philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Talking horses and perfect faces: The rise of virtual celebrities

Kizuna AI has 2.3 million YouTube followers. She post videos nearly every day, talking to camera about life, love and video games.

But she is also a CGI construct; a fictional character made to look like a young woman, voiced by an actor, claiming to be an advanced artificial intelligence.

Her channel is part of a growing trend in Japan for so called virtual YouTubers, or VTubers.

...Another virtual Instagram star is , who caused a great deal of confusion when she first appeared on the scene in 2017 with highly stylised images featuring a golden iindzila; neck rings sometimes worn by the Ndebele people of South Africa. The pictures were staged and lit like fashion photography, even though they had actually been created using a 3D software programme.

“Fashion is so retouched and filtered, that our expectation of what a fashion photograph looks like is completely different from our expectation of what a person on the street looks like,” Cameron-James Wilson, the photographer who created Shudu Gram, tells me. “We have this idea that supermodels are perfect anyway, so a 3D supermodel doesn‘t stand out that much.”

Behind the mask

In the world of virtual personalities, anonymity can be a powerful force. What would the reaction to Shudu Gram be if the identity of its creator remained a secret? Would Kizuna AI be as popular as she is if the account wasn‘t built on the fantasy of an autonomous artificial intelligence?

One subculture within this subculture, which Hirota calls ‘Virtual-Bishoujyo-Juniku‘, or ‘virtual beautiful girl incarnation‘, is based around male illustrators drawing female characters that they then inhabit using a voice changer.

“Japan has very strict internet laws, and very strict broadcasting laws,” she says.

“If you use motion capture to turn yourself into an animated character, you can be critical, cheeky; you can bypass censorship.”

At a time when facial recognition technology is becoming ever more accessible, it has never been so easy to inhabit a fiction. Whether virtual YouTubers and Instagrammers become part of the internet‘s make-up, or fade as a short-lived fashion, for now the lines around reality continue to blur.

See the full story here: https://dentondaily.com/talking-horses-and-perfect-faces-the-rise-of-virtual-celebrities/