An AI expert who has made David Beckham speak nine languages claims people will be able to make a Hollywood movie from ‘behind your desk’ within three years.
Victor Riparbelli, 32, is co-founder of the company Synthesia which uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike human faces and speech that are almost indistinguishable from real video.
The young entrepreneur provides high-quality, low-cost films aimed at corporate clients for training, marketing and communications.
Synthesia’s technology has been used for adverts such as making David Beckham speak nine languages to raise awareness of malaria.
A screenshot of a malaria campaign using an AI of David Beckham who spoke in nine different languages
The company also made a virtual sports journalist for Reuters who reads out match summaries in a video
Victor Riparbelli (pictured) is co-founder of the company Synthesia which uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike human faces and speech
It also repurposed Snoop Dogg‘s Just Eat advert to make the rapper say ‘Menulog’, which is the name of the company in Australia.
The company also made a virtual sports journalist for Reuters who reads out match summaries in a video, using photography and reports. It requires no scripting, editing or production.
The AI journalist is modelled on Ossian Shine, the Reuters’ global sports editor.
Speaking to The Times, Mr Riparbelli said: ‘These technologies are going to get better and better.
Mr Riparbelli said: ‘It is so important to think about safety from day one.’ (Pictured, Victor Riparbell on Centre Stage during day two of Web Summit 2019 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon)
‘They’re still far from being able to produce a Spielberg film, but they’ll get good enough that at some point, all the world’s YouTube creators who today are limited to filming themselves, talking to the camera, making a prank video outside, they’re going to be able to get way better tools for storytelling.
‘In three years, you’re going to be able to produce a Hollywood film from behind your desk without really anything else, just your imagination.’
But Hollywood unions representing writers and actors have recently led long strikes over studios’ use of AI and the potential impact on jobs.
‘I don’t think that we’re going to move into a world where everything is just going to be completely AI-generated content,’ Mr Riparbelli continued, ‘I think we’ll value real human content more. People are not going to want to watch just super-crappy movies made with AI, just because they’re made with AI.’
There are also well-founded fears about deepfakes and misinformation.
Mr Riparbelli and his co-founders initially funded the company through money invested in cryptocurrencies. (Mr Riparbelli during a Bloomberg Television interview in London)
Deepfakes are AI-generated media that mimic human voices, images, and videos that can be mistaken as real
Earlier this year, more than 400 AI experts, celebrities, politicians, and activists signed an open letter demanding lawmakers to take action against deepfake technology.
The letter argued that the growing number of AI-generated videos are a threat to society due to the involvement of sexual images, child pornography, fraud, and political disinformation.
Deepfakes are AI-generated media that mimic human voices, images, and videos that can be mistaken as real.
Mr Riparbelli said: ‘It is so important to think about safety from day one.
‘We have a very ethical framework that we take very seriously. But there’s also an element of, like, no truly transformative technology has not gone through that.
‘Eighty years ago radio novellas was the thing parents were very scared about, teenagers being in their rooms, listening to the radio, listening to stupid content.
‘When I was young, I remember playing video games. The fear was if you play too many of these video games, you’re going to end up like a school shooter or a criminal.
‘I think it’s very important to have that perspective with these things. But that’s not an excuse to not take it very seriously.’
Mr Riparbelli and his co-founders initially funded the company through money invested in cryptocurrencies.
Mr Riparbelli said: ‘Video today is a linear medium and it’s a product of the constraints you have in the production process’
The AI expert has predicted that within just a few years, people will be able to make their own Hollywood movies
At first, they struggled to get any interest from investors. They sent a ‘cold email’ to American billionaire Mark Cuban, who appears on the American Version of Dragons’ Den, Shark Tank.
He replied within four minutes and after 14 hours of back and forth he agreed to put in $1 million.
Now Mr Riparbelli and his co-investors have raised $150 million since the company was established in 2017.
Synthesia is valued at over $1 billion and employs 400 people in the UK, the US and Denmark.
Mr Riparbelli said the lightbulb moment came when he met Professor Matthias Niessner, one of his co-founders.
He had written a research paper showing AI producing hyper-realistic videos.
Mr Riparbelli added: ‘It felt like I saw magic for the first time.
‘I have a very obsessive personality. It’s one of my strengths and my weaknesses. I just got obsessed with this idea.’
The company developed two theories to form its basis.
Firstly, the technology they use will make the marginal cost of creating content to go to zero, not just in cash but in time and skill.
The second is that as the world increasingly uses content with code instead of having to physically record it, then what we know as video today is going to change completely.
Mr Riparbelli said: ‘Video today is a linear medium and it’s a product of the constraints you have in the production process.
‘You have to film things with a camera, you put it onto your computer, then you can’t change it. And if you want to shoot something else, you need to go out in the real world and shoot it.
‘It’s very different from most of our other digital experiences, with text, for example. Video or whatever it’s going to evolve into, I think, is going to be very different.’