The fundamental technologies for creating digital clones of people — text, audio, and video that sound and look like a specific person — have rapidly advanced and are within striking distance of a future in which digital avatars can sound and act like specific people, Tamaghna Basu, co-founder and chief technology officer of neoEYED, a behavioral analytics firm, told attendees at the virtual Black Hat conference on Aug. 6.
While deepfake videos that superimpose a 3D model of a specific person over another person's face have raised fears of propaganda videos, disinformation operations, and smear campaigns, successful digital clones could cause even more problems, especially for systems that use voice or facial recognition for access management or as a way to fool employees into accepting someone's identity. While the current result of Basu's experiment have numerous telltale signs that the subject is clearly not human, the relative success of project demonstrates how close we may be to successfully creating simulated people.
"As you can clearly see, there is a gap, but this gap is about making the voice more convincing, making the facial expressions have more emotion, those are on the road map to be done," he told attendees during his presentation. "The ultimate goal that I have, [building] an alternate [version of me] that can have a conversation over text, voice, and video," seems achievable.
Inspired by futuristic shows such as Black Mirror, Basu decided to attempt to construct a digital clone of himself using three already existing technologies: chatbots, audio synthesis, and deepfake videos. The effo ..
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