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Date: April 26, 2024

The AI startup that offers lifelike replicas to humans presents a fascinating challenge: can you identify the real human from their AI doppelganger?

The boom of Generative AI quickly gained a reputation for the potential to oust many human jobs, which settled down over time considering its inaccuracies and long-hauled learning phase. Major AI development companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google claim that AI will only become a support system for humans to unlock higher efficiency while reducing the workloads of mundane tasks. Amid mixed conversations happening globally, an AI startup has brought a new crop of AI services that can create lifelike replicas of humans to create digital versions of themselves.

Edo Segal, the co-founder of an AI startup, Touchcast, claims to create AI clones that match voice, tones, mannerisms, and gestures like the tilt of an eyebrow. The service can turn a PowerPoint presentation into a script that can be narrated just like the original human would. In a demo display over Zoom, Segal’s AI clone was so lifelike that people almost forgot it was synthetic.

“Investors can talk to my twin for as long as they want, ask any number of questions. With the digital twin, you can afford to simultaneously have countless conversations with numerous investors,” said Segal, a serial entrepreneur raising a Series B funding round for his startup, Touchcast. Touchcast has recently raised $55 Million in a Series A round, with major tech giants like Accenture already using it. Professors at the Imperial College of London have also used Touchcast to conduct digital college sessions any time of the day.

The number of companies building human-mimicking capabilities is growing fast, but none have achieved the accuracy Touchcast did. Synthesia is another AI startup that comes close to Touchcast, offering convincing digital replicas of humans to perform various tasks. Synthesia is currently valued at $1 Billion by letting its clients create custom digital avatars applicable across multiple platforms. The expressive avatars can automatically adapt the body language and tone of the human and match their sentiments of words presented in a script.

While AI promises to maximize efficiency and minimize workloads, the recent evolution of AI clones can take the use case to extremes, eventually completely replacing many human jobs. The capability to rapidly create digital clones can lead to a surge of deep fakes, a challenge that has harmed the reputation of many celebrities globally. Generative AI is prone to errors and keeps training itself on various open sources, leading to misleading bias. Multiple countries have already implemented many regulations to control the misuse of AI and limit their capabilities to pro-human activities. Touchcast and Synthesia claim that they carefully vet customers, provide early detection of bad actors, and restrict the type of content users can generate through their platform.
 

By Arpit Dubey

Arpit is a dreamer, wanderer, and a tech nerd who loves to jot down tech musings and updates. With a logician mind, he is always chasing sunrises and tech advancements while secretly preparing for the robot uprising.