Ukraine’s latest government spokesperson is an AI-generated “digital person”. A deep-fake, if you will, although it’s not a trick - the authorities are being very transparent about what we’re seeing. And what the spokesperson actually says is going to be 100% written by humans, as much as anything is these days anyway.
Known by the name “Victoria Shi”, the idea is that she (it?), rather than a traditional human being, will share any necessary official operational and consular information with us. Whilst not supposed to be reflective of a real person as a whole, her image is (consensually) based on none other than singer and former ‘The Bachelor’ contestant, Rosalie Nombre.
I am a digital person that means that the text you hear was not read by a real person it was generated by artificial intelligence I will carry out a number of tasks first and foremost I will inform the public providing timely and verified information from Ukraine’s Consular service I will provide journalists with updates about the work of consules in protecting the rights and interests of Ukrainian citizens abroad.
Supposedly this is all in the service of freeing up time and resources for real humans to do what they need to do in times of war. Something tells me people will come up with a wide range of alternative theories though.
The legitimate videos will each feature a QR code that link to a text version of the speech published on the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to let you verify their integrity. Whether the inevitable future fake versions will do something similar, or whether the majority of humankind would care enough to actually check each time that each video is legit, seems less certain to me.
Here’s an example of her in action from Business Today.