#36: AI-Generated Video, Virtual Actors and Deepfakes, AI Veganism

Ian Bowie
Hello and welcome to AI Unfiltered with me Ian Bowie and our resident expert, Michael Stormbom, where we will be talking about everything to do with AI in our modern digital society and what the future holds for all of us.

Michael Stormbom
We have spoken about AI generated images in previous episodes, and it’s an endlessly fascinating topic. But taking that one step further, there’s also been recent strides in AI generated videos.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, and now of course we’ve got this Make-a-Video. Yeah, technology that’s come out of Meta.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, our good friends at Meta…

Ian Bowie
Our good friends at meta that we love so much. I was gonna say we’ve never slagged off ever in our lives. But maybe they’re listening to us and they’ve actually thought hey, maybe those guys have got a point. Let’s create something that might eventually be useful and interesting.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. I saw briefly an article that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple was quite critical of the metaverse concept, right?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, as we have been as well, but this is one of the first things they’ve actually launched. Yes. Anyway, which actually interests me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I can see some potential with that. All right. At the moment, of course, it’s still in its developmental stages. And it’s pretty basic. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
And just to explain for the people who don’t know what it is, I mean, it’s basically similar to the image generators you’ve seen where you can input text and it generates an image for you, but now it generates a video clip for you. Quite simple ones at the moment, but anyway, an indication of where the technology might be going.

Ian Bowie
Absolutely. Well, I mean, think about it. I mean, in the future, who’s going to need actors? I mean, can you can you imagine sort of turning around to people like, you know, Johnny Depp and all the hundreds of other actors that I don’t know their names off, and saying, Well, hey, you know, we don’t need you anymore, dude. And your $50 million per film, salary.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. On a related note, you know, Bruce Willis, the actor who just retired due to illness, but apparently he had sold the rights to use his likeness. So to use AI generated Bruce Willis and he was in some commercial. He was in a commercial for some Russian, Russian company.

Ian Bowie
Was that true? Because I, I read that but then I also read another article that said it wasn’t true.

Michael Stormbom
No. So I mean, he had already done it, sold his likeness for this particular commercial, right. And I mean, I ended up looking it on YouTube, so it’s basically like a deep fake of, of Bruce Willis. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
But did he sell that? Or did they just do that.

Michael Stormbom
it? He sold it to them for that specific purpose, but then it had been misrepresented as having sold like all rights to his likeness. That was not the case. Actually. Yeah, but more on a case by case basis that if he wants to do sell his likeness in the future, and of course, they have him digitized already, so they can do that.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, yeah, right. Well, I suppose it’s just it’s just another extension of all these bands selling the digital rights to their songs, isn’t it? Well, yeah, for sure and selling their whole back catalogue.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, or a related note often other actor who just retired. James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader. Or like, I mean, I don’t know if he retired altogether, but he’s retired from the role of Darth Vader, right? Okay. But today, he sort of has given Disney permission to then use either like archival audio and then generate new audio for Darth Vader as they need for future Star Wars projects. Yeah. There’s already one out there. It’s just like a synthetic Darth Vader voice.

Ian Bowie
But of course, that’s not a charitable contribution to the future of Star Wars, is it? I mean, he’s obviously getting money for that.

Michael Stormbom
Well, I would hope to at least, it’s one of the most recognizable voices of the Star Wars franchise, so.

Ian Bowie
I mean, if you think about it, I mean, my goodness, what an easy way to make money. Yes, of course, you can use my my voice for whatever you wish. And then you pay me. That’s right. You know, you just sit back in your palace in Malibu, and count the money. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I’m being cynical here, but still. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, well, he’s 91, so now he doesn’t have to, you know,

Ian Bowie
Is he’s 91?

Michael Stormbom
At least, I mean, getting up there in age. I think he’s happy to retire, at least from that role.

Ian Bowie
You would think so yeah. You would have thought his voice has changed a bit over the years as well.

Michael Stormbom
I think it has to us as well, for all we know, they probably have to process quite heavily already. Anyway. So yeah.

