My first video clone

My post #169 published on 9 November 2013 was titled Feeling free in flight and continued the theme of the cyborg. The cyborg is just one of a number of virtual hybrid human media entities. Another obvious example is avatars of players in video games.

Recently, it’s been possible to combine video and audio presentations of human beings cloned from source data to produce new videos. In such videos we see and hear podcasts of human content providers whose appearances, mannerisms and voices are sourced from original media formats, but represented with new content.

I’ve experimented with voice cloning before. See post: Clonecasting. Now, I’m catching up with cloning video content. Here is a short fragment of content I recorded in 2020 as part of an online lecture about cyborgs. (If video does not appear click on More below.)

Next, I used the HeyGen AI video creation platform to merge the same source video with text content from the post of 9 November 2013 titled Feeling free in flight. (If video does not appear click on More below.)

It’s kind of hilarious! The next step is to work out how to incorporate my own vocal attributes rather than this American voicing. See next week’s post.

Also see post Computer images and realism about the “uncanny valley.”

Here is the audio of the entire post Feeling free in flight read by a different synthetic voice, which is a bit softer on the ears.

Note

• Featured image is by ChatGPT: Please generate a steampunk-style rocket ship orbiting Mars.
• See https://www.youtube.com/@calmlyunhinged for videos of a cloned British actor reading verbatim transcripts of Trump speeches.