Dear
Narendrabhai ,
For over a year , I have
been pleading with you to launch www.NaMo.ai ,
by sending following e-mails :
Dear PM - Here is your BRAHMASHTRA for 2024 ……………. 28 Feb 2023
AI Chatbot : Brahamashtra for 2024 Elections ?
……………… 23 Mar 2023
Dear PM : Introspection won’t help / Technospection will . 13
May 2023
Anuragji , how about this NEW TECH ? ……………………………. 17
May 2023
Feedback is Good : Dialogue is Best …………………………………. 13
Jan 2024
If you can’t lick them , join them ……………………………………….. 24
Feb 2024
AI Chat bots: If you don’t speak up, They will substitute
you…28 Feb 2024
Modi Saheb , Aap Kaise ho ? ………………………………………………….
06 Mar 2024
In these emails , I had highlighted :
Ø The
advantage of your message ( in your own voice ) getting across to millions of
voters simultaneously ( in 20 Indian languages ) and those voters being enabled
to “ chat “ with you
Ø The
distinct possibility of someone launching your DEEP FAKE
From the following news report, you will appreciate
that this “ possibility “ is about
to become a high “ probability “
I urge you once again, to expedite the launch of www.NaMo.ai ( ala
www.HemenParekh.ai )
One more thing
I have no resources to turn my VIRTUAL AVATAR (
sporting a single / simple photo
) into a 3D Volumetric Hologram , jumping out of the mobile screen of the voter
But with the resources at your disposal , you can
simply direct your IT team to
ensure that , on www.NaMo.ai, your video gets projected in the air,
while “ talking “ to the voters on their mobiles - up CLOSE and PERSONAL
Hints :
# Your IT team may want to talk to Joe Ward (
Founder > IKININC / 'Joe
Ward'
jward@ikininc.com )
# https://thedebrief.org/holographic-breakthrough-scientists-create-full-color-
3d-holographic-displays-with-ordinary-smartphone-screen/
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.HemenParekh.ai / 19
April 2024
Context :
How
A.I. Tools Could Change India’s Elections .. NY
Times … 18 April 2024
Extract :
For
a glimpse of where artificial intelligence is headed in election campaigns,
look to India, the world’s largest democracy, as it starts heading to the polls
on Friday.
An A.I.-generated version of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi that has been shared on WhatsApp shows the
possibilities for hyper-personalized outreach in
a country with nearly a billion voters.
In the video — a demo clip
whose source is unclear — Mr.
Modi’s avatar addresses a series of voters directly, by name.
However, it is not perfect. Mr. Modi appears to
wear two different pairs of glasses, and some parts of the video are pixelated.
Down
the ladder, workers in Mr. Modi’s party are sending videos by WhatsApp in which their own A.I. avatars deliver
personal messages to specific voters about the government benefits they
have received and ask for their vote.
Those video messages can be automatically generated in whichever of India’s dozens of languages the voter speaks. So can
phone messages by A.I.-powered
chatbots that call constituents in the
voices of political leaders and seek their support.
Such
outreach requires a fraction of the time and money
spent on traditional campaigning, and it has the potential to become an essential instrument
in elections. But as the technology races onto the political scene, there are few
guardrails to prevent misuse.
Chat-bots and personalized
videos may seem more or less harmless. Experts worry, however, that voters will
have an increasingly difficult time distinguishing between real and synthetic
messages as the technology advances and spreads.
“It’ll
be the Wild West and an unregulated A.I. space this year,” said Prateek Waghre,
( prateek@internetfreedom.in
) the
executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group
based in New Delhi. The technology, he added, is entering a media landscape
already polluted with misinformation.
Around
the world, elections have become a testing ground for the A.I. boom. The tools
have been used to turn an Argentine
presidential candidate into Indiana Jones and a Ghostbuster.
During the New Hampshire primary, voters received robocall messages urging them not to vote, in a
voice that was most likely artificially generated to sound like President
Biden’s.
And
in India, Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., and
the opposition Indian National Congress party have
accused each other of spreading election-related deep-fake content online.
One outpost on this new
Indian frontier is in the western desert state of Rajasthan. On the ground
floor of a residential building on a dusty back lane, a 31-year-old college
dropout, Divyendra Singh
Jadoun, (devi@theindiandeepfaker.com)
operates an A.I. start-up, The
Indian Deepfaker
His team of nine people has been making
commercials with A.I.-generated avatars of Bollywood actors and actresses. But
earlier this year, political
parties and politicians began asking him to do for them what he had done for
celebrities. Of the 200 requests, Mr. Jadoun said, he took on 14.
