WEEK 3
THINK: DALI AND DALI BEHIND THE SCENES
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"Agency GS&P pulled off the kind of headline-grabbing stunt that the publicity-loving Dalí would have appreciated himself when they resurrected the Catalan artist as a charismatic host at the Dalí Museum in Florida. Billed as “art meets artificial intelligence”, Dalí Lives was created by pulling more than 6,000 frames from old video interviews and processing them through 1,000 hours of machine learning to be able to overlay the source onto an actor’s face. The text was composed from a mixture of quotes from interviews and letters with new commentary designed to help visitors emphasis with the artist and relate to his work."
"The novelty here is that this deep-fake example is interactive. A total 45 minutes of footage split over 125 videos allows more than 190,000 possible combinations depending on visitor responses and even includes comments on the weather. It finishes with Dalí turning around and snapping a selfie with his audience. Dalí claimed it was unlikely he would ever die, and maybe he was right, because he was brought to life a second time recently by Samsung’s AI lab in Moscow, this time by training AI on landmark facial features from just a handful of images rather than the usual thousands."
1.Why do you consider this synthetic media?
It derives from the old media, video, being learned by AI. Dali's face and action are deep-faked to produce a new series of video that can interact with the museum guests.
2. How this was made? What about the data set used to train it?
It is produced by machine learning, as said by Dali's museum. The data set is his old video interviews and photograph.
"Dalí Lives was created by pulling more than 6,000 frames from old video interviews and processing them through 1,000 hours of machine learning to be able to overlay the source onto an actor’s face."
3. What are the ethical ramifications of this specific example?
In fact, "resurrecting" a celebrity who has passed away is usually controversial. Because this behavior is usually unable to get my direct approval. But when Dali's own image becomes a symbol to help the audience better understand his own works, will this become a more meaningful thing? I think the benefits of this incident itself are great, and it can spread great works to more people. But behind this incident, what if Dali was stolen after his "resurrection"? Digital Dali is now the result of machine learning, but when he has a human image and Dali identity in today's digital society, his existence cannot be equated with a piece of code and data that can be disposed of at will. As a respected art master, he should have some rights, such as reputation rights, portrait rights, and so on. But it is not clear today who can rely on to hold and benefit from such rights? I think "resurrecting" Dali was a good idea, but the law behind the portrait rights of dead celebrities is far from perfect.