Imagine a superstar watching himself in a hate speech video just before the release of his film. Imagine a politician’s video goes viral showing him using racial slurs and epithets right before an election. Imagine a team of investors watching a CEO confessing the flaws of his product in a video while he is on the road to raise funds for it.

All these are fake, made-up scenarios - fake yet possible. And the credits for that would again go to revolutionary of the era – Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Advancements in AI and cloud computing technologies along with Platform Services and Graphic Processing Units Virtual Machines (GPU VMs) have made possible the sophistication of image, audio, and video manipulation techniques.

Public research AI algorithms, access to commodity cloud computing, data abundance, and availability of diverse media have created a storm to democratize Synthetic Media. This AI-generated synthetic media, also known as deepfakes, can turn fake to real and false to the truth.

It can manipulate media in increasingly believable ways. It can create a copy of a person’s voice, superimpose one person’s face on another’s body, and restage or decontextualize the existing media via puppeteering, lip-synching, and voice cloning.

It is synthetic media that can enable a mother losing her voice to talk to her family. It is synthetic media that can fake a politician’s speech to empty his vote bank. And it is synthetic media that create a fake video of a person to damage his reputation.

However, the deepfakes are not just limited to tricking politicians, defaming celebrities, defrauding businesses, or harassing people. Synthetic media has some serious business cases to invest in the ecosystem:

• Cost-saving and scheduling – Voice cloning via synthetic media can cut down on the time needed to chase busy voice actors. To put it simply, if you have Awkwafina voicing a character in your animated film, you can capture her voice sample and generate the lines.
• Custom regional accents – Rather than selecting just one human character, advertisers could generate hundreds or thousands of synthetic characters to appeal to narrow demographic bases. This means, instead of having one celebrity extol the virtues of a toothpaste, different characters can appeal separately to college-going teens, stay-at-home dads, and potential trendsetters.
• Reaching people in their language – Using AI synthesis, one can create David Beckham's video about malaria in Gujarati or Jackie Chan’s video about wearing a mask in Tamil. This can create an opportunity for advertisers to reach out to people in their own languages.
• Archiving people around – Advancements in synthetic media can also let us preserve ourselves as well as our loved ones. You might be able to ask questions to a 5-year old you or listen to your grandmother sing long after she’s gone.

A glimpse of this has already stolen the limelight this Diwali – Cadbury’s ad campaign featuring the Badshah of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan. It was not just a Cadbury ad, instead, it let local stores create an ad for their shops featuring Shah Rukh Khan for free. The store owners can now use the face and voice of King Khan to promote their brand without spending a single penny.

And this was made possible by the magical powers of AI and ML. Yes, it was AI that recreated Khan’s face and voice in a way that it sounds like the actor is saying the local store or brand's name.

The AI-generated synthetic media is taking us to a new and very complicated field of intellectual property rights. Though there are several ethical and legal concerns regarding its use, we must accept that it has entered us into a new era of AI-driven advertisements.