I definitely think that Dr. Oblivion and Isaiah Beacon do not share the same values and opinions when it comes to AI. Isaiah Beacon is very pro-AI and will do anything to evangelize while Dr. Oblivion is pessimistic about its uses. I decided to have Isaiah ask Dr. Oblivion for advice on how to convince others that AI is the best for humanity. Of course Dr. Oblivion is not a fan of Isaiah’s fervor that does not take account of the threats of AI.
As a note, I did try to make the video, but after 7+ hours of processing and trying again on different days the lip syncing never finished.
This week I chose the option of one big assignment. I needed to make a video of my character speaking with Dr Oblivion and connect it all to Aggressive Technologies. I instantly knew I wanted to make Alice into an investor. But she is not a person to be satisfied with just being a part of a company she wants to be the boss. While Lady Alice knows she is smarter than everyone she also knows she needs to research before doing something new. This is how I approached this topic.
I started by going to visit the good Doctor. I asked him questions multiple times to hear his different answers. I downloaded the answers. I asked him leading questions to get him to mention certain things in his answer. I then wrote a script for Lady Alice Smythe. I used Audible to edit and piece together the many answers I had from Dr. Oblivion. Here is one I ended up not using.
Same question with 2 different answers.
I then went through the process of taking my mp3 and pairing it with the face. It was easier than I thought it would be after I figured out what to do. There was just a little trouble on getting started on my part. I skipped a step and didn’t realize it at first and was so lost. After a few minutes of feeling confused I found my user error and was rewarded with success! I was so over the top pleased with myself on being able to do this.
I then turned my attention to Lady Alice E. Smythe. I have a cold, so my clogged nasal voice was not an option this week. So, I turned to text to speech programs on the internet. I listened to many. I found Textmagic and liked the easiness and rang of voices I had to pick from.
With the voice done now I just needed to give her a face. I didn’t like what I could find online. To be honest I didn’t look too long. I contacted a friend I hadn’t seen in a while and asked If I could use their face. I am happy to say she said yes. I took some photos of her off of Facebook and used Adobe Photoshop to get rid of people and change the setting. I then used these photos to tell a story.
I would like to do more with the photos and get a video of my friend to play with in the future. I will have to see what she thinks of this first.
You may notice a lack of subtitles or not depending on when you view this I may have already gone back and added them.
While I didn’t have Alice actually appear to be speaking her part I like that I had different pictures to use to tell a bit of what is going on. I think I made it more interesting than just the same stiff heads going back and forth to look at. I also Like how I have introduced Aggressive Technologies to Alice’s story and what her interaction with the company will look like. Lady Alice has money and believes she is always the best person for the job.
For my choice of assignment this week, I decided to do the Talk to the Bot assignment. I actually did the Consult with your doctor as one of my optional assignments for a previous week, so I already had experience generating speech from Dr. Oblivion and creating a narrative. I decided to make my course character, Hwei, ask Dr. Oblivion to become one of his evil sentient robots with a body that would aid him in taking over the world by creating perfect AI beings that would take over humans.
Learning how to generate the lip synced video was a whole different process compared to the original Consult with your doctor assignment. It wasn’t hard, but it really did take a while and I think having a higher end PC and good internet speeds expedited the process for me. The process was streamlined enough to where I only had to click a few buttons and create the right folders. The tutorial given was very helpful for me to follow directions and create the videos.
What really intrigued me was the Python code used for the entire process. There was a “show code” button for each of the processes, and I looked through lines while I waited for my videos to generate. I was fascinated to see how each piece of code worked for the application. and it was definitely some good future personal project ideas for me in the future.
For the Dr. Oblivion clips generated, I was a little disappointed at how the lip sync wasn’t all that great. I’ve seen some other examples at the top of DS106 weekly assignment posts, and those look to be synced a little better than mine. There were parts where at the end of a period, the Doc’s lips kept moving and it felt a little jarring to me. For Hwei’s voice, I used a basic speech generator online to make mp3’s of his voice. I tried to use an AI voice replicator to take the original League of Legends game voice for hwei, but many of them required a paid subscription and was out of reach for me. I spliced it all together by using the Clipchamp online video editor, and it only took a few minutes to put the video, audio, and Hwei’s avatar picture together.
Overall, I had fun with this assignment and I learned a lot about AI generation for audio and video. Hopefully I can even make an AI bot myself with my own code! I’ll make sure to cater it towards taking over the world with AI, or else Hwei might hold my life against me
