Startup 'ObEN' Is Betting the Future On Personal AI Avatars (gizmodo.com) 39
merbs shares an excerpt from a Gizmodo report: In January 2019, when China Central Television, the largest broadcast network in the most populous nation in the world, aired a special to celebrate the Lunar New Year, the hosts welcomed four life-sized "personal artificial intelligences" to share the stage with them. Called PAIs, they were three-dimensional holographic replicas of the presenters that moved, spoke, and sang to the delight of the cheering live audience. The program was viewed some 1.8 billion times. One of the most-watched TV shows in the world had been hosted by AI avatars. The company behind those avatars is the Pasadena-based ObEN. This startup, with its 100 plus employees, is betting that in the future, everyone will want their own PAIs -- to digitally try on clothes, to interact with friends, to keep the kids company while you're away on a business trip. In that future, celebrities will create PAIs to interact with fans to promote their latest films and albums. Teachers and doctors will have PAIs that offer personalized services to their students and patients. When you go to the mall, PAIs will pop up on the interactive screens there, enticing you to buy stuff.
ObEN describes its ambitious vision of the future as "personal AI for all." And ObEN is far from alone, of course. Investors, tech giants, and even governments are betting big on lifelike digital avatars -- between Facebook's push to port your likeness into VR, the eerily lifelike AI news anchors put on the air by Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, and the burgeoning CGI celebrity simulacra scene in Hollywood, there's a newfangled interest in the (potentially vastly profitable) art of porting people's digital likeness to our screens. Cyberculture has revolved around avatars for decades, but the avi-to-avi future pursued by ObEN and others promise a level of representation saturation hitherto unimagined by even the most fervent cyberpunks. Would a world filled with PAIs really beget more convenience and entertainment? Or would it further accelerate already ascendent trendlines of the crowding and hyper-commercialization of our digital spaces? To better understand this new frontier of companion AI, and both its utopian and dystopian implications, I headed to Pasadena, to ObEN's HQ, to become the first non-celebrity civilian to get my own PAI.
ObEN describes its ambitious vision of the future as "personal AI for all." And ObEN is far from alone, of course. Investors, tech giants, and even governments are betting big on lifelike digital avatars -- between Facebook's push to port your likeness into VR, the eerily lifelike AI news anchors put on the air by Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, and the burgeoning CGI celebrity simulacra scene in Hollywood, there's a newfangled interest in the (potentially vastly profitable) art of porting people's digital likeness to our screens. Cyberculture has revolved around avatars for decades, but the avi-to-avi future pursued by ObEN and others promise a level of representation saturation hitherto unimagined by even the most fervent cyberpunks. Would a world filled with PAIs really beget more convenience and entertainment? Or would it further accelerate already ascendent trendlines of the crowding and hyper-commercialization of our digital spaces? To better understand this new frontier of companion AI, and both its utopian and dystopian implications, I headed to Pasadena, to ObEN's HQ, to become the first non-celebrity civilian to get my own PAI.
If we can have the perfect personal AIs.... (Score:1)
What do we need celebrities for?
Or companies?
Or even other people?
This is a dangerous path we are treading down, and having one company monopolizing it will end up as well as Google, Microsoft, or Facebook did.
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If we can have the perfect personal AIs, What do we need celebrities for?
Dang, I didn't want it and thought it was useless, but now you made me want it.
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Re: If we can have the perfect personal AIs.... (Score:2)
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They cannot deliver. At this time, it is completely unclear whether AI that deserves the name is even possible. At best, they can create some mindless chatterbot.
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Reminds me of the movie "Looker". A tech company was able to make perfect digital doppelgangers of a model or actress to use in movies and TV. Then they would kill off the actual person so they didn't have to pay royalties to that person.
Nightmare fuel Clippy+Chucky? (Score:1)
That is how that sounds.
Let me guess (Score:2)
One of them was called Simone?
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Or S1M0NE because some stupid hipster thought "leet" speak was rad. /s
Holographic displays (Score:2)
The future is Pirate AI Avatars (Score:2)
Soon the Space Pirates will roam the digital multiverse, stealing people's AI avatars and selling them on the high digital seas, whilst the Imperial Lesser British Space Navy will dragoon poor innocent AI avatars on digital islands and press them into service (really slavery too) to fight them.
Avast, maties!
Thar be digital treasure out there!
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There can only be treasure to the degree that we invest in this stuff.
It shouldn't be hard to opt out.
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that's where the piracy comes in, matie!
We wait off shore until the landlubber AIs think they're all nice and cozy in their virtual beds, and then we do a sneak attack past their virtual defenses!
Let me make this universal (Score:4, Insightful)
Startup XXX is hitching a ride on a fashionable idea YYY, making extensive and grandiose claims in order to secure the most funding from more easily impressed investors (or government agencies, as the case may be), to be divvied up between its founders before it disappears into the blue.
missed it (Score:1)
When did we master 3D holograms?
Something is fishy
As soon as it can past a Turing test... (Score:3)
As soon as it can pass a Turing test I'm in. Doesn't have to pass forever. Or even really pass. How about intelligently carry on a conversation that lasts more than three sentences. Because I have interacted with the best AI bots around, ones that are hailed as the next best thing in AI, an they've got nothing. Eliza, over fifty years ago, carried on better conversations than the best we have to offer today.
At first, but then..... (Score:2)
When you go to the mall, PAIs will pop up on the interactive screens there, enticing you to buy stuff.
Wow, somehow they made me want it even less than I wanted it originally.
I Guess "AI Avatars" is the next buzzword (Score:3)
Does this AI run on my server or theirs? (Score:2)
My favorite quote from Harry Potter: Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.
why live your life... (Score:3)
"...everyone will want their own PAIs to try on clothes, to interact with friends, to keep the kids company..."
why live your life, when you can have a PAI do it for you!
"In that future, celebrities will create PAIs to interact with fans to promote their latest films and albums"
Ah well, why not just only have a PAI then, what is the point of there being a real person anyway?
"When you go to the mall, PAIs will pop up on the interactive screens there, enticing you to buy stuff."
can't wait for this future to happen! just what i always wanted!
Dumb shit (Score:2)
Thanks. (Score:2)
But no, thanks.
Filing under: shit I can live without.