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People are hiring their faces to be deepfake-style marketing


Liri can run many businesses in multiple countries, as she has hired her face to Hour One, a startup that uses human likenesses to create AI-voiced characters that appear in marketing and training videos for organizations around the world. Part of a wave of companies overhauling the way digital content is produced. And it has big implications for human power.

Liri does the waitress and bar work herself, but has little idea what her digital clones are doing. “It’s definitely a bit strange to think that my face could appear in videos or commercials of different companies,” he says.

Hour One isn’t the only company take deepfake tech mainstreamuses it to produce mash-ups of real images and AI-generated videos. Some used professional actors add life to deep fake personalities. However, Hour One does not require any special skills. You just need to be willing to surrender your face rights.

character driven

Hour One creates a pool of what he calls “characters.” He says he has around 100 in his books so far, with more being added every week. “We have a tail of people dying to be these characters,” says Natalie Monbiot, the company’s head of strategy.

Anyone can apply to become a character. Like a modeling agency, Hour One filters applicants by choosing what they want in their book. Monbiot says the company is aiming for a broad cast of characters that reflect the ages, genders and racial backgrounds of real-world people. (Currently, about 80% of their characters are under 50, 70% are female, and 25% are white.)

To create a character, Hour One uses a high-resolution 4K camera to film a person talking and making different facial expressions in front of a green screen. And that’s it for the human part of the performance. By plugging the resulting data into artificial intelligence software that works like deep fake technology, Hour One can generate an infinite amount of images that person says they want in any language.

Artificial intelligence character created by Hour One using Liri’s face

Hour One’s customers pay the company to use their characters in a promotional or commercial video. They pick a face, upload the text they want it to say, and get back a video of what a real person looks like, delivering that scenario to the camera. The fastest service uses text-to-speech software to create synthetic voices that sync with characters’ mouth movements and facial expressions. Hour One also offers a premium service where the sound is recorded by professional voice actors. These sounds are also adapted to the movements of the character in the video. Hour One says it has more than 40 clients, including real estate, e-commerce, digital health and entertainment firms. One of the big clients is Berlitz, an international language school that provides teacher-led video courses for dozens of languages.

According to Monbiot, Berlitz wanted to increase the number of videos he presented, but found it difficult to do so using real human actors. They had to have production teams recreating the same plot with the same actor over and over, he says. “They found it really unsustainable. We’re talking thousands of videos.”

Berlitz works with Hour One to create hundreds of videos in minutes. “We are changing the studio,” Monbiot says. “A person doesn’t need to waste their time making a movie.”



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