AI: Digital Twins being rolled out. RTZ #400

...deals leading to AI created mainstream performances

Back last August, in ‘About those Digital Twins’, I noted that there was ‘Abundance ahead for individuals and businesses’, as this AI Tech Wave progresses. Back then Hollywood was going through a ‘tussle between Writers/Actors, and Studios’, around AI leveraging their likeness. Their ‘Digital Twins’ as they were.

Fast forward almost a year, and we’re now seeing digital likenesses being fielded for professional duties. As the Verge reports, “An AI version of Al Michaels will deliver Olympic recaps on NBC/Peacock":

“NBC’s AI-generated voice could create nearly 7 million customized recaps during the Paris Olympics.”

“Legendary sportscaster Al Michaels is going to give daily, personalized recaps of the Paris Olympics on Peacock — well, an AI-generated Al Michaels voice will. In practice, the effect is a lot like hearing a sports announcer’s voice in a video game like Madden, except it’s spitting out lines about real-life sports, which, in this case, means custom Olympics coverage.”

“Here’s how it works. To set up what NBC is calling “Your Daily Olympic Recap” in the Peacock app, you’ll provide your name (the AI voice can welcome the “majority” of people by their first name, NBC says in a press release) and pick up to three types of sports that are interesting to you and up to two types of highlights (for example, “Top Competition” or “Viral & Trending Moments”). Then, each morning, you’ll get your Michaels-led rundown.”

“The voice was trained using Michaels’ appearances on NBC, according to the press release, and the experience was built in-house, NBCUniversal’s John Jelley tells The Verge in a statement. “Our in-house Peacock team of engineers, product managers and data scientists developed a proprietary process to integrate, optimize and validate state-of-the-art large language model and voice synthesis technology to create this experience.”

Of course, NBCU will take it slow with the necessary precautions, on this inaugural run of rolling out digital likenesses:

“To help protect against potential AI-made weirdness, NBC says that “a team of NBCU editors will review all content, including audio and clips, for quality assurance and accuracy before recaps are made available to users.” But I still feel like there’s the chance somebody’s recap will include an AI-generated hallucination spoken out loud in Al Michaels’ voice, like highlighting the wrong athlete or bungling some unusual outcome in a sport.”

This is just the beginning of the beginning of these types of AI deployments.

Despite the ongoing discussions, negotiations, and litigations around companies leveraging personalities and content with AI technologies, the industry is moving forward with deals and deployments. And the big tech companies continue to update their ‘Terms of Service’ on their current platforms to make way for more AI Data training and inference.

Concurrently this week, after the RIAA sued to AI music startups Suno and Udio around using music IP in their AI services, we saw YouTube negotiating with major record labels for rights to use AI with their music catalogs.

I discussed this ongoing evolution of litigations and negotiations also last year in “Show me the Money” last summer. A year later, as the multimodal LLM AI technologies continue to Scale, we’re getting closer to see more deals gets made, and AI driven ‘digital twins’ and digital content being rolled out to mainstream users. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)