Creativity Squared: On Trust & A.I.-Created Avatars

Dear Creativity Squared Member,

Do people trust A.I.-created hyper-realistic avatars? Discover what the data reveals in the first study of its kind!

Soon to-be Dr. Jill Schiefelbein is the Chief Experience Officer and a Partner at Render, a Creativity Squared partner and sponsor that’s a start-up specializing in creating hyper-realistic avatars, including mine. Jill is also a leading researcher on these types of photo-realistic avatars.

As of December 2023, Jill will have defended her doctoral dissertation, which is the first study of its kind that focuses on the effectiveness, engagement, and trust of hyper-realistic avatars – with both subjective and objective participant data.

What does the research data reveal? Today, you’re getting the first glimpse of her findings in Episode 18 on Creativity Squared.

You’ll not only discover how avatars reach and resonate with viewers, but also how Jill consults businesses to understand, utilize, and leverage synthetic media through added personalization, customization, and choice. Geek out with us about the history of avatars, the synthetic media industry landscape and business use cases, and how this new medium is democratizing video creation and helping us to become more human.

Listen to what Jill reveals now.

🙋‍♀️ Want your own custom synthetic avatar? Creativity Squared is collaborating with our partner and sponsor Render to bring their avatar experience to Cincinnati, OH, on October 25 and 26, so anyone can digitally clone themselves. If you’re interested, sign up here.

We’re coming up on the Labor Day holiday weekend in the states, and wishing everyone a wonderful end of summer wherever you are. I’ll also be at Ars Electronica, one of the largest festivals of art, technology, and society, and excited to share with you what I learn there. If you haven’t listened to it already, check out Ep11. Truth, A.I. & Reality: Investigate Truth & Ambiguity through Art with Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director of Ars Electronica.

Scroll on to discover:

• 🎧 More on Episode 18

• 🤯 A.I. + Creativity News Roundup

• 🎨 All Art is Representation, and Why It Matters: An Exploration of the Convergence of Art and Human Consciousness

• 👯‍♀️ Digitally Clone Yourself!

• 💎 Creativity Squared Premium Member Benefits

• 💝 Milestone Rewards

We’re just getting started, and if you enjoy our content, I’d really appreciate it if you could share, review, like, subscribe, leave a comment, and help spread the word about Creativity Squared in whatever way you’re willing to. Your support is greatly appreciated, and the whole team looks forward to growing with your help. Thank you!

Here's to exponential possibilities!

Helen

Also Noteworthy:

🙋‍♀️ Want your own custom synthetic avatar? Creativity Squared is collaborating with our partner and sponsor Render to bring their avatar experience to Cincinnati, OH, on October 25 and 26, so anyone can digitally clone themselves. If you’re interested in this, sign up here.

🐝 We use Beehiiv for this newsletter and Riverside for recording podcast episodes, and recommend them!

🗓 The ArtsWave Truth and Healing Artist visual gallery will be at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati through September 10. As a proud partner, we interviewed all of the artists, and are excited to share the first batch of conversations released — check them out here.

🎨 I want to live in a world where artists not only coexist with A.I., but thrive. And because it’s important to support artists, 10% of all revenue Creativity Squared generates goes to ArtsWave, a nationally recognized non-profit that supports over 150 arts organizations, projects, and independent artists. Consider becoming a Premium Member today! 

🚀 Interested in becoming a sponsor of Creativity Squared? Reach out!

Helen Todd (she/her)
Human behind Creativity Squared
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CreativitySquared.com
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How creatives are collaborating with A.I.

Listen: E18. Jill Schiefelbein: Do People Trust A.I.-Created Avatars?
Discover what the Data Reveals in the First Study of Its Kind on Hyper-Realistic Avatars

Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Stitcher | Pandora | Amazon | Google | SoundCloud | iHeart Radio

Jill Schiefelbein is an early tech adopter and thrives at the intersections of communication, education, and technology. As a University faculty-turned-entrepreneur, she’s an award-winning business owner, author, and recovering academic. She taught at Arizona State University for 11 years, analyzed terrorist documents to provide counter-terrorism messaging strategies to the military, and was a pioneer in digital education. Jill helps organizations navigate physical, digital, and technological communication spaces to attract customers, increase sales, and retain clients.

In today’s episode, you’ll not only discover how avatars reach and resonate with viewers, but also how Jill consults businesses to understand, utilize, and leverage synthetic media through added personalization, customization, and choice. Geek out with us about the history of avatars, the synthetic media industry landscape and business use cases, and how this new medium is democratizing video creation and helping us to become more human.

🙋‍♀️ Want your own custom synthetic avatar? Creativity Squared is collaborating with our partner and sponsor Render to bring their avatar experience to Cincinnati, OH, on October 25 and 26, so anyone can digitally clone themselves. If you’re interested, sign up here.

Your A.I. + Creativity News Roundup

With all of the A.I. news flooding our feeds and screens, we’ve got you covered. News to check out includes:

• Behind the AI boom, an army of workers in ‘digital sweatshops’ The Washington Post — In the effort to enrich the data fueling A.I. growth, The Post says that “companies producing AI technology are also charting a new frontier in labor exploitation.” The article profiles workers in the Philippines who work for cents a day to annotate images and text used to train A.I. models. Their employer, Scale AI, serves clients including Microsoft and OpenAI. One of Scale AI’s competitors, Sama, has been accused of similarly exploiting workers in Kenya.

