🫥 Deeper fakes

🧵 In today's edition:

• 🫥 Deeper fakes with Microsoft’s VASA-1

• 🫂 Can AI solve Japan’s population problem?

• 🤖 BBC is going big on AI

• 🛠️ AI Tools to Check Out

• 🤑 AI Fundraising News

• 🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

🫥 Deeper fakes with Microsoft’s VASA-1

Microsoft Research Asia recently introduced VASA-1, an AI model that generates synchronized animated videos of a person speaking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track.

Pros and cons:

• VASA-1, trained on over a million YouTube clips of celebrities, can produce realistic videos featuring accurate facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio in real time.

• This technology has potential positive uses, such as promoting educational equity, enhancing accessibility, and offering therapeutic companionship.

• However, it also raises concerns about possible misuse. It could facilitate the creation of deepfakes, making individuals appear to be saying things they never said or enabling harassment from a single social media photo.

Microsoft acknowledges these concerns and insists that the generated videos still contain recognizable artifacts, distinguishing them from genuine videos.

Yet, detecting such deepfakes may become increasingly challenging as the technology progresses.

Overall: In response to these concerns, Microsoft asserts that it opposes the creation of misleading or harmful content about real individuals and is keen on using its technique to advance forgery detection. Citing privacy and potential misuse, the researchers have not released the VASA-1 code.

Read more: Ars Technica

🫂 Can AI solve Japan’s population problem?

Japan's population dynamics have been a significant concern for a while now:

• The country is grappling with a severe labor shortage caused by an aging population and declining birth rates.

• For the first time, more than one in 10 individuals in Japan is now aged 80 or older.

• National data also reveals that 29.1% of the 125 million population is aged 65 or older, a new record.

• Japan has one of the world's lowest birth rates and has long faced challenges providing for its aging population.

Now, with 11 million workers expected to be missing by 2040, companies and the government are exploring AI's potential to bridge this gap.

Many businesses are adopting AI-powered solutions to automate tasks and enhance efficiency.

• For example, Osaka Ohsho, a Japanese dumpling maker, has employed AI cameras to identify defective dumplings, reducing the production line workforce by 30%.

• In agriculture, an AI app assists farmers in detecting crop diseases and pests, replacing the decreasing number of experts.

The education sector is also experimenting with AI, with some schools introducing AI-powered English conversation tools to support language learning. However, teachers agree that AI cannot entirely substitute human interaction and teaching.

Overall: The Japanese government is proactively investigating the use of AI in administrative tasks and staff training, saving thousands of work hours each year.

Despite these initiatives, experts maintain that AI is not yet prepared to replace human workers entirely. Instead, it serves as a tool to boost efficiency and productivity amid labor shortages.

Read more: BBC

🤖 BBC is going big on AI

The BBC is investing £6M/$7.4M in AI to transform its educational service, BBC Bitesize, and make it more personalized and interactive. 

Their aim? To attract younger audiences and future license fee payers.

After being heavily relied upon during the pandemic lockdowns, BBC Bitesize will transition from a digital textbook into a more personalized learning platform. It will incorporate AI-powered tools to: 

• Provide personalized testing, 

• Identify learning gaps, and 

• Recommend follow-up content to deepen subject understanding.

The investment is part of the BBC's effort to remain relevant and build relationships with younger audiences, who are increasingly turning to digital platforms like YouTube. By leveraging AI, the broadcaster hopes to create a "spinach version" of YouTube, offering educational content tailored to individual users' needs and interests.

Overall: While a relatively small investment compared to the £700 million in annual savings the BBC needs to find, the move aligns with the broadcaster's Reithian purpose of "informing, educating, and entertaining." 

It also reflects the BBC's commitment to proactively deploying AI on its own terms, creating ethical algorithms to enhance user personalization and relevance.

Read more: The Guardian

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🤑 AI Fundraising News

• Langdock raises $3M in Seed funding to provide a platform that offers enterprise-grade security, cloud, and on-premises solutions, and a chat interface – allowing colleagues to access LLMs across departments.

• Xfactor.io raises $16M in Series A funding to develop an AI-powered revenue platform that combines sales, marketing, and operations teams with effective planning, value-driven execution, and key decision-making.

🐦 Tweet Post of the Day

The future is about to be crazy… 🤯