Endorsements Evolved: AI Celebrity Doubles 📸

Good morning, AI explorers!

Welcome to another edition of AI Authority, delivering all of the top groundbreaking AI news shaping our world into a bite-sized newsletter every weekday morning.

As always, we’ve got one daily AI headline, two exciting tools, and three pieces of content we love from the community for you today.

In this edition:

✍️ News: Celebrities Licensing AI Digital Likenesses
🛠️ Tools: Voice Library from ElevenLabs, Genius by Diagram
🎨 Creator Corner: Landscape Split Prompts, Recreating the ‘Secret Invasion’ Intro, ChatGPT ASCII Art Fail

Here’s everything you need to know:

One top headline in the AI space to know:

📸 Endorsements Evolved: Celebrities Cash in With AI Doubles

In the most recent season of Black Mirror, you might’ve seen Salma Hayek lend her digital likeness to fictional streaming service Streamberry (a parody of Netflix) — with somewhat disastrous results.

Even if you haven’t, the idea of licensing out your likeness in an AI form might feel futuristic, or even dystopian.

But it’s already happening right now.

An article from the Wall Street Journal detailed the rise of celebrities leveraging their images using AI-generated duplicates — with athletes like Carmelo Anthony, Neymar, and Jack Nicklaus, along with supermodel Eva Herzigova taking advantage of the new technology to open a new marketing avenue.

For the celebrities, the benefits are two-pronged:

• Having a ‘licensed’ AI image helps combat the rise of deepfakes that we’ve seen in the wake of the AI boom — with many celebrities seeing their likenesses used without consent.

• Licensing your AI likeness takes a LOT less commitment on the part of the celebrity. In the words of Tom Graham, chief executive of AI startup Metaphysic, celebrities “get paid, but they don’t have to show up.”

For the brands, companies can use AI in ways not often possible — with things like de-aging the celebrity (golf legend Jack Nicklaus 83, but his AI likeness is from his younger playing days) or being able to hold individual conversations with users in a way that might be cumbersome for a real-life star.

The model isn’t some bland generic avatar — the tech draws on hundreds of hours of interviews for each subject, allowing the duplicate to be able to mimic both the voice and unique individual thoughts and responses of the celebrity.

“In a digital sense, they are alive: They can connect emotionally; they can entertain; they can interact in real time. This is the future of marketing,” said Greg Cross, CEO of Soul Machines, whose tagline is ‘We breathe life into digital celebrities’.

Will AI-generated doubles change the game for celebrity an athlete marketing endorsements? Or does it cheapen the experience for a consumer interacting with a ‘fake’ version of their favorite star?

And with AI continuing to evolve at an exponential rate, will we even be able to tell the difference?

Two AI-powered platforms to add to your toolbox:

• Voice Library from ElevenLabs — A global collection of vocal styles built for countless applications (link)

• Genius by Diagram — Your AI design companion in Figma (link)

Diagram was recently acquired by Figma, with its tools now integrated into the interface design application:

Three of our favorite tweets, threads, AI generations and more:

Some absolutely stunning outputs from this landscape split portrait prompt. Via @ProperPrompter:

If you read last week’s newsletter on Marvel’s AI-generated opening credits — someone decided to recreate it themselves (with some impressively close results). Via @substylance:

ChatGPT’s art might need some work. Via Reddit user sass_m8:

See you tomorrow!

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