People hire faces to be deepfake style marketing clones

Liri can juggle so many jobs in different countries that she has hired a face with Hour One, a startup that uses similarities to people to create AI-voiced characters that later appear in marketing and educational videos for organizations around the world. The company is part of a wave reviewing the way digital content is produced. And it has big implications human work team.

Liri does her server and bar work live, but has little idea what her digital clones are all about. “It’s definitely weird to think that my face can appear in videos or commercials for different companies,” he says.

Hour One is not the only company takes the main technology of deepfake, using it to create mash-ups of real footage and AI-created videos. Some have used professional actors for this add to people with a deep life. But Hour One doesn’t require any special skills. You need to be willing to give up your facial rights.

Encouraged character

Hour One is building a set he calls “characters”. He says he has about 100 books so far, with more being added weekly. “We have a queue of people dying to become these characters,” says Natalie Monbiot, the company’s head of strategy.

Anyone can apply to be a character. Like a modeling agency, Hour One filters among applicants, selecting the books it wants. Monbiot says the company aims for a broad sample of characters that reflect the ages, genders, and racial backgrounds of people in the real world. (Today, about 80% of the characters are under the age of 50, 70% are female, and 25% are white.)

To create a character, Hour One uses a high-resolution 4K camera to speak in front of a green screen and shoot a person who makes different facial expressions. And that’s a human part of the show. By connecting the resulting data to AI software that works similarly to deepfake technology, Hour One can create a final footage of what it says all it wants in any language.

Hour One customers pay the company to use their characters in promotions or commercial videos. They select a face, upload the text they mean, and translate a video that looks like a real person delivering the script to a camera. The fastest service uses text-to-speech software to create synthetic voices, synchronized with the characters ’mouth movements and facial expressions. Hour One offers a premium service where audio is recorded by professional voice actors. These voices are again adapted to the movements of the character in the video. Hour One says it has more than 40 customers, including real estate, e-commerce, digital health and entertainment companies. A major client is Berlitz, an international language school that offers teacher-led video courses in dozens of languages.

According to Monbiot, Berlitz wanted to increase the number of videos he offered, but he tried to use real human actors. Again and again they had to have production teams to create the same setup with the same actor, he says, “They thought it was really unbearable. We’re talking about thousands of videos.”

Berlitz is now working with Hour One to create hundreds of videos in minutes. “We’re replacing the studio,” Monbiot says. “A human being should not waste time shooting.”