A TECH billionaire has unveiled a hyper-realistic AI clone that can speak every language – including alien ones – and even picks at its virtual nose.
The resemblance is uncanny – can you spot the difference?
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Billionaire Reid Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn, built a custom GPT trained on 20 years worth of his books, speeches, interviews and podcasts.
With all of this data, the AI model is able to mimic Hoffman’s speech patterns and physical mannerisms, such as hand gestures and looking upward while ‘thinking’.
I’m not above being lazy, having you do work instead of me means that I can go and have fun and do other things.
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder
The clone, called Reid AI, uses both speech and video deepfake technology – the same kind that can be manipulated by hackers.
Reid AI is able to condense a 333-page book into a single sentence for four different types of people: the smartest person in the world, a five-year-old, Star Trek fans and Seinfeld fans.
For Star Trek fans, Reid AI was able to summarise the book in Klingon, a fictional alien language in the franchise universe, in what Hoffman described as a real “superpower”.
Hoffman has likened the dawn of AI to Europe’s industrial revolution beginning in 1760, calling it the “steam engine of the mind”.
The grand hope for AI is for it to relieve tough, and potentially life-threatening, duties off humans.
For Hoffman, a digital twin means he can take a step back from some of his responsibilities and have some fun.
“I’m not above being lazy, having you do work instead of me means that I can go and have fun and do other things,” he tells Reid AI in the interview.
“But actually the more serious, interesting and deep thing is it adds to the range of capabilities, things that I can do.”
These new abilities, Hoffman speaks of, include being able to communicate in Klingon – as well as other languages – and write poetry.
It also means the businessman can offload tasks onto his AI clone that he “wouldn’t have had the time for”.
Onlookers on X (formerly Twitter) have called uncanny deepfake “insane” and say it was “only a matter of time” before someone conducted this type of experiment.
Artificial Intelligence explained
Here’s what you need to know
- Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is a type of computer software
- Typically, a computer will do what you tell it to do
- But artificial intelligence simulates the human mind, and can make its own deductions, inferences or decisions
- A simple computer might let you set an alarm to wake you up
- But an AI system might scan your emails, work out that you’ve got a meeting tomorrow, and then set an alarm and plan a journey for you
- AI tech is often “trained” – which means it observes something (potentially even a human) then learns about a task over time
- For instance, an AI system can be fed thousands of photos of human faces, then generate photos of human faces all on its own
- Some experts have raised concerns that humans will eventually lose control of super-intelligent AI
- But the tech world is still divided over whether or not AI tech will eventually kill us all in a Terminator-style apocalypse
DEEPFAKE FEARS
Hoffman partnered with generative AI video company Hour One and AI audio startup 11ElevenLabs to build Reid AI.
11ElevenLabs is reportedly the product that was picked up by scammers to create deepfake robocalls of US President Joe Biden earlier this year.
Fears over deepfake has escalated this year, as 2024 is considered a record year for leadership elections worldwide.
A former White House Information Officer warned at the beginning of the year that the chilling rise of deepfakes and AI-created content will be used as propaganda ahead of the US election.
A month before the UK’s General Election in 2019, a deepfake video of Jeremy Corbyn backing rival Boris Johnson went viral online.
Hoffman skirts around the obvious ethical concerns surrounding deepfakes and digital twins in his interview.
He reckons that, despite fears, ‘we’ should continue strides in developing the eerie technology – and the regulations around it.
“It’s very important that we set the rules of the road with digital twins,” he said to Reid AI, adding that “in this case it’s easy, because we’re doing this collaboratively.
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“Now obviously, it’s easy enough to create a digital twin that has me saying things that I don’t believe, I don’t agree with, and those things can happen with this.
“Everyone starts with a negative and doesn’t realise all the things that are positive, [like] the ability to make more human connections using it.”
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