Welcome to Synthedia
The Best in News, Data, and Analysis About Synthetic Media
Glad you made it here. This article is written by a human for humans. But, it is about our non-human counterparts in the digital realm and the variety of media that digital services are creating every day.
It may be that one of the cornerstones of synthetic media, virtual humans (aka digital humans and digital twins) are the ultimate skeuomorphism technique for making us all comfortable in our increasingly digital world. If the technology had been advanced enough at the dawn of the internet, you can be sure lifelike virtual humans would have preceded digital notepads of yellow paper with lines. The technology has advanced so far that it is ushering in a new era of digital engagement and media production.
A Unified Concept of Media Generation
We no longer have to worry about unfortunate uncanny valley mishaps like The Polar Express. Processing power is greater. Techniques are better. And, of course, we now have deep neural nets, advanced convolutional neural nets, large language models, GANS, and the like to complement ever-improving CGI technology.
We do need to worry about how the technology is being applied, how large language models are generating more and more content that is unedited, and what the impact will be on the creatives that produce our media assets today. The key point is that the quality of the technology output is outpacing our social, cultural, and business practices and expectations.
Synthetic media is already revolutionizing entertainment, and it is starting to wedge itself into e-commerce, customer support, popular culture, and elsewhere. However, synthetic media is not today a unified concept among the general public or even the digerati. We are about to change that together.
The Four Horsemen of Synthetic Media
Today, you know about synthetic media in terms of technologies: virtual humans, synthetic voices, deepfakes, AI-based image generators, and AI-based text generators. Almost everyone thinks of these as separate and sometimes complementary technologies. Our thesis is that they represent a category of technologies that enable synthetic media creation.
You might think of these technologies as representing five or six, or seven markets, depending on how you would like to differentiate the solution spaces. In reality, they are all segments of one market with four key manifestations:
Video
Audio
Images
Text
In each instance, synthetic media solutions employ computation, typically along with artificial intelligence techniques, to generate media that heretofore required organic minds, emotions, sensibilities, and dexterity to create. Will artists more and more become editors of AI-generate work? Will digital twins allow us to be in more than one place and engaged in more than one conversation at a time? Will the synthetic media category profoundly change the cost structure, creative boundaries, and expectations around media creation? Yes. Yes. And yes, yes, yes.
What About Voice AI and Metaverse Trends
Synthetic media also turns out to be a critical element of the voice AI and metaverse trends. To be clear, it has many applications outside of these other technology categories. However, it is a logical extension of voice and conversational AI because it provides robust humanlike synthetic voices and creates the opportunity to embody the bots we interact with.
What metaverse spaces and virtual worlds need most right now is compelling content. You might think, “Well, they could use more users as well!” It is the compelling content that will attract and retain users. Building that content organically using traditional technologies and techniques will be costly and slow. It must be done, but it will not be fast enough beyond the gaming category.
Synthetic media technologies provide the scalability and flexibility to generate content that will get many of these web3 spaces off the ground. Content may finally be king, and much of it will be created synthetically.
Providing a Home for Synthetic Media
This is an exciting time. In many ways, it reminds me of the web in 1996, mobile in 2009, and voice assistants in 2016. Each of these technology shifts ushered in new innovation, new use cases, and new consumer expectations. They also needed a place to keep track of the rapid pace of change, sift through the hype, and make sense of many disparate data points. That is what we will provide for you here.
Several times per week, we will post an article or link to an article in this newsletter. All you need to do is subscribe to get an email each day sent to your inbox. Some of it will be information only available here, some from Voicebot.ai’s coverage and research around synthetic media, and some from third parties. All of it will be curated to bring you the most important story around synthetic media that day or the key insight to keep you a step ahead of others in the space.
For the conversational AI industry, Voicebot.ai provided a home for industry professionals and aficionados alike. We covered it every day in depth and nuance. That created a vibrant community and the deepest knowledge base of industry information encapsulated in thousands of data points, hundreds of charts, dozens of reports, and more than 4,000 news articles.
Building on an Existing Knowledge Base
When we began thinking about how the technologies of synthetic media were complementary and lacked a clear industry home, we made another discovery. Vociebot.ai had already published more than 150 articles on synthetic media. The team already had a strong understanding of the component technologies, the companies, the use cases, and adoption patterns. There is now a topic in the Voicebot.ai menu where you can read all of those going back to 2017.
However, we also decided that this topic was important enough that it merited a separate space, a place where you can keep track of synthetic media-related information on its own terms. The first manifestation of that idea is this newsletter.
Who is Synthedia For?
Why should you care about this? If you are a developer or designer, you are likely to have many opportunities to work in this space. If you are a marketer, you will soon be using these technologies if you are not already. If you are a consumer, you are already coming into contact with synthetic media and it may serve you well to understand what is a human creation and what is synthetic.
So, give us a try. We look forward to your feedback and helping us source even more interesting news, data, and insights that chronicle the rise of synthetic media.