Saying Goodbye to Reality As We Know It
If you considered the numerous ways that humans have devised to escape reality, you’d think that our world is unbearable and that the only way to survive is to constantly escape. From drugs to a steady diet of movies, we’ve discovered lots of ways to escape reality. The ability to escape is important to humans and as technology moves forward, we continue to find more creative ways to travel outside reality.
However, it seems that the age of escapism is now over. We are now interested in redefining reality.
Meta, which was previously known as Facebook, is one of the largest social media companies in the world. It controls considerable resources, which it is throwing behind the creation of the metaverse.
Meta’s impact will accelerate the creation of a new world in which reality and virtual reality are blurred. At some point, the two versions of the world may become indistinguishable, in what is currently being referred to as mixed reality.
There are multiple technologies that will be involved in the creation of the metaverse. These include virtual and augmented reality, along with devices such as virtual reality glasses. Another technology involved will be the creation of volumetric media, otherwise known as 3D media. In the near future, holograms will move from science fiction movies into our world.
There’s a technology that is being left out of the conversation, one which may assume a pivotal role in the metaverse: creative reality.
What is Creative Reality?
This is the creation of synthetic media either from scratch or from the manipulation of existing media. It is done chiefly through artificial intelligence models, which have been trained to generate media that is seen as authentic by humans.
Forms of Synthetic Media
Fake Faces
Thanks to generative adversarial networks, which are a form of artificial intelligence, computers can now create realistic faces of people from scratch. Such artificial intelligence models are trained on faces of real people. One part of the model is trained with real human faces. The more the training goes on, the more proficient the model becomes at the job.
Furthermore, this training equips the model with information about the properties of real human faces, enabling the model to create human faces. Such faces, at least at first glance, are indistinguishable from real faces.
So realistic are they that it’s not unthinkable that they are already in use in various parts of the internet. For example, with such a face, a bot could run a social media account.
Animated Faces
Thanks to creative reality technology, still photos of people’s faces can be brought to life in a most convincing way. To achieve this, all you need is the likeness of a person, say in a photo or painting.
After running the photo through specialized software, either on a website or an app, you get an animated clip that resembles a real video of the person. The person in the clip will be performing basic actions, such as smiling and looking around. Still, the videos look pretty realistic.
You can use animated faces to bring back to life historical figures or animate real-life stars, manipulating them to do your bidding!
Manipulated Faces
In addition to animating still faces, current technology can alter facial expressions. If an image shows someone being sad, the same image can be manipulated to show them being happy or excited.
This has numerous current and potential applications. For example, personalized emojis, generated from one image and made to portray a wide range of expressions, are now possible.
The ability to manipulate faces can also prove invaluable in stock photos. You may find an image which would be perfect if it had a certain expression. Rather than settling for a less appropriate image simply because it has the right expression, you can come up with the perfect image by changing the expression of an existing image that is suitable.
Applications of Synthetic Media
Content Creation
Thanks to advances in technology, the whole content creation process is being democratized. Artificial intelligence is key in this and has permeated almost all areas of content creation.
By inputting text into a model, you can get AI generated voice-overs that sound like human recordings. Even more exciting is the fact that you can create written content by keying in some instructions into an AI model. These range from social media posts and marketing copy to long form content such as blogs and ebooks!
Add to all this the ability to create faces from scratch and animate them according to your whims and you’ve got a full content creation workflow. Gone are the days when you had to go to a studio to create content. Now, you can do it from the comfort of your computer and at less cost.
Video Face Blurring
Video is gradually becoming the primary form of content. It has higher engagement, with a growing number of people preferring video to other forms of content for all use cases, from entertainment to education.
As a result, a lot of video is being generated. Most of it ends up being stored on the internet, where it is vulnerable to cyber attacks.
While cyberdefense tactics work, they are not always effective and sometimes, data breaches occur. Usually, cyber attackers use automatic face-detection software to reveal and use the identities of people in wrongfully-acquired video.
The technology behind fake and animated faces enables the faces in stored video to be de-anonymized. This way, the faces are recognizable by humans but not by automatic face-detection software.
This is helping improve privacy as well as comply with regulations.