2023-09-21 14:44:15
After midnight, AI-generated avatars sell household products, makeup and pork chops live on Taobao and other live shopping platforms.
Watching influencers sell you diapers, mascaras and other culinary preparations day and night is the funny life you can lead in China. This happens in particular on the Taobao application, the equivalent of Amazon, which also has a streaming. On it, influencers present, like teleshopping hosts, all kinds of things to buy in one click. For several months, they have been relayed, particularly at night, by virtual beings. Streamers generated by artificial intelligence, who take on the facial expressions and gestures of their human colleagues, such as pointing to the “buy” button at the appropriate time. The movement of their lips corresponds to what they are saying, even if there are a few bugs, specifies the MIT Technology Review who was interested in the phenomenon.
Home shopping passion
In France, the live shopping trend has not really taken off, despite the attempts of platforms and brands. But in China, teleshopping with social media is a thriving industry. The biggest livestreamers can generate the equivalent of billions of euros in products sold in the space of a few hours. This work, however, has a cost that small brands cannot necessarily afford. They therefore see virtual streamers as a more low-cost way to take advantage of the trend.
Several tech companies therefore offer this service, like Xiaoice and Silicon Intelligence, which sell their avatars for around 1,000 dollars (940 euros). The data to be entered is quite basic: one minute of video to create a digital double of a real person, as well as the price and name of the product to sell. The script, which was previously written by a person, is now also generated by artificial intelligence before being proofread by a human. Some more sophisticated (and therefore more expensive) avatars can also read comments posted on the stream chat and respond to them, or even adjust their marketing speech according to the number of viewers.
On Twitch, there are already channels whose hosts are generated by AI. They take on the features of Jesus, Trump or even SpongeBob, and are also capable of interacting with the cat, but do not sell anything.
“Virtual beings” in other industries
On la page web de Xiaoice, we can read rather lunar descriptions of what the company presents as “virtual workers” (maintaining in passing the myth of conscious artificial intelligence), who have “emotional interaction capacities and professional skills. » Live shopping is one of the use cases for these deepfakes. But we also find more incongruous cases such as a virtual employee of an investment fund, the digital double of the Chinese economist, Lang Xianping or even the presenters of a financial news TV channel. In the world of live shopping, these virtual beings are already having consequences, reports MIT Technology Review. If they don’t affect the industry’s superstars, virtual streamers might replace less followed streamers, whose ROI is lower. According to the figures, the average salary of streamers is down 20% compared to 2022, and it is more difficult to find work than before.
The factories of virtual beings do not intend to stop there. Silicon Intelligence plans to endow its avatars with emotional intelligence, allowing them to adapt their facial expressions to the chat’s comments. And above all, the company plans to generate by 2025, 100 million “digital workers” as it calls them, compared to 400,000 today.
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