Virtual People as a Service

When we read about all the recent developments in Artifical Intelligence, we obviously ask ourselves: "where will this all lead to?" - or when we read books like Ready Player One or Snowcrash, we might ask ourselves how soon we will be living in a dystopian future. And then again, we see all the positive outcomes of AI research, for instance the just released MedPaLM, which will hopefully aid doctors in finding the right treatment for a disease.

As the author William S. Gibson once famously quipped "the future is already there, it is just unevenly distributed", we can already have glimpses of what to expect in the future. As we are talking about things that might have an impact in our future, we can also not be certain that this will really happen. Which really is the fun when thinking about future developments.

In China there's a huge new industry developing, called virtual people. All of this is possible due to the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, as well as 3D Imaging and so on. And it is a huge leap into the future when you compare the Chinese virtual persons with automated phone banks used for customer service right now. Those virtual persons can do so much more than just answer questions and guide you more our less through customer support, they are supposed to act as much human as possible, thereby creating lots of new ways of interaction with real humans.

While many people already think that lots of influencers look artificial, in China there are now virtual persons acting as influencers, which has the oftentimes needed side-effect that this person will always be on message for a brand and won't say or do stupid things. There is now even an Influence index of the leading virtual humans in China?- brave new world. Those virtual people can sing and dance and interact with humans on a livestream - but they don't get tired, never have bad days and will never be overbooked. Also, they can be truly interactive and personal, as all the interactions can be on an individual stream.

According to this article on CNBC, virtual people as a service is taking off in China now: "Some buyers of virtual people include financial services companies, local tourism boards and state media, said Li Shiyan, who heads Baidu’s virtual people and robotics business.

As the tech improves, costs have dropped by about 80% since last year, he said. It costs about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) a year for a three-dimensional virtual person, and 20,000 yuan for a two-dimensional one.

Li expects the virtual person industry overall will keep growing by 50% annually through 2025."

This is quite some growth and we will probably see virtual people being used in many ways, from entertainment and advertising to business and education. The big question remains: is this a step into the right direction, or will we be happy soon to be able to a real human again? And also: is this something that we want in Europe or will it remain something that fascinates us, but will never take off here?