Among those getting the A.I. treatment is Shakti Singh Rathore,
( shaktisingh140@gmail.com
)
- a 33-year-old B.J.P. member. His job this election season is to tell as many people as possible about Mr. Modi’s programs
and policies. So he decided to create a replica of himself.
“A.I.
is wonderful and the way forward,” Mr. Rathore said as he settled in front of a
video camera at the office of The Indian Deepfaker, preparing to become digitally incarnated. “How else could I reach the
beneficiaries of Mr. Modi’s programs in such large
numbers and in so short a period of time?”
As Mr. Rathore adjusted a
saffron scarf with the party’s logo that hung around his neck, Mr. Jadoun
instructed him, “Just look into the camera and talk as if the person is sitting
right in front of you.”
With
about five minutes’ worth of material, including an audio
recording and profile shots, Mr. Jadoun went to work. He said he uses open-source A.I. systems
and builds upon them with his own code.
First, Mr. Rathore’s face
was isolated from each frame of the recording.
Then data was collected from his facial features,
including the size of his face and lips, as well as his gaze.
Mr.
Jadoun said the data set
was then fed into A.I. models that learn to predict facial patterns.
“You need to keep running
it through the program and fine-tuning the face until you get the best face
possible,” he said.
A
“ cloning algorithm
” also analysed the audio recording, learning
the voice’s cadence and intonations. Mr. Jadoun said it often takes six to eight hours of tweaking to perfect the
face and for the lips to
sync with the words. The rest is largely automated.
In one demo, it took about
four minutes
to create around 20 personalized greeting videos.
Mr.
Jadoun said his team could produce up to 10,000 videos a day. For larger
jobs on deadline, it will rent graphics processing units.
Generative A.I. can also
remove language barriers, which is especially helpful in a linguistically
diverse country. Mr.
Rathore’s avatar can be programmed to speak regional languages to
reach the remotest corners of India.
Political parties are not only texting constituents video
messages but also using cloned voices to call people directly,
all powered by chatbots like ChatGPT.
In
the past, when a party representative would call voters, they would hang up,
Mr. Rathore said. “But now, when a local leader utters
a voter’s name,
it immediately catches their attention.”
During
the conversation, the chatbot asks about local government programs that offer
free electricity or funding for start-ups. Mr. Jadoun said the calls were
recorded and transcribed for quality control and A.I. training.
Mr.
Rathore said he had spent around $24,000 of his own money to reach about 1.2 million people
through his video messages and phone calls and to receive information about who
didn’t answer. He called it an investment in his future with the B.J.P.
Nikhil Pahwa, the editor
of MediaNama, which covers digital media in India, said the personalized
messages could be particularly powerful among Indians.
“India
is a country where people love to take photos with celebrity impersonators,” he
said. “So if they receive
a call from, say, the prime minister, and he speaks as if he knows them, where
they live and what their issues are, they would actually be thrilled about it.”
Mr.
Waghre of the Internet Freedom Foundation questions whether A.I. content is
persuasive enough to affect this year’s election. But he said the long-term
effects could be problematic. “Once you normalize this in people’s information
diet, what happens six months later when there are deceptive
videos?” he said.
Mr.
Modi himself has discussed adding disclaimers to A.I.-generated content so
people are not being “misguided.”
Mr.
Jadoun and representatives of two other A.I. start-ups in India created what
they call an “A.I. coalition manifesto,” pledging
to protect data privacy and uphold election integrity.
For
instance, Indian Deepfaker videos are labeled “A.I. generated,” and its chatbots announce that
they are A.I.-generated
voices, Mr. Jadoun said.
Narendra
Singh Bhati, 28, the owner of resorts in Rajasthan, received an A.I.-generated
call from Mr. Rathore this week. Mr. Bhati said he was impressed with its
personalization.
He said he had not realized that the call
was A.I.-generated, although the script made that clear. “I even said goodbye
to Mr. Rathore” at the end, Mr. Bhati said.
Suhasini Raj is a reporter based in New Delhi who has covered
India for The Times since 2014. More about Suhasini Raj ( suhasini.raj@nytimes.com
)
