AI is Coming to Professionally Made Video Content - Brace Yourselves

 

In the profession of dentistry, AI has already become an incredible tool.  We happen to use Pearl's Second Opinion system in the office and it has become really critical to what we do.  

There are basically two types of AI, narrow & broad.  The narrow type is what we use in dentistry.  It's NOT the Terminator.  Instead it's really good at looking at the pixels in a radiograph and identifying areas of low density where they shouldn't be.  That means it can, in the blink of an eye, analyze an x-ray and point areas that have less density in an area that should have *high* density.  It's a pretty simple concept and it works incredibly well.

The one that people are concerned about, and rightly so, is the broad type.  This is the type that does lots of things, not just some specific task.  As a diehard geek, I try to keep up to date with as much tech info as possible.  In order to accomplish that I do a lot of reading and one of my favorite publications is MIT Technology Review.

Recently I got a chance to read an article on the publication's website that talked about the coming wave of using AI to create videos of real people.  We've had this type of CGI ability for while.  We've all seen major motion pictures where actors are created digitally in certain situations.  In the last Indiana Jones movie Harrison Ford was digitally edited to appear as a younger Indiana Jones in some scenes.  It was a cool effect, but if you looked closely you could tell the CGI Ford from the real one.

Now the technology has evolved to the point where AI can be used to create avatars of real people that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real individual.  It's soon going to be possible to create completely synthetic people that can say or do anything with near perfection.  We're having a hard enough time trying to figure our fact from fiction nowadays.  Being able to put words or gestures into videos of real individuals is going to change things.

I found the article fascinating... and a little scary.  If you're interested, here is a link.