Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated in Keynote Speech
vice.com
vice.com
And it's a pretty weak showing. The stiff animation and bad lip sync immediately gives it away to me. And the fact that the CGI Huang is shown ~15 times smaller than the real one is very damning.
> It's not clear exactly which part of the keynote speech features CGI Huang (which is what makes the replica so impressive), but if you jump to this part of the presentation you can see Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode into multiple different 3D models.
So how much was Vice paid for this article?
CGI Jensen looks like he came out of a 2009 videogame. Nvidia may have the tech but you can tell it lacks the artistic supervision of a proper VFX house so the end result looks like something their engineers put together in a last minute crunch (which is probably what happened).
I really hate when movies throw in a CGI character expecting it to come off as real. It pulls you out of the movie in a way that normal over-the-top action CGI doesn't. I remember watching the recent Star Wars movies and being jerked out of the flow by CGI Princess Leah and some other characters (whoever the villainous old man was in that movie).
I'd be interested to see any videos of CGI faces that can fool experts.
Also, I'd like to point out that Microsoft has skillfully choosen scenes that are "easy" to create: airplanes with smooth shapes, buildings from long distances and low detail, landscapes that don't include movement (no grass moving in the wind or waves lapping on the shore). MS set them selves up for success here.
And I agree that MS set themselves up for success with this type of scenery, it is fascinating how well the end result looks overall.
There are videos from CGI artists, e.g. Corridor Crew, that break down really good CGI, which is almost entirely invisible to the non-expert eye. That is in fact the best kind of CGI: the one that enhances reality so seamlessly that it's almost impossible to pick apart. Quite entertaining and informative videos.
You're right that theres a possibility that someone is fooled and never finds out, and another possibility that someone is fooled, finds out later, and claims they never thought it was real. However, it is very clear that it's possible to be fooled and find out later.
The balls looked a bit odd in the film, but I figured it was simply an artifact of 23fps film capturing a small plastic ball moving at high speed. I never would have guessed it was all CGI. I think I'd seen the movie three times before buying the DVD and watching the special features, years later. So I was fooled in the mid-00s and again in the late 10s.
There's a BTS video[1] about the animation on one episode, appears that it was a blend of both CGI + real faces.
So if any part of that falls into uncanny valley, the whole experience looks wrong.
Back when animations were done by hand, Disney's animators handled this by rotoscoping (drawing over...) live action, which created very convincing results even when the movements were exaggerated for effect.
Doing the same with CGI without a template is an unbelievably difficult challenge. It's much easier to create cartoonish exaggerations than to get spot-on perfect realism.
Youtuber Shamook did just that with the finale of the Mandalorian season 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrHXA2cSpNU
He actually got a job with ILM out of it. The future of CGI actors will probably involve a fusion of techniques like this in order to get it right.
For those who don’t want to watch all of it (even though it is quite excelent) the points I remember are:
- subsurface scattering of skin
- do the pores stretch? (As the face is moving)
- movement, especially movement of the upper lip as the character speaks
That's part of the point. If computer software alone can replicate state of the art human effort from 12 years ago, that's what they're showing off. It's not "look how great this rendering is", it's "look how good the AI that made this is".
https://www.cnet.com/news/lucasfilm-hires-deepfake-youtuber-...
They actually say that’s what happened in the video on it.
Was in a breakout after the main Jensen presentation and the engineer was talking about how they were fiddling with K8s to get the demo to work right, the night before. And this was the money demo in the middle of the presentation.
On the other hand... I actually kind of like a company that half-asses demos. It suggests they're spending their time on more important things.
They should have given the work to those VFX guys, Corridor crew would have done something much better in just couple of days.
I guess it was the tight deadline (only a few weeks I think?) that didn't leave them any time to polish the final result.
I think what Vice ment to say was "this video was SO boring, we were multitasting on our phone and didn't see anything out the ordinary from the corner of our eyes."
For journalists, something like that is quite an accusation, and it really doesn’t help anyone to thoughtlessly make it.
Maybe they are stupid, or just have different ideas of what’s newsworthy, or it was a slow news day…whatever. But all of those come down to a difference of opinion, not a statement of fact made without evidence.
“Assume good faith” is in the guidelines here. And while it isn’t explicitly extended to the articles themselves, the reason for including it do extend to other interactions. Mindless cynicism leads to the sort of corrosive distrust that’s eating away at civil societies everywhere.
...repeated breaking of trust by institutions has earned that. It is unfortunate and it does eat away at our civil society. The solution is to fix the broken institutions and re-gain trust, not to blindly follow them like livestock!
not saying this is an example of it - though it's possible since it looks and reads exactly like a native ad would
Then I focused on the transition, and the jacket lost all the texture. Later I let the transition play through, and saw that lonely character standing there, zoomed away, awkward hand and arm movement, and I cringed.
Why put any amount of effort into it if this is the result? Almost pathetic.
On the other hand, there's no such thing as bad publicity, I guess ...
My pet conspiracy theory is that that old cliché is promoted by publicity companies as false advertising aimed at their own customers, the businesses who buy their ad campaigns, to cover their asses regardless of the end result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqZ9ECm70#t=23m03s
The reason he ended up looking like shit is because it was a combination of dog-fooding their own software (admirable) as well as rushing the production on a tight deadline.
Imagine crunching long hours to make a digital replica of your boss for the hell of it. They even scanned his leather jacket, which is admittedly worthy of a chuckle considering the thing's taken on a life of its own. In the distant future, I imagine the jacket will be embodied with AI and entrusted with carrying the company forward in Jensen's image.
Silicon Valley may have ended years ago, but stuff like this writes itself.
NVIDIA is dog-fooding their Metaverse renderer and all the CGI sequences in the keynote were created using it. As someone considering to build a plugin for it, that's great news. If they use it themselves, you can be reasonably optimistic that it won't have any horrible usability bugs. Plus it now integrates with Blender.
So if I had to come up with a headline, it'd be:
"NVIDIA's Photorealistic Keynote Rendering Software now available for Free to Blender Users"
Namely, the possibility of automating bullshit. Endless mission statements, employee narrated stories, and hand gesturing is very valuable. I would pay $10,000 out of my pocket for the opportunity to never do those product hype videos again.
Or alternatively, since they are the ones also building it, they intimately know it's (undocumented) pitfalls and how to work around them and/or they plow through bad DX with a horde of engineers that only a big corporation like them can afford. Dog-fooding doesn't automatically improve a product.
Useless PR gimmick, which did not impress me at all.
They apparently created all slides of the keynote with omniverse in a couple of weeks, and used a lot of technologies for no other reason than just to try them out.
https://dilbert.com/series/71-Dilbert-3D-prints-a-Pointy-Hea...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BUDwj_mXKE&ab_channel=Movie...
Makes you wonder how important most of the video calls really are...
I always assumed tech CEOs were human, but this explains so much...
48 hours later there'll be a Luke Skywalker deep fake version of this guy on YouTube created on an old Intel.