Like many students, Liri had several part-time jobs. She is 23 years old, with a nice face and she is a waitress and bartender in Tel Aviv, Israel, where she attends university. But she also sells cars, works in retail and conducts job interviews and onboarding sessions for new employees as a human resources manager. In Germany.
How does it do it all?
Liri can juggle so many jobs, in multiple countries, because she has lent her face to Hour One, an AI startup that uses real people as a basis to create deepfake characters who then appear in marketing and educational videos for companies. organizations around the world. Do you remember her? I have spoken here of his first steps, and now he's stronger than ever.
Hour One is part of a wave of companies that are overhauling how digital content is produced. Their advance could have big implications for the “flesh and blood” workforce.
Liri does her waitressing and bar work in person, but she has no idea what her digital clones are up to. “It's definitely a little weird to think that my face might appear in videos or ads for different companies,” she says.
Hour One is not the only one
Hour One isn't the only company leveraging deepfake technology to produce mash-ups of real footage and AI-generated video. Some used professional actors to give life to characters like Salvador Dalì, eg.
Hour One, however, does not require special skills. You just have to be willing to hand over the image rights to your face.
A future of characters
Hour One is building a pool of what it calls “characters.” She says she has about 100 "characters" in his portfolio so far, with more added every week. “We have a line of people dying to give us their faces to become characters,” he says Natalie Monbiot, Chief Strategist of the company.
Anyone can apply to become a character. Like a modeling agency, Hour One filters candidates, selecting those it finds most appealing. The company aims for a broad sample of characters that reflects the ages, genders and racial backgrounds of people in the real world, Monbiot says. A face for each category, in short.
Currently, about 80% of its characters are under 50, 70% are female and 25% are white.
How to go from a face to a virtual testimonial
To create a character, Hour One uses a high resolution 4K camera to film the face of a person talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen. Enough. End. that's it for the human part of the performance. By inserting the resulting data into artificial intelligence software, the system can generate an infinite amount of footage of that person saying what they want, in any language.
Hour One customers pay the company to use its characters in promotional or commercial videos. They select a face, upload the text they want it to say, and get a video of what looks like a real person reciting that script to a camera.
What kind of services does Hour One offer?
The fastest service uses text-to-speech software to generate synthetic voices, synchronized with the characters' facial movements, mouth movements, and facial expressions. Then there is a premium service in which the audio is recorded by professional voice actors. These voices are again adapted to the character's movements in the video.
Hour One says it has more than 40 clients, including real estate, e-commerce, digital health and entertainment companies. One major client is Berlitz, an international language school that offers teacher-led video courses for dozens of languages. According to Monbiot, Berlitz wanted to increase the number of videos offered, but struggled to do so using real human actors. They had to have production crews creating the same setup with the same actor over and over again, he says: “They found it really unsustainable. We're talking about thousands of videos." Berlitz now works with Hour One to generate hundreds of videos in minutes. “We're replacing the studio,” Monbiot says. “A human being doesn't need to waste time filming.”
The Alice Receptionist case
Another example of the technology in action is Alice Receptionist, a company that provides businesses with an avatar on a screen to handle visitor queries, replacing the role of a human receptionist in a number of physical locations across the United States. Hour One is working with Alice Receptionist to update its video footage of human actors so that digital receptionists can say different things in different languages without having to shoot hours of video.
And Liri? What happens once a face is "sold"?
Like all the "characters" of hour one, Liri also receives a micropayment every time a customer licenses a video that uses her face. Monbiot doesn't say exactly how large these payments are, except that they are dollars, not cents. “I can't say anyone makes a living doing this today,” she says. “But we think if all goes well it will be a viable way to have an income.”
By eliminating the need for film crews, studio technicians and actors, Hour One's technology is a boon for companies looking to scale up video production, offering a little easy cash to a handful of people like Liri. Some are troubled by the implications for the future of work.
Change the face, change the roles
“It seems like a fairly extreme case of technology scaling back the role of the human being in a particular work process,” he says Jessie Hammerling from the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, which studies the impact of new technologies on work. Automation doesn't always eliminate human roles entirely, but it changes them in ways that affect people's ability to earn a fair wage or turn a job into a long-term career, she says. Can we blame him?
Hammerling notes that allowing companies to reuse one-time actor footage for multiple video projects will reduce the availability of this type of acting work. The "trade union" battle will move to the management of image rights ... on one's face!
There is a risk of being included in content that is objectionable, or that may conflict with other work
Jessie Hammerling
Hour One knows his stuff
The company doesn't let people have a say in how their face will be used, or what words will be put in their mouths, but its policy specifies that it won't work with certain industries. “We're pretty conservative about the types of companies we work with,” Monbiot says. This means no gambling, no sex and no politics. It will always be like this?
Liri isn't too worried for now. She trusts Hour One not to use her face for anything that might make her uncomfortable. “I had friends send me videos where they saw my face, which I thought was very strange,” she says. “Suddenly, I realized this thing is real.”
