel for today:

"TL;DR: single portrait photo + speech audio = hyper-realistic talking face video with precise lip-audio sync, lifelike facial behavior, and naturalistic head movements, generated in real time.”

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/

VASA-1 - Microsoft Research

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Microsoft Research

@stroughtonsmith

So what will be the main use for all this, beyond tricking the gullible?

@KanaMauna @stroughtonsmith there's a section about it in the article.
@radieschen @KanaMauna @stroughtonsmith thank you so much for sharing the supposed drivers behind this development. And the way it is written is revealing “potential benefits”: like the purpose is indeed societal destruction, disinformation, creative theft and ultra capitalisation, they came up with last minute bullshit pretexts like “companionship”, seriously?!! Show me the research showing the mental health benefits of talking to a moneymaking pixel wall!

@sheislaurence

I guess the purpose is just making money but accepting that people will do bad things with it.

When I read the beneficial uses, I was wondering whether they're actually needs by the groups they're mentioning or if it's just privileged people thinking this might be helpful use cases.

@KanaMauna @stroughtonsmith

@radieschen @KanaMauna @stroughtonsmith the latter, in fact I really believe it is more cynical than this, clearly there is zero market research about the applications they mention, and no one who loves their money go into business without market research. So the research they did and know is lucrative is selling to psychopaths, dictactors and arseholes.

@sheislaurence @radieschen @stroughtonsmith

Exactly. HOW will this be used in education. It is such an afterthought.