Meta Unveils AI-Powered Video Avatars for Influencers at Connect 2024

Meta Announces AI Video Avatars for Influencers

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previewed a new feature on Wednesday that will allow creators to make realistic video avatars modeled on themselves that speak and listen to fans who visit the creators' accounts on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg demonstrated the technology at Meta Connect, the company's annual developer conference, but the artificial intelligence avatars are not yet

Meta is working on recreating influencers with AI

Meta has big ambitions for using AI to help creators, and it showed two impressive demos of what that could look like onstage at Connect today. One version of this involves fully recreating real influencers as AI figures. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a live demo of a creator-based AI persona, which looked like the creator, talked like the creator, and tried to respond to questions like the creator would. It was pretty wild to watch. Another tool it's developing takes Reels and automatically dubs them into another language, maintaining the creator's voice and even changing the movements of their mouth to match. Zuckerberg presented two videos onstage of Reels by Spanish creators being translated and dubbed into English. The demo wasn't live, so it's unclear how well this tech works right now on a typical video, but it was still incredibly impressive to watch. At scale, it seems like this technology has the potential to make videos reach a lot more people, which is something Meta definitely wants to do so it can better compete with platforms like TikTok and YouTube. (Speaking of YouTube, the company has been investing in auto-dubbing, too.) Meta also announced a bunch of other AI-related features at Connect today, including that its AI assistant will be able to talk in the voices of celebrities.

Mark Zuckerberg Showed New Tech That Uses AI to Fully Recreate People

Today at Meta Connect, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads showed off a a technology that is capable of fully recreating influencers as AI figures that can be spoken to as if they were the real person. The technology at play here, as explained by The Verge and Engadget, was showcased for two purposes. Firstly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed that its AI is able to dub Reels into other languages including changing the movement of a subject's lips so that it appears to be spoken natively. Not only will the words be translated, but Zuckerberg says the technology will "simulate the speaker's voice in another language," too. No exact timeline for this technology's release was provided at Meta Connect, but Zuckerberg says that it will first roll out to "some creators' videos" in English and Spanish in the United States and Latin America before slowly increasing language support and access over time -- the company did say that it plans to add more languages "soon." Meta's AI translation feature does sound like a good improvement from strictly an accessibility and reach perspective even if there is likely to be some discomfort around the changing of how a person's lips move during speech. That said, if that small change is considered problematic, Meta's next application of the technology is likely to be viewed with significantly more scrutiny. As shown in Instagram Reels shared by The Verge, Zuckerberg presented a live demonstration of speaking with a fully AI-powered version of a real human influencer. The AI version looked and talked like the real person and was able to -- or at least tried to -- respond to questions as it believed the creator would. It was apparently very believable in the demonstration. Meta did not apparently say when it plans to give access to this feature to content creators and influencers, but the company is likely to be very careful with the rollout. It is very possible for this technology to be abused and for many to not be able to tell if the words being spoken were actually something the real person said or if it was just an AI-generated answer.