An emerging use for generative A.I. is having an A.I. avatar/clone/replica that serves as an effective double of someone. This has many uses in business, and so will likely become widespread in the coming years across many industries.
The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- An example of this is a real-estate agent who uses an A.I. avatar to create short videos personalized to certain clients. These videos could run down the features of certain homes.
- Another use would be using a digital avatar to create videos running down the details of, say, a new product, or a step-by-step process for assembling or using a product. This can save the company time and resources while also providing potentially helpful content to customers.
- One of the biggest weaknesses, currently, of these gen-A.I. avatars is the cold effectiveness of the delivery. The signs of emoting, vocally and facially, may be there, but the businesslike (and not in a positive sense, here) with which the speech is delivered is a tell-tale sign. It feels almost too effective. Actual human speech, improvised or rehearsed, in most cases has tiny all-too-human flaws. These flaws in a nice way, humanize the speaker and can even make the speech seem more effective.
- Another thing to watch out for is that the A.I. avatars can be over-the-top in miming “natural” human movements. Random chin tilts, neck flexes, and pauses for emphasis, can seem forced and unnatural in these videos.
- A potential downside for businesses that use, or just overuse, this technology is an erosion of trust in the business. If human-to-human contact is not a priority, and personal communications to clients and customers is seen as something to delegate to technology, then that could affect customers’ perception of how a business values them. Who, or what, is hiding behind the avatar?
The Next Step in Creating a Digital “You”
A key aspect of having an online “presence” in the form of a profile or just writing out comments in, say, a blog post, what happens is that you make an object serve as your ambassador in a digital environment.
Profiles, Tweets, pictures, etc. are like the parts of a Transformer assembly that combine to form a manufactured online identity.
In other words, in the digital world we willingly turn ourselves into objects meant to stand in for our real-world selves.
A.I. avatars are a technologically sophisticated next level of this. Like many technological next-innovations, it is something like a stack of chips thrust across a card table to raise the stakes, to see who will play along.
The writer of this blog post is not writing this out for the sake of surreptitiously alleviating any discomforts surrounding this technological development. Nor to suggest that this is anything like a “natural” step in technological evolution, if such a thing could even be said to exist.
Really, what the writer of this blog post wishes to point out is that this emerging technology is not without its technological precedent.
And, really, once the uncanny-valley shock of the uncanny new wears off, or just becomes overfamiliar enough so as to desensitize us, then
Too Effective at Public Speaking?
As mentioned in the third bullet point of the Key Takeaways section above, the problem with the current state of A.I. avatars is that they do not quite capture human speech.
The result in many cases is an A.I. avatar that is just blowing through the words, so that it really feels as if the avatar is merely talking at you, which it is, but still.
What’s more (circling back to Key Takeaway #4, now), is that the at times unnatural-looking imitations of natural human quirks of speech, such as moving your head when emphasizing a point, pairs uncomfortably with the wooden delivery of lines.
The result can be uncomfortable, where the viewers (potential or existing customers) get the sad, strange, feeling that the business is so coldly mercenary that it does not even bother using human-to-human communication in getting the customer to the point of purchase.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
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