Ian Bowie
It’s quite interesting with these franchises. You know, you’ve got. Okay, Star Wars, Darth Vader, but it’s been around since 1976. Darth Vader should either be very old or dead by now. You know, they don’t age the characters.

Michael Stormbom
They don’t take place in chronological order.

Ian Bowie
Batman, Superman Spider Man, they’re all as young as they ever were. Can’t we have an arthritic Spider Man?

Michael Stormbom
Possibly. I think there are some comic books where they go with that concept to do that. And I think Batman as well. There’s the famous Dark Knight Returns. The seminal 80s comic where there’s an older Batman.

Ian Bowie
And of course, it’s an indication of a desert of creativity, because they just bring back the same old same old tried and tested stuff, don’t they? It’s all about the franchises. Yeah. Where’s the new stuff?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, no one goes and watches the new stuff.

Ian Bowie
No, but you have to see the thing is you’ve got to kill off the old stuff to let in the new stuff.

Michael Stormbom
It comes down to the profit motive. Well, yeah. Yeah, as long as they can make money from old stuff then, why invest in new stuf?

Ian Bowie
They won’t take the risk with new stuff, but again, if we go back to what Meta created, and this is Make-a-Video thing. You know, obviously, once it’s fully developed, then the production costs for creating new films for example, new series, one imagines will fall exponentially. So it should lower the threshold for taking those risks of putting new stuff out there.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I mean, at least it can be used to, I don’t know, create specific concepts. Yeah. We’re probably quite far away. From having like a completely AI generated 90 minute movie, but in principle, oh,

Ian Bowie
Yeah, of course. We’re a long way at the moment, but one day, it’ll be possible.

Michael Stormbom
Possibly, yeah. Yeah, for sure. I don’t see why not. I mean, if you’re just looking at how much progress has been made with those image generators in just the last year, did anyone think that’ll be possible five years ago, next. And when it comes to using a person’s likeness, there’s of course been the concern about deep fakes around for quite a while now.

Ian Bowie
Well, it actually talking of deepfakes. Now, this is an interesting one. Do you think that could ever be a defense in a court of law? And then see, so you then say, well, actually, that wasn’t my advice. It’s not my advice. You could try that and then would the would the onus then be on the defense or the prosecutor to then prove that actually, yes, it is

Michael Stormbom
To be clear, we are not lawyers, so no, absolutely no, I’m just wondering, that was bought to sort of like a reasonable doubt. What scenario but yeah, conceivably, I mean, especially if there isn’t a recording of your voice like this? Well, he called on the phone and threatened to murder me. And then he said, well, well, obviously it’s some sort of nefarious someone.

Ian Bowie
No, you’d have to have a recording, though. I mean, that was that’s that’s just hearsay then, isn’t it? Well, yeah. One one person’s word against another. I mean, it goes back to.

Michael Stormbom
But I mean, there’s going to definitely going to be artifacts. So maybe a layperson wouldn’t be able to tell. But certainly you can get some sort of audio analyst to go to and say well, basically you can see here and here in the audio signal that these are clearly artifacts of it being either edited or synthesized, or whatever.

Ian Bowie
But it’s the same thing with some photographs. Isn’t that you know, that they can just play with them digitally nowadays?

Michael Stormbom
They can but again, how many will be… so again to a layperson, they might be indistinguishable from reality. Then you just have to bring in like a specialist who can tell you what the artifacts are.

Ian Bowie
I mean, for example, there was that photograph of Prince Andrew with whatever she was going, that woman. And a lot of people say well, that looks like it might have been digitally manipulated.

Michael Stormbom
But that wasn’t a court of law, was it?

Ian Bowie
Well, it was not. It didn’t quite go that far, did it, because, but it was going to be used in evidence as proof that they had met.

Michael Stormbom
Aha, right. Well, I try not to follow royalty all that much, personally, but..

