2023-11-11 21:00:05
A digital avatar animates the Hilton hotels account. TAOBAO SCREENSHOT
The tone is cheerful but the face remains impassive. Does the influencer lack enthusiasm for the hotel nights she promotes? No: his strangely calm face is animated by means of an artificial intelligence which can still be improved. However, the Hilton hotel chain was convinced by a marketing company to use the services of this avatar to run its account on the Taobao e-commerce platform.
“We started using these digital avatars in 2022. We wanted to have someone reliable in the long term and save money,” explains Xiao Chunliang, boss of the company Ruyi cultural creation, based in Hangzhou, west of Shanghai. The boss estimates saving at least 20% compared to a full-time presenter. On sites like Taobao, Alibaba, number one in online commerce, or even Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, digital replicas of presenters are increasingly present, especially at night, when employees are resting.
The first ones deepfakes (or hyperfakes, which can be video or audio) appeared at the end of the 2010s: in 2017, we saw videos circulating featuring Obama and Trump speaking in Mandarin. Unlike generative artificial intelligence (AI), which creates images, texts or music from generally written instructions, deepfakes are carbon copies of existing people, to whom AI brings to life in an increasingly convincing manner. For the moment, this use has struggled to find a market, apart from that of scams and disinformation. But home shopping represents an opportunity for this industry.
In China, the trend is catching on quickly. In the wake of a few start-ups, all major Chinese digital companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.comthemselves users of these technologies, began to offer their clients the opportunity to create virtual animators.
In a generally tech-savvy country, these innovations are rather well received. Example with a recent video of the American singer Taylor Swift, speaking in perfect Mandarin about her latest trips on an American television set: the work of an AI developed by the Chinese-American start-up Heygen, whose software has translated the singer’s words, synchronized the movements of her lips, and even gave her, to make it more authentic, a slight American accent! The video sparked millions of comments, often enthusiastic, on the Weibo platform. But the main outlet is in online teleshopping. On sales platforms, these live videos will employ 2.7 million people in 2023, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, and their hosts have already generated 1,270 billion yuan (163 billion euros) of sales in the first half, according to the National Metrology Institute of China.
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