The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Article
- TikTok recently announced TikTok Symphony, a creative suite of A.I. tools.
- One of the standout features is Symphony Digital Avatars, which allows for brands to create content using generative A.I. avatars of real people.
- There are two categories to Symphony Digital Avatars, the Stock Avatars and the Custom Avatars.
- Stock Avatars are made from real, professional actors who have licensed, well, themselves for commercial use.
- Custom Avatars allows brands to create their own avatars that are made to look like a potential creator, such as an existing company spokesperson.
Bringing A.I. to Influencer Content
If you skipped the key takeaways section above, this writer recommends that you peruse it. But regardless, here is the main point: TikTok is rolling out a suite of A.I. services (TikTok Symphony) that involves bringing influencer marketing to a new level.
These services have a lot to offer brands, but it is the influencer one that is a real standout feature.
The Generative A.I. Avatars Are of Real People
So one of the things that we need to emphasize here is that the generative A.I. avatars are not like those weird face-mixtures that approximate to “somebody, but really nobody”. Meaning, those A.I.-generated people that do not really correspond to anyone with a real-world identity. An identity-less cipher without any known real-life counterpart.
Now, if your business already has a sponsored-content partnership with an influencer, then you can simply leverage that existing partnership to now include A.I.-generated content with that influencer. Think of it as like a cross between a Name, Image, Likeness deal with a generative A.I. platform.
It gives one (at least this one writer of the blog you are currently reading) cause to wonder, really, whether the Custom Avatars thing was TikTok’s way of not trying to alienate existing influencers. Influencers who, for several reasons but principally monetary, would like to keep the money flowing in from such partnerships. After all, some influencers do their influencing as a career, rather than some before- or after-work thing.
The other option is Stock Avatars, which are based on real-life professional actors who lent their name, image, and likeness to appear in A.I.-generated branded content where their Stock Avatar will, you know, sell vacuum cleaners and stuff like that. That’s one way to get famous, this writer supposes.
The use of real professional actors here is another wise decision, business-wise. That is because claiming to take jobs away from real-life influencers and professional actors strikes this writer as an almost too-obvious public response that would have come up pretty early in a TikTok board meeting about this technology.
Multilingual Capabilities with Symphony Dubbing
One of the benefits here is that it can widen the reach of your branded content. A way this can be done is making use of the multilingual feature that allows avatars to speak in multiple languages.
Those languages include:
- English
- Spanish
- German
- Vietnamese
- Portuguese
- Thai
- Japanese
- Bahasa
- Indonesian
- Chinese
And more language options will be available down the line.
But if no one at your company actually speaks any of those languages, then maybe think twice about that feature.
Or just consider certain consequences implied by the decision.
Because, you know, if you get a customer-service call or email or DM in, like, Portuguese, what will be your plan of action besides a frantic Google Translate referral?
So How Does It Work?
Beyond the multilingual dubbing we mentioned above, brands have quite a bit of control as to what goes into the sponsored content.
For instance, you can place the influencer in a kitchen setting if you are trying to sell e.g. a new kind of potato-peeler.
And of course you get to choose the script. Plus, choose from music to accentuate the Custom or Stock Avatar’s dialogue.
You can even add stickers to the content to make it even more eye-catching.
Also, it is important for brands to realize that TikTok will go ahead and label your A.I. Avatar content as being A.I.-generated.
Okay, But Does It Work Well?
“Well”, here, meaning do the Avatars seem natural and convincing.
That remains to be seen.
In the promo video for the service that TikTok released, the avatars seem to sort of creepily mimic what this writer will term the “TikTok address”, which if you have watched enough of the kind of TikTok videos with a close-up selfie you will know what this consists of: wide eyes that wait just a little too long to blink, middle-school-theatre-meets-infomercial delivery, a strainingly earnest face, a (usually) faux—in that each vid almost always betrays a meticulousness making-of right down to a sensed rehearsal of speech—off-the-cuff just-wanted-to-record-this-real-quick vibe reflected in both performance and costume and sometimes makeup and set design (a classic example, the car-seat selfie vid, is in the promo), to name just a few hallmarks the Avatars algorithm(s) doubtless picked up on during the training phase.
So, in other words, it makes the familiar seem a little strange and uncanny, in this writer’s opinion. Do not be surprised if some of the content ends up looking awkward and off-brand (for your brand).
That being said, we are just in the early stages of this feature for TikTok, and if the A.I. development of Silicon Valley is any indication, this stuff is just going to keep getting better and better.
But another problem is that if A.I. content is flagged, or if the A.I. Avatars just become (in)famous on the app, you may see people tuning out of it, or only engaging with it to maybe mock or criticize it.
Just a possibility, because the reality is that most people in the public are really quite split over what areas of their lives they wish A.I. to be a part of, and which parts they would prefer not to see A.I. in.
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