A new service powered by artificial intelligence that can turn portraits into talking heads was announced by D-ID on Monday.

Called Creative Reality Studio, the self-service application can convert a facial image into video, complete with speech.

The service is aimed at professional content creators – learning and development units, human resources departments, marketers, advertisers and sales teams – but anyone can try out the technique on the D-ID website.

Creative Reality Studio
Video by John P. Mello Jr.

The platform reduces the cost and hassle of creating corporate video content and provides an unlimited variety of presenters – versus limited avatars – that include users’ own photos or any images that the company has the right to use, according to the company. Gained notoriety when its technology was used in an app called Deep Nostalgia. The software was introduced as a way to animate old pictures.

The company said the technology enables customers and users to choose a presenter’s identity, including their ethnicity, gender, age and even their language, accent and tone. “It provides greater representation and diversity, creating a stronger sense of inclusion and belonging, which drives further engagement and interaction with the businesses that use it,” it said in a news release.

Matthew Kershaw, D-ID Marketing Vice President, told TechNewsWorld, “The use cases include empowering professional content creators to seamlessly integrate video into the digital space and presentations with specialized PowerPoint plug-ins, the use of customized corporate video narrators.” Generating more engaging content.

impressive services

The quality of these services is impressive, and continues to get better, maintained Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a research and public policy organization in Washington DC.

“The service isn’t at a level where it’s completely replacing a presenter, but there’s no reason not to expect it to be there relatively soon,” he told TechNewsWorld.

D-ID explained that the use of video by businesses has increased dramatically and more of them are integrating it into their training, communication and marketing strategies.

Accelerating this trend, it continued, are the rapidly evolving worlds of avatars and the metaverse, both of which demand a more creative, immersive and interactive content approach from digital creators. Production budgeting, however, can be prohibitively expensive and requires significant allocation of time and talent.

“The service is an evolution of the avatars and emoji people use today, but can be used in lengthy discussions or presentations,” said Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, a consumer technology consulting firm in New York City.

“The idea is to save time, especially if you were going to read a script,” he told TechNewsWorld. “It can be more engaging to an audience than simply watching audio or slides.”

democratizing AI

D-ID CEO and co-founder Gil Perry noted in a news release that the company’s technology, which is limited to the enterprise, has been used to create 100 million videos.

“Now that we are offering our self-service Creative Reality platform, the potential is enormous,” he continued. “It enables both large enterprises, small companies and freelancers to create personalized videos for multiple purposes on a large scale.”

Kershaw said D-ID’s technology will further democratize creativity. “I say ‘forward’ because technology has really been democratizing the arts for decades,” he said.

“From the installation of synthesizers, samplers and sequencers in music to Photoshop and Illustrator in photography and illustration, and premiere and desktop editing in film production and motion graphics, the ability to create high-quality productions outside of specialist high-end studios It’s been happening since the 1980s,” he said. “This is the latest episode of that long-running series.”

“This is certainly a step forward towards democratizing AI,” agreed Aviva Litton, a security and privacy analyst at Gartner. “It has great use cases in education, healthcare and retail,” she told TechNewsWorld. “It’s a better way to communicate with people. We’re becoming a more visual society. Nobody has time to read anything.”

deepfake concerns

With growing concern over the use of “deepfakes” to spread misinformation and take social engineering to new heights, there is always the potential for misuse of new synthetic media solutions such as D-ID.

“As with any technology, it can be used for the ill by our bad actors, but our platform is aimed at legitimate businesses that would have no interest in that kind of use,” Kershaw said.

“Plus,” he continued, “we’re not deepfakes. We don’t put someone else’s face on someone else’s body, and we’re not trying to tell anyone something they didn’t say.”

“Within D-ID’s platform, we have put in place a number of security measures to ensure that our technology is not used in this manner,” he said. “We do not repeat the voices of celebrities or those without permission from any person.”

The company also filters abusive and racist comments, and prohibits the platform from being used to make political videos.

“D-ID is putting railings on their platforms, but we all know that railings are never perfect,” Litton said.

“It is a good tool to spread misinformation because these social media sites are not ready for deepfakes,” she said. “Even if social media sites are good at detecting deepfakes, they will never be enough. It’s like spam. Spam always gets through. It will happen too, but the consequences There will be worse.”

need for origin

Detecting deepfakes is a losing proposition in the long run, Litton said. Even today, detection algorithms typically cannot detect more than 70% of deep fakes.

He added that determined adversaries will keep pace with deepfake detection using generative adversarial networks so that the detection rate is eventually reduced to 50%.

She predicts that in 2023, 20% of successful account takeover attacks will use deepfakes to turn over sensitive data to socially engineered users or transfer funds to criminal accounts.

“Many safeguards need to be implemented industry-wide, which is why we are also working with industry bodies and regulators to implement legal safeguards that will make the industry more secure and reliable in general ,” said Kershaw. “We think that having an industry-wide system for watermarking content invisibly through the use of steganography, in particular, would get rid of almost all potential issues.”

“You will be able to see a section of media and click a button to see where it came from and what’s in it,” he said. “Transparency is the solution.”

“There are many ways to deal with counterfeiting, but the most important is to know the origin and authenticity of the media,” Castro said.