Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology: The AI version of Elihay Vidal looks a lot like the man in real life. I watched him anchor a news broadcast last week and had to stare intently for a number of seconds to confirm I wasn’t watching a real human.
Vidal’s avatar has a human face, human body, human expressions, and even a shirt with the top two buttons unbuttoned. His “Edge of Tech” show runs regularly on CTech, an Israeli tech news site where he’s editor-in-chief, and the visuals and voice are entirely synthetic. To develop the show, Vidal worked with Caledo, a tech company that builds AI news video for news sites looking for a cheaper and easier alternatives the real thing.
After watching Vidal’s show, I wanted to know why he’s allowed himself to be turned into an AI avatar and where he sees the format going. Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Alex Kantrowitz: The AI ‘reporter’ using your likeness looks very human, like the real you. How did you turn yourself into that avatar?
Elihay Vidal: I stood in front of a camera and moved around, and the software captured my movements. The avatar’s movements are therefore my movements. My AI avatar is singular. It is my voice, my mimics, my facial expressions, my eyes, and my smile.
When you initially saw the AI generated version of yourself on screen, were you like, wow, that’s me?
I showed it to my family, my wife, my children, my parents, and my sister. Everyone said, there’s no way it’s not you. The machine just learned my character. The little nuances in there, people recognize them as mine.
Why make news videos with artificial intelligence avatars, as opposed to just filming them yourself?
We filmed only once for half an hour. I gave a speech in front of the camera. Then, after a few days they showed me my avatar, which was generated by AI. And when I gave the speech, I did it in Hebrew…
But your avatar speaks in English?
Yes, and the English was perfect. I said, No, no, no, no, no, listen, listen, listen, when I speak, I don’t speak perfect English. I have an accent. So let’s make the accent a little rougher. And so they tweaked the machine and changed my accent. Then I was very, very content with what I got.
Caledo, the company that built the avatar, also has a few off-the-shelf avatars and you can say, I want this one, I want that one. I wanted to be an Asian girl or a blonde guy, or whatever. You can choose avatars from their gallery, or you can do the shoot yourself, as I did…
More here.
