The First Human-AI War

It all began two years ago when a very short video called?This is NOT Morgan Freeman?went viral, leaving millions of viewers stunned.

In 2020, Miles Fisher, a TV and film actor and Tom Cruise impersonator, reached out to Chris Ume, a VFX and AI artist, and asked him to create deepfake videos of him playing Tom Cruise. The videos went viral on TikTok, with one of them having over 100 million views.

Watching these videos immediately intrigues one’s curiosity. Is this the real thing? If not, how on earth can?this deepfake be so realistic? It puts our senses in question. Will I be able to detect a fake from the real thing? This is mind-blowing!

Immediately after that, come the ethical and moral questions. If this is fake, what is the real actor’s take on this? Does he know someone else is using his identity? Is it legal? Does he get royalties for this? All of these create uncertainty and concerns.

Writing about the impact of?AI on some professions?six months ago, I would never imagine that this was just around the corner when the first Human-AI war started in Hollywood last week.

Hollywood’s actors and screenwriters joined forces for the first time since 1960. They protested against the use of generative AI tools in the industry that may eventually replace them.

Hollywood studios were impacted by the rise of Streaming led by Netflix. Streaming represents a different business model, where the viewer pays a monthly fee and consumes unlimited content. The Streaming firms started to produce their own content, thus reducing the dependency on Hollywood studios.

As a result, Hollywood studios, in a search to cut production costs and maintain their bottom lines, discover the use of new generative AI tools. Actors will no longer be required to work long days on the set. A 360-degree detailed scan of the actor is all that is needed to create a new avatar character for a movie.

The actors battle over their compensation package. They understand that one day of scanning needed to create their film character represents a deep pay cut.

The corporate video production industry is also affected by the AI revolution. In today’s reality, all you need to create a ‘talking heads’ type video is just text.

There are many generative AI-based Text-To-Video platforms where you can ‘produce’ your own video. Write your text, select the tone of the voiceover in any language, choose the style of your AI actor/avatar, select the background, and?voilà!?You got yourself a short video in no time.

At this stage, these videos are mostly used in tutorials and explainer-type videos. The viewer accepts the fact that the actors are not real, which is okay for this genre.

Now, imagine that you can get a celebrity as a presenter for your brand for a fraction of the cost it would take you to hire the real thing. Using deepfake, a celeb can generate additional income without doing anything but approving the final cut of the video.

If your CEO doesn’t like to be in front of a camera, or just doesn’t have time to shoot a corporate video, that’s fine. Just use Deepfake to do that, without him or her being present. The same goes for Testimonial Videos or any other ‘talking heads’ authentic videos.

The technology is almost there. It took Chris Ume several weeks to create a single two-minute deepfake Tom Cruise video, using several tools and high skills. The outcome was phenomenal. Turning this into a commercial cost-effective generative AI platform will take some time.

And in the future, we may find ourselves in a scene from the?Blade Runner?movie where reality and fiction are mixed into one. Time will tell.

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