Synthetic Media – What’s coming next?

What is synthetic media?

Synthetic Media includes artificially-generated video, voice, images or text, where AI takes on part (or all) of the creative process. This falls under the broader landscape of synthetic, artificial or virtual reality (photo-realistic AR/VR).

One of the more powerful things about modern machine learning or AI methods is that they can enhance the creative process I prefer to call this augmented intelligence and I think it’s one of the most exciting things about modern artificial intelligence.

As ‘software eats the world‘ we’re seeing more machine learning moving into everyday tasks. We already have machine learning in fraud systems, biology, and supply chains.

Recently we’ve begun to see the explosion of artificially-generated media. We’ve seen deepfakes

Images

We’re already seeing synthetically generated images which are largely generated with techniques such as StyleGAN.

One of the leaders of this type of revolutionary tech is Rosebud. The question becomes why would you need Shutterstock when fake images will do?

Synthetic Audio

We’re seeing an explosion in audio endpoints. A case in point is airpods but there’s others such as smart speakers. And who knows what other sorts of audio-enabled devices we’ll have. We’re also seeing a proliferation of podcasts and various audio content. As we see more audio content, the challenge will be to create engaging audio experiences. And as synthetic audio tends towards human level, we’ll have more and more premium on creating immersive audio experiences. We’re already seeing a consumer acceptance of voice-cloning tech and Text to speech (TTS) for example the proliferation of smart speakers. The challenge for brands is how do they produce engaging content and reach their audience?

With these trends, I predict in 5 years’ time the majority of audio content will be produced at-least-in-part by machine methods. Therefore to be relevant brands will need to integrate such techniques into their workflows.

Call to action

If you’re interested in media, a publisher, an investor or just generally interested in what augmented intelligence means for your business, and you want to see what augmented intelligence means for producing engaging audio experiences. You can have a look at www.aflorithmic.ai or send me an email to find out more peadar[at]aflorithmic[dot]ai

Links

• Synthetic media accelerator – https://betaworksventures.com/campv1
• Deep fakes – Dessa
• Synthetic media working group – https://www.w3.org/community/synthetic-media/