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How dare you! You're a really bad person unless you treat the products of VCs with the same enthusiasm and naivete that people did in the 90s. You owe them optimism!
We don't like to interact with people just because that's the only way we can interact but because humans are human. AI avatars are the exact opposite: a statement of disinterest. If you don't care enough about my business to be on a sales call with me, why would I bother speaking to an AI avatar you send in your place? What's a thank you message without a human being actually taking the time to record it?
AI avatars seem a lot like crypto: they're a neat technology solving the wrong problem. The "inefficiency" of humans interacting with humans is the fundamental component of communication. I guess it's a lot like LLMs: instead of producing less content that is more valuable / thoughtful per unit, we're producing a lot more content that is much less valuable / thoughtful per unit. AI avatars will create more vacuous communication, not enable our communication to be more thoughtful.
Maybe human behavior will change because of this, maybe the next generation that grows up interacting with AI avatars won't have this same feeling that speaking to an actual human means something.
It will never stop being funny to me that these assholes self-righteously told government to step out of the way so that they (and by extension the rest of the Silicon Valley investor class) could show how they could build their way out of all of our social, economic, and political problems. They even end this self-righteous screed with "There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for…
> We expect this space will give rise to multiple billion-dollar companies,
The most miraculous thing about this wave of AI is how democratized it is and how resistant it has been to anyone making money of it.
The more AI stuff I see makes me want to purchase a cabin somewhere in remote Montana and start writing a journal.
> Can’t you just generate an image of a face, animate it, and add a voiceover? Not quite. The challenge isn’t just nailing the lip sync — it’s making facial expressions and body language move in tandem. It would be weird if your mouth opened in surprise, but your cheeks and chin didn’t budge!
Starting here:
- "generate an image of a face, animate it, and add a voiceover?"
Tried this at [0]. Here's an example visual output:
- https://visualmic.com/example-animation-4.gif
Judge for yourself. You can see the mouth and eyebrows move in response to voice volume, and the eyes shift and blink according to settings. But no cheek movement, no head tilt, and no face shape change.
I think TFA is sort of right.
I'm not sure that face cap and AI are 100% needed, and most of the tools for making great VR models seem either pretty complicated or sort of privacy invading. But, better translating voice input into face changes does seem sort of needed.
There's "virtual Youtuber" (vtuber) software too, but that too seems some combination of complicated/clunky, resource intensive, and/or in signup-required land. [EDIT: Surely, there is a good front end at OpenLive3D [1], but making the .VRM model for it, e.g., with VRoid Studio [2] is where things seem start to get a little more time/energy-intensive.]
I'm not against pseudonymous avatars, but is there a third path? It should be easy and open, no? Gonna have to trawl through the suggestions of a16z on this one.
[0] https://visualmic.com
[1] https://openlive3d.com
[2] https://vroid.com/en/studio