AI influencers are taking over social media

News: AI voice deepfakes are fooling listeners

Welcome back to The Daily Update — A concerning study suggests that AI scammers may be on the rise soon. Here’s the full menu:

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Humans can only detect deepfake speech 73% of the time

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Summarize text with TLDR This

📸 Business Spotlight: AI influencers are making millions

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

Read time: 2 minutes

🗞️ The Latest in AI: Humans can only detect deepfake speech 73% of the time

Deepfake audio is getting concerningly realistic. A study by University College London found that humans can only detect deepfake speech 73% of the time.

“Our results suggest the need for automated detectors to mitigate a human listener’s weaknesses,” the study said.

What you need to know:

  • Researchers tested 50 deepfake speech samples in multiple languages on 529 participants.

  • Familiarization treatment and repeated exposure did not significantly improve recognition accuracy.

  • The combination of multiple human judgements, referred to as “crowd performance,” was as effective as automated detectors.

Why it matters: Over a quarter of listeners thought the deepfake speech was real, and the researchers didn’t even use the latest deepfake technology in their study. Deepfake speech will only improve and become more realistic, making it easier for scammers to use AI deepfake audio as a weapon.

Click here to learn more.

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Summarize text with TLDR This

TLDR This can summarize any piece of text into concise content. You can generate summaries by entering an article’s URL or by pasting the article’s text.

Options:

  • Key sentences vs. AI (human-like) summary

  • Short/Concise vs. Detailed/Section-wise

This tool is perfect for getting the gist of long documents, studies and textbook readings quickly. Here’s a concise AI summary of the study referenced above:

Click here to try TLDR This.

📸 Business Spotlight: AI influencers are making millions

Screenshot: alexacollins_ai (Instagram)

It might not be long before social media models and influencers are replaced by AI. The virtual influencer market is currently estimated to be worth over $4 billion.

What’s happening:

  • CGI and AI-generated social media influencers are rapidly accumulating millions of followers.

  • Lil Miquela is projected to make over $10 million this year. ‘She’ has already worked with clients like Chanel, Prada, Samsung and Calvin Klein.

  • The market is expected to grow by 26% by 2025.

  • Some profiles are so realistic that many followers are convinced they are humans.

What it matters: The rise of virtual influencers could revolutionize social media marketing and consumer businesses. Rather than shelling out money to the popular influencers of today, brands may feel inclined to create their own virtual influencers to promote their products in the future.

While this would be a cost-effective marketing solution for brands, what does it mean for social media users and real, human models and influencers?

Click here to learn more.

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

  • Microsoft: Bing Chat is coming to third-party browsers, including on mobile devices.

  • aiPhone: Apple is hiring dozens of engineers to compress large language models to run efficiently on iPhones and iPads.

  • Terms of service: Zoom says its new AI tools aren’t stealing ownership of customers’ content.

  • Access denied: Internet users can now block OpenAI’s web crawler from scraping their sites.

Have questions or thoughts on today’s newsletter? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for reading The Daily Update!

Jack

(P.S. If you know someone that may find today’s newsletter useful, send it their way!)