Synthetic media

)[9][10] Significant attention arose towards the field of synthetic media starting in 2017 when Motherboard reported on the emergence of AI altered pornographic videos to insert the faces of famous actresses.

[11] Synthetic media as a process of automated art dates back to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, where inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria designed machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music.

[14][15] The tradition of automaton-based entertainment flourished throughout history, with mechanical beings' seemingly magical ability to mimic human creativity often drawing crowds throughout Europe,[16] China,[17] India,[18] and so on.

Initial experiments in AI-generated art included the Illiac Suite, a 1957 composition for string quartet which is generally agreed to be the first score composed by an electronic computer.

[21] Lejaren Hiller, in collaboration with Leonard Issacson, programmed the ILLIAC I computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (where both composers were professors) to generate compositional material for his String Quartet No.

[40] Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their uses in celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud.

[47] In December 2017, Samantha Cole published an article about r/deepfakes in Vice that drew the first mainstream attention to deepfakes being shared in online communities.

[51] Non-pornographic deepfake content continues to grow in popularity with videos from YouTube creators such as Ctrl Shift Face and Shamook.

In the emerging world of synthetic media, the work of digital-image creation—once the domain of highly skilled programmers and Hollywood special-effects artists—could be automated by expert systems capable of producing realism on a vast scale.

[55] One subfield of this includes human image synthesis, which is the use of neural networks to make believable and even photorealistic renditions[56][57] of human-likenesses, moving or still.

Artists can tweak settings like guidance scale (which balances creativity and accuracy), seed (to control randomness), and upscalers (to enhance image resolution), among others.

Additional influence can be exerted during pre-inference by means of noise manipulation, while traditional post-processing techniques are frequently used post-inference.

Several companies have released apps and websites that allow one to forego all the options mentioned entirely while solely focusing on the positive prompt.

[76] Some projects offer real-time generations of synthetic speech using deep learning, such as 15.ai, a web application text-to-speech tool developed by an MIT research scientist.

[77][78][79][80] Natural-language generation (NLG, sometimes synonymous with text synthesis) is a software process that transforms structured data into natural language.

[81] GPT2 is a transformer, a deep machine learning model introduced in 2017 used primarily in the field of natural language processing (NLP).

[93] The US Congress held a senate meeting discussing the widespread impacts of synthetic media, including deepfakes, describing it as having the "potential to be used to undermine national security, erode public trust in our democracy and other nefarious reasons.

[95] The case raised concerns about the lack of encryption methods over telephones as well as the unconditional trust often given to voice and to media in general.

[101] Citron (2019) further states, “religious institutions are an obvious target, as are politically engaged entities ranging from Planned Parenthood to the NRA.

[102]” The author anticipate that deep fakes will deepen and extend the social hierarchy or class differences which gave rise to them in the first place.

[104] A recent study shows that two out three cyber security professionals noticed that deepfakes used as part of disinformation against business in 2022 which is apparently 13% increase in number from the previous year.

[105] Synthetic media techniques involve generating, manipulating, and altering data to emulate creative processes on a much faster and more accurate scale.

[106] As a result, the potential uses are as wide as human creativity itself, ranging from revolutionizing the entertainment industry to accelerating the research and production of academia.

The initial application has been to synchronize lip-movements to increase the engagement of normal dubbing[107] that is growing fast with the rise of OTTs.

[112][113] Deep reinforcement learning-based natural-language generators could potentially be used to create advanced chatbots that could imitate natural human speech.

[132] Through the use of artificial intelligence, old bands and artists may be "revived" to release new material without pause, which may even include "live" concerts and promotional images.

Conversely, the existence of synthetic media will be used to discredit factual news sources and scientific facts as "potentially fabricated.