• AI could choke on its own exhaust as it fills the web Axios — A.I.-generated content could account for as much as 90% of the information on the internet within a few years, according to experts. Yet the proliferation of such content threatens to worsen the quality of the A.I. models themselves. If models are trained on content produced by other A.I. models, it can create a negative feedback loop. Researchers refer to the incestual self-pollination of A.I. models as ‘model collapse’ or ‘Habsburg A.I.’

• OpenAI Wants Its New ChatGPT to Be Your 'AI Assistant for Work' CNET — A faster, unlimited version of ChatGPT is now available for companies. Around 90% of companies are already using generative A.I. in some capacity, but the new enterprise edition of ChatGPT promises to be the ultimate work assistant. ChatGPT Enterprise will offer enhanced security, advanced data analysis functions, new abilities to input longer prompts, and include a range of customization options. It will also give businesses access to GPT-4, the latest version of the company's AI technology.

• Microsoft Infuses AI With Human-Like Reasoning Via an “Algorithm of Thoughts” Decrypt — Microsoft says that A.I. models trained through its new method will be able to solve problems more intuitively. The company says that their new framework combines humans’ ability to make nonlinear connections with an algorithm’s ability to quickly explore, filter, and organize information. The new framework is reportedly more efficient and less resource-intensive than precursor frameworks such as ‘Chain of Thoughts.’

• Market Research: The AI Boom Expands to the Hair and Makeup Counter The Information — Technology that scans your body and develops a fully custom skincare routine is one of the novel ways that the beauty industry is experimenting with artificial intelligence. An early tester of the tech told The Information that the success of the treatment felt like “stepping into the future.”

• OpenAI Passes $1 Billion Revenue Pace as Companies Boost AI Spending The Information — The company that kicked off the era of A.I., initially as a non-profit research institution, is now on track to surpass $1 billion in revenue by 2025 as a very much for-profit tech player. It’s hard to imagine that OpenAI would be here if not for the fact that ChatGPT is closed-source software that enables the company to essentially name its price. Open-source vs closed-source distribution of A.I. technology is still a topic of debate, but OpenAI’s financial success will make it hard for newer companies to ignore the profit potential of closed-source software that the public can’t scrutinize.

• Americans growing anxious as AI adoption expands, Pew Research finds Engadget — Over half of Americans are more concerned than excited about the rise of artificial intelligence. Survey results released this week show that concern is growing among the public, with 14 percent more respondents putting themselves in the anxious category now compared to nine months ago. It seems that Americans grow more wary of A.I. as they learn more about it, as the survey shows that both awareness of and concern about A.I. have grown in tandem since January.

• OpenAI disputes authors’ claims that every ChatGPT response is a derivative work Ars Technica — In their responses to a pair of class action lawsuits, OpenAI tries to claim that their use of artists’ work to train ChatGPT is not copyright infringement. Authors including Sarah Silverman are suing OpenAI, claiming that all responses from ChatGPT are derived from the work used to train the model – their work. OpenAI is moving for dismissal of most charges, arguing that their goal is to teach ChatGPT how to create its own works based on inspiration from what its been fed, not to create a Chatbot that blatantly plagiarizes any particular artist for profit.

All Art is Representation, and Why It Matters:
An Exploration of the Convergence of Art and Human Consciousness

The creative arts are a collection of processes, practices, or methodologies that produce artworks (objects, performances, literature, etc.) that have a physical, spatial-temporal reality — they exist in the “real world” and are therefore accessible through the senses. The impression created by a work of art is not merely physical; it is often augmented with a measure of intuition, inspiration, and insight on the part of the beholder that enhances and deepens what is, in effect, an interactive emotional experience. The creation of art is often compelled by a personal drive or desire on the part of the artist to convey a message, a complex of emotions, or symbolism that provides an interpretive experience for potential viewers, an audience, or future perceivers yet unknown. Art stimulates the imagination and emotions and may provide a way for those who interact with an artwork to experience elements of the consciousness, mental state, time, and place of the artist(s) that created it. In other words, art is fundamentally a physical representation of the artist’s reality or lived experience, and it also embodies the artist’s overt or implicit desire to create mementos of their individual or cultural existence, works that transcend one’s inevitable demise.

Continue reading this blog post now.

Sign Up: Digitally Clone Yourself
Now There Can be Two of You!

👯‍♀️ In case you missed the announcement, I’ve digitally cloned myself! There are less than a thousand known custom synthetic avatars in existence. Learn all about mine in episode E14. Not Deepfaked! I Cloned Myself. You’ll meet Helen 2.ODD, my digital double, and discover why and how I made my A.I.-created custom synthetic avatar.

🙋‍♀️ Want your own custom synthetic avatar? Creativity Squared is collaborating with our partner and sponsor Render to bring their avatar experience to Cincinnati, OH, on October 25 and 26, so anyone can digitally clone themselves. If you’re interested, sign up here.

Thank You to Render

Creativity Squared is supported by Render which provides Digital Likeness solutions for personal brand businesses, thought leaders, influencers, and business leaders who want to leverage their synthetic, A.I.-powered Likeness to communicate more effectively online and create audio and video content from anywhere without going on camera. Learn more by visiting: https://rendermedia.ai.

Interested in partnering with Creativity Squared? Reach out!

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