Adobe has once again showcased its ability to generate fake content in its ‘Sneaks’ lab project previews as party of the software giant’s Summit event held in Las Vegas last week.
The technology previewed last week was eerily similar to a previous ‘Sneak’ showcased at the company’s 2019 Max conference where 30 seconds of audio of anyone’s voice could be used to say anything the user typed into a prompt. At that time, the backlash from the screening of the technology saw it buried and never released.
In the 2024 instance of the prompt-directed content, not only was the demonstrator (Amir Meisami, a staff machine learning engineer at Adobe) able to generate speech, but video as well.
While Meisami was no doubt innocent in his intentions, the potential for misuse of such technology in the wrong hands is plain for all to see.
During his presentation, Meisami told the audience that it was “absolutely mind-blowing” that by utilising a large language model he could finetune a message so it fits naturally and seamlessly within the context of the original.
He then showed a demonstration of himself being recorded on video which melded his actual speech and video with computer generated versions of himself.
“That was a digital avatar of me presenting to you jet jams credit cards all integrated within a video that is already ready to go. So if you’ve done influencer marketing in the past, which I’m sure many of you have, you already know this process can take weeks to months but now everything from ideation to partnership creation launch and tracking of your campaign can be done within a single platform and in just a few clicks,” he said.
Adobe is acutely aware of the potential destructive power of generative AI and has been a leader in ensuring its development is done so within tight guide rails and has also been leading the burgeoning Content Authenticity Alliance.
Regardless, when it demonstrates its lab experiments such as #ProjectPromoMojo, Adobe is showing that it’s playing around with the faster and looser side of this technology.
Judge for yourself in the below presentation.
