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“When we’re playing a game, we adopt a certain persona or personality, when we’re coaching our kids’ football team we adopt another persona, we have a different personality when we’re at the pub having a beer with our mates,” Cross explains. “As human beings, we’re always adjusting our persona and the role we have within those parameters.
With digital people, we can create those constructs.”
Right now, Soul Machines mostly makes digital people for customer service and public outreach, but they’ve also worked with will.i.am and Carmelo Anthony; in will.i.am’s short promotional video for his digital twin, the Black Eyed Peas rapper observes a pimple that Soul Machines replicated on his face.
> The company has digital people repping the World Health Organization, Maryville University, Westpac bank, the New Zealand police, and SK-II skincare. Ruth is a digital baking coach who works for Nestle. The company has been doing this for years, starting with BabyX in 2013 — a prototype AI that remains the core of its research arm. Cross’ co-founder is engineer Mark Sagar, who had an Oscar-winning digital effects career in Hollywood (including a stint at Weta Workshop) before returning to the University of Auckland to create BabyX, which is modeled after his daughter.
There are naturally other players in the digital person industry, like the AI Foundation (AIF) which also boasts a mixed team of scientists and entertainment veterans, including AI-driven game creator Lars Buttler (Trion Worlds), visual effects artist Rami Hachache (creator of fake Quibi celebrity Kirby Jenner), and Hollywood executive Joe Drake from Lionsgate. AIF’s website offers even less insight into the nuts and bolts of their tech, aside from a similar general message about “bringing the potential of AI to everyone.”
[. . .] At the moment its digital people still require guidance from a human “trainer.” Soul Machines’ end goal is to teach a digital person how to make goal-based (and one day, value-based) decisions, which is still a long way off.
“At some point in the future,’ says Cross, “you might be able to create a digital version of yourself or multiple versions of yourself, and they can go out and do stuff, make money for you, make money for your company, while you’re doing something else that’s a whole lot more fun.”
My first thought is that this is going to be an absolute field day for MMORPG botters farming for resources. But Cross goes on to suggest using a digital person to play a game like Call of Duty. “Those types of digital people are what we call human-enabled or human-driven digital people, they’re mimicking — they’re under the instruction of real people,” he explains. . .
[. . .]. “It doesn’t matter how well animated the ‘digital person’ is, how high their resolution is, or how well-programmed they are to provide ‘individual attention,’ they are unable to replace human teachers who have a monopoly on knowing how to be human — now and in the foreseeable future,” Kelly explains, pointing out the dangers of having a for-profit company, working with governments, to determine the shape of entire education systems.
[. . .]
This new digital workforce would also operate under a specific set of conditions. “When we create a digital brand representative for a big enterprise, of course, they’re not going to have the ability to express negative emotions,” Cross explains. “We’re expected to behave in a way that is consistent with the values of that particular role.” It’s a troubling standard when you consider how Big Tech dehumanizes its workers today, with Amazon leading the pack. While digital humans don’t need rest (or basic compassion), a corporate “positive vibes only” mandate means changing the way we perceive and interact with “customer service” even as it wears a human face.
“People are more aware of what data is getting captured and how it’s getting captured and how it’s getting used,” Cross says when I ask him about ethics of metaverse construction, especially in the wake of an era when Google once bore the slogan “don’t be evil.” “Every wave of new technology has been used to make a huge difference in the world, in terms of productivity, democratization, our ability to travel... technology has always been used by most of us to do incredibly good things and by a few of us to do the things that aren’t very nice or simply plain evil. That is a reflection of the human condition.”
It’s an interesting ideal to hold up in an age where Facebook is being rightfully pilloried as an “indisputable” source of harm to its millions of users, especially when you consider its origins as a glorified “hot or not” for Mark Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard students.
> Over at The Atlantic, Ian Bogost points out that tech-driven metaverse buildup is very much “a fantasy of power and control” that twists and romanticizes a sci-fi concept into an equally twisted escape route for billionaires who don’t need to contend with the reality of their capitalist legacies.
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