Ian Bowie
I’m not following that kind of nonsense either, I

Michael Stormbom
But, I mean, if it had gone to a court of law, then they could surely and if it had been manipulated, then they could certainly they could certainly figure it out. And be able to show that it was manipulated. But of course, if there’s other evidence that might not matter.

Michael Stormbom
But coming back to AI generated art.

Ian Bowie
There was there was there was that thing that you send me about the chap in America, who won an award an art award, he got an awful lot of stick from other artists who had genuinely you know, painted their pictures or drawn or whatever they were doing. Whereas he just basically instructed an algorithm to create the prize winning artwork.

Michael Stormbom
So it was the fine arts competition at the Colorado State Fair. And the artwork had been submitted by Jason Allen, who had created the artwork using Midjourney which is one of the image generators we’ve spoken off on the podcast before and he ended up winning,

Ian Bowie
But he hadn’t in that way cheated because he was very open about the fact that he had used an AI algorithm, and the judges were fine about it as well. So, you know, is there an ethical problem with that? Really? No,

Michael Stormbom
I mean, isn’t isn’t the main thing the end result in a way?

Ian Bowie
Well, I would have thought so and also, of course, that picture that the AI algorithm created, wouldn’t ever exist if it hadn’t been for his imagination, and ability to instruct the algorithm to create it in the first place.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, and I mean, just finding the right… it is even a thing now, it’s called prompt engineering. So when you try to devise the prompts that will..

Ian Bowie
So yeah, you may know how difficult that is. I mean, especially me trying to prompt Dali to draw me something that I want.

Michael Stormbom
Ya know, so many times it’s its own thing and it requires a lot of experimentation also successive so I mean, I should send you that article. There’s someone described there because they did this thing where you Okay, first you generate one picture, okay. And then you add a little bit to it and then you generate a new picture based on that one. So it just was successive. It was actually the whole whole thing that I mean, it still requires creativity. It’s a creative process. Yeah. So So yeah, maybe you don’t have to, personally the technique to, to draw that. But I mean, it becomes an art form in its own right, just to figure out the right wording and to experiment and to get to the point.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, and I suppose even though you know, you might not be able to draw yourself or paint. You can still have a visual imagination. Yeah. I suppose it’s a bit like, yeah, the artist’s impression impressions of felons. You know, when when you sit when the witness sits down with a police artist, and they try to recreate an image of the perpetrator. So here’s a fantastic use for that technology. Yeah, for sure. Police artists beware. AI is definitely coming for you. Why not?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, for sure. On a completely unrelated note, but I also learned a new term the other day when looking into this art generating… so it’s AI Veganism.

Ian Bowie
Explain.

Michael Stormbom
I will because it’s perhaps not quite clear what that means. No, but I mean, a lot of these image generating algorithms certainly have all been trained with basically whatever images you can scrape from the internet and that means there’s a lot of well copyrighted and trademarked material in there. I would say that the other day, it’s not entirely clear how that goes down in copyright and trademark law, but you’re kind of using other people’s copyrighted. So in so if you’re an AI vegan, then you only use models that are trained on genuinely open data. Right? Yeah. Just scraping whatever we find on the internet. So of course, it’s going to be material in there they don’t actually have the right to do us there. So so the AI vegans tend to use models that have only we’re only open and free…

Ian Bowie
Becomes a very limited amount of source material.

Michael Stormbom
Not necessarily but there is quite a lot of open data, but certainly, I would imagine like a vegan sort of image generator, probably not quite as, as diverse as…

Ian Bowie
As a carnivorous one.

Michael Stormbom
Or an omnivorous one. Yes. Yeah. Now what I got was kind of interesting, interesting choice of words to highlight interesting term. Veganism, veganism for AI veganism. Yeah, well the concerns with regards to what material has been used to train the image generators are absolutely valid. And using the work of other people and copyrighted material. And conceivably, even photos of us, of you, scraped from social media have been made their way into some of those models.

Ian Bowie
Well, yeah, I mean, I suppose everybody has the right to own their own face, don’t they? But then, of course, I suppose their argument is if you put your face in the public domain, then don’t you automatically give up your copyright on your face? I don’t know.

