GoKawiilA couple weeks ago, my coworker Charlie got a cold email from a startup with a link to their “personalised” video pitch. I put scare quotes around “personalised” both because that’s literally how they described the video over email and because it turned out to be thoroughly impersonal trickery: the guy in the video was not a person at all. He was synthetic, either fabricated entirely or maybe a clone of the human who created him.
The video is 90 seconds of this guy “Chase” scrolling around our landing page and pitching their product, a tool that generates launch videos for startups. “Hey Charlie, it’s Chase from Represent Studio. I was just on your website, and what you guys are building is super exciting.”
Were we interested? Did Charlie want to hop on a quick call with “Chase”?
The fake is impressive, even a little scary, but there are a few tells. Something about his glassy eyes darting around are not quite human. And the pitch felt a little too pointedly casual. Also, “We’ve had some of the biggest launches in the Silicon Valley.” The Silicon Valley?
I had recently binge-listened to Shell Game, Evan Ratliff’s podcast in which he documents his experimental startup run entirely by AI employees, so I was primed to sniff out just this sort of synthetic human fakery. Charlie noticed it, too. You can watch the video yourself—I’m sure “Chase” will appreciate the publicity.
To satisfy our curiosity, Charlie replied: “Hi. Was this an AI video?”
No prodding needed, we got our answer: “Yes, this is a video generated by an AI system we built internally. Curious, did it resonate with you?”
Well, “Chase,” it certainly got our attention!
Pretending to be human is unethical
Good thing we have Robin Sloan to call a spade a spade. From his pop-up newsletter last month:
... continue reading