The current season (if you can even call three episodes a season) of Black Mirror features an episode starring Miley Cyrus in which a young pop star is forced into a coma so that her manager can replace her with a digital avatar that can go on tour 24/7 without ever needing a break. And like most episodes of Black Mirror it’s an eerily realistic look at a future that’s just around the corner as we may soon have our very own versions of personal digital avatars that influence almost every aspect of our lives.
As Gizmodo puts it:
“In January 2019, when China Central Television, the largest broadcast network in the most populous nation in the world, aired a special to celebrate the Lunar New Year, the hosts welcomed four life-sized “personal artificial intelligences” to share the stage with them. Called PAIs, they were three-dimensional holographic replicas of the presenters that moved, spoke, and sang to the delight of the cheering live audience. The program was viewed some 1.8 billion times. One of the most-watched TV shows in the world had been hosted by AI avatars.
The company behind those avatars is the Pasadena-based ObEN. This startup, with its 100 plus employees, is betting that in the future, everyone will want their own PAIs—to digitally try on clothes, to interact with friends, to keep the kids company while you’re away on a business trip. In that future, celebrities will create PAIs to interact with fans to promote their latest films and albums. Teachers and doctors will have PAIs that offer personalized services to their students and patients. When you go to the mall, PAIs will pop up on the interactive screens there, enticing you to buy stuff.
ObEN describes its ambitious vision of the future as ‘personal AI for all.’ And ObEN is far from alone, of course. Investors, tech giants, and even governments are betting big on lifelike digital avatars—between Facebook’s push to port your likeness into VR, the eerily lifelike AI news anchors put on the air by Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, and the burgeoning CGI celebrity simulacra scene in Hollywood, there’s a newfangled interest in the (potentially vastly profitable) art of porting people’s digital likeness to our screens.”
This isn’t exactly a new concept. People have been creating video game characters that look like themselves for ages. More recently smartphone apps have let people customize their very own emojis. But what we’re talking about now goes far beyond that. Modeling video game characters and communicating with our friends was just the beginning. Phase Two now includes a second, life-sized version of ourselves that would replace certain people in the real world, fundamentally altering the way we get our news, receive healthcare, educate ourselves, and consume personal entertainment. If the point of Virtual Reality is to create a “mirror world” that mimics the real world in a digital setting then the PAIs are almost doing the exact opposite of that, adding our digital selves to the real world. And once that happens, once PAIs enter the mainstream, there may be no going back to the way things used to be.
Are personal AI avatars the Greatest Idea Ever?
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