Michael Stormbom
Well you can’t copyright a face, but I mean a photograph of a face certainly has copyrights. Well, yeah. So for example, if I were to take a photograph of you than I would on a corporate because I took the photo.

Ian Bowie
Right? Which means what? You could do whatever you wanted with that photograph,

Michael Stormbom
Well, not necessarily but But you couldn’t do anything with the photo without my permission. Right now, but as a point, because I follow some of these rock bands, so it’s like, even, like, photographers taking a picture of them, and then they put it on their Instagram. Well, they can’t do that. They don’t own the photo, the photographer owns it.

Ian Bowie
You mean then then the band puts it on their Instagram. Yeah, but they don’t have the copyright on the photo. Although actually what one would imagine that if you went to, give me a big band. Current.

Michael Stormbom
A current big band? Yeah. Led Zeppelin.

Ian Bowie
They’re ancient.

Michael Stormbom
I know. They don’t exist anymore.

Ian Bowie
You say the Rolling Stones.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, yes. Rolling Stones. Yes.

Ian Bowie
But anyway, you went to somebody like their concert, and you take a photograph, and then they then use it on their Instagram account. Now. You’re almost in a way I feel like you should say thank you to them. Because you could advertise and say, Hey, that’s my photograph.

Michael Stormbom
But that’s always the lines to the photographers and artists as well. Think of the exposure you get for when we we post your stuff for free and we don’t have we don’t have to pay for it.

Ian Bowie
You Yeah, I mean, it depends who you are. If you if you’re a big name photographer, you might be a little bit unhappy about that. But if you’re somebody who is up and coming and trying to make a name for themselves, then you might just say to them, well look, guys, you know,

Michael Stormbom
well, why did you put the photo on it and they don’t put a name on it? Well, yeah.

Ian Bowie
Then then you might say, well, you know, look guys, you can use a photograph. I’m happy about that. But could you please put my name at the bottom? Yeah, I’m sure they would. If you didn’t make a big fuss about it and just said, look, could you do that? Because you know, it’s my copyright.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. But yeah, it’s one of those things that is not well understood necessarily.

Ian Bowie
Because if you if you upset the band, your name goes on a blacklist and you don’t even get into the next concert dear. Yeah. I mean, at least that’s that’s the way I’m thinking. Yeah, you know who’s bigger you are the band. The band is always gonna be bigger in it, especially if it’s Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or whoever they’re always gonna win.

Michael Stormbom
Well, are they. But at any rate.

Ian Bowie
If you think in terms of the name game, and the fame game, sure, you know, if you’re looking to build your name and increase your fame, then I would have said that, you know, being able to ride on the back of the Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin is going to do you a lot of positive good.

Michael Stormbom
Now for for sure, but let’s say it’s not Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones likes some mid level band with, what 50,000 Instagram followers.

Ian Bowie
50,000 Instagram followers that you didn’t have access to before?

Michael Stormbom
Well, you don’t you don’t buy a whole lot of donuts with exposure. So I think that’s my point. But yeah,

Ian Bowie
Okay. I mean, I haven’t given a lot of thought because I’m not a photographer, yet.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, because it’s the general attitude. If you commission a piece of art or ask, do it for it, do it for free. Do it for the exposure.

Ian Bowie
Oh, yeah. No. Well, then you tell them to piss off.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, that’s my point. Exactly.

Ian Bowie
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Unless, unless you do make an exception for Led Zeppelin. You know, some some really, really big mega band. Yeah. And especially if you said well, you know, okay. Can I then also sell this photograph? Wherever? Yeah, on the back of, you know, with with with your kind of stamp of approval. Yeah, then yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
But if it’s your random noname, Instagram, no, definitely. And if anyone would like to engage our services, we also prefer to be paid in money rather than in exposure.

Ian Bowie
You’ve been listening to me Ian Bowie and my colleague, Michael Stormbom. On AI Unfiltered and for more episodes, please go to aiunfiltered.com. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai