By Editor Morten B. Reitoft 

Last week INKISH published an article titled "What is ChatGPT - Embrace or Fear?" - and this is just one of many articles, posts, and comments on where AI is taking us. I don't think AI is soon replacing the creative thinking of humans, but it's important to remember that what we see, i.e., ChatGPT is only first generation in public. When we all try ChatGPT, my take is that it's deliberately, from OpenAI's side, an opportunity to see how people are using ChatGPT and let it learn from the humans trying.

However, this article is about something that has been developing for years - Deep Fake. You remember the phrase, "a photo never lies," which in today's Photoshopped world is a joke, and we all know it. With fast computers and GPUs, technology is now quite capable of manipulating film similarly to photos. We have seen it in countless films where CGI is used to create stunning scenes, characters, and even films that wouldn't be possible without it.

In America's Got Talent show, the US-based company Metaphysic did a LIVE performance of Elvis Presley. See it here. The company has specialized in 'building the hyperreal metaverse,' not to be confused with the Facebook Metaverse. Metaphysic is able - as well as others - to replace, for example, a face of a person and then adapt facial expressions, voice, eye- and body movement to make it almost impossible to distinguish the real person from the artificial person.

This is both amazing and scary, as this eventually can make it impossible to distinguish what is real and not real. Check out this film from Mike Boyd.

INKISH already uses a variant of 'deep fake' by using a program called Descript. As we add a video to Descript, it transcribes it and allows us to edit it in text. It can remove filler words automatically and remove the space in the video, either by leaving a blank or by truncating the length accordingly. It can also learn from the audio and train a voice to sound like anybody - called Overdub.

For adding pronunciation, changing a verb, or editing jibberish, it's excellent, and when a voice has been trained, it can be used to write a podcast with the voice of a person who never said these words. The voice needs to be verified by the owner, but once verified, it can be used for pretty much anything!

Does it sound 100% natural? If you write a podcast, you will need to edit the pronunciations and the speed of how you speak pretty detailed, so for podcasting, yes/no - but for editing films with a few minor errors, I am pretty sure nobody will be able to notice.

Both Metaphysic and Descript use AI to enable their services. So by learning, it becomes better and better over time.

AI is used in more and more applications, and as I wrote in previous articles, AI or Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning is 'just' an algorithm able to learn from its input. The more data it has processed, the better it is. The implications of AI are intriguing as many speculate over which jobs it will replace and who will benefit from AI. I was even mentioned yesterday in a LinkedIn post suggesting that the printing companies embracing AI will be tomorrow's winners.

AI is not new, so we are more interested in speculating about AI because OpenAI, ChatGPT, and Dall·E have opened our eyes to the potential (and the threads).

And one more thing...

The computer and the chip as we know it today were invented in the late '60s. Today's chips are built on the same technology but improve speed and capacity by adding more capacitors to the design. The advantage of this is that chip design can improve in iterations and keep the cost down. The downside is that the energy used, the excess heat, and the size of the chips are about to be as fast as they can get with the current technology. We will, however, need even faster chips, and many researchers are looking into entirely new designs. Some may have heard about quantum computers, which are still in the research phase, used by companies like Google, IBM, and the defense industry. New breeds of chips are being developed using entirely new ways of processing - using the human brain as inspiration. It's almost like a biological computer, promising faster computing with considerably lower energy consumption. With AI, robots, space explorations, and the need for more and more computer power, the pace only got started, and it's pretty amazing what we see these years.

Check out this great film by Bloomberg about next-generation computer chips.