Young employees in a packed campaign office located in Seoul are trying to accomplish something nearly impossible – make a matured South Korean presidential contender cool by utilizing deepfake technology.
AI technology has been previously employed in elections such as a deepfake video of Barack Obama humiliating Donald Trump to an unsuccessful Mayor contender from New York Andrew Yang promoting in the Metaverse.
Creators of AI Yoon believe that he is the world’s first authorized deepfake contender – a conception attaining traction in South Korea. It has the world’s swift average internet speeds.
Black hair neatly combed and wearing a fashionable suit, the avatar is almost identical to the real contender. However, the avatar uses briny language and meme-ready gibes for engaging youth voters who receive their news online.
The avatar has become a massive hit since its debut on January 1. AI Yoon has garnered millions of views.
More than thousands of people have raised questions, which is not the routine policy-related fare.
President Moon Jae-in and his rival Lee Jae-Myung are drowning and whom would you save was a question posed to AI Yoon by one of the users to which the avatar snapped back that it would be wishing both of them good luck.
Meta-snide
AI Yoon would serve as an imposter for the real contender at a first glance. This is a befitting illustration of the vast progress of artificially created videos referred to as deepfakes over the previous years.
A local deepfake technology organization required recordings of sentences exceeding 30,000, audio and video of twenty hours from the original Yoon for the creation of the avatar.
AI Yoon team’s director Baik Kyeong-hoon stated that frequently spoken words by the actual Yoon are better reproduced in AI Yoon.
AI Yoon’s dialogues are written by the actual Yoon’s campaign team and not by the original Yoon himself.
This approach has yielded the best results. The pronunciations of AI Yoon have reached the headlines in South Korea’s media resulting in seven million people visiting the website of Wiki Yoon for questioning the avatar.
Baik also stated that such reactions would not have been possible if they had produced only politically correct statements.
AI Yoon while answering the user’s queries sarcastically refers to President Moon Jae-in as “Moon Ding Dong” and his rival Lee Jae-Myung as “Lee Ding Dong”.
When a user wants to pose a question to Moon Ding Dong regarding his real enemy, AI Yoon replies that it is the President’s more appeasing outlook towards Pyongyang as per his critics.
Contender Yoon considers the President’s outlook as soft and rejects the approach of his meeting with Kim Jong Un – Pyongyang’s leader four times when both North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war.
AI Yoon tried to deflect attention from the actual Yoon’s past scandals by resorting to humor. One such example of the scandal was when contender Yoon was a senior prosecutor, he collected irrelevant fruit gifts from a construction organization.
AI Yoon stated that I am not obligated to persimmons and melons. I am obligated only to the people. However, his campaign was later compelled to admit that he received certain gifts.
Seoul Women’s University information security professor Kim Myuhng-joo conveyed to the local media that the kind of script utilized by the campaign for the avatar draws on the language utilized in the online gaming world.
Kim stated that the avatar reads off the manuscripts compiled by its creators who do not mince terms.
Ko Sam-seog, Lee’s employee accuses the cyber-candidate of degrading political demeanor.
One can say that the snide is working since during polling, Yoon is ahead of his opponent Lee due to the voters in their twenties.
Future of AI
Some of the youngest employees in Yoon’s campaign are Baik and his other two team members who are all in their twenties and thirties.
They are responsible for AI Yoon’s reactions in the rapid-fire conceptualizing sessions lasting just for thirty minutes when compared to the carefully-honed oratory usually followed in public policy debates.
The election monitor of South Korea does not transmit disinformation and permits AI contenders for campaigning on the condition it is recognized as deepfake technology.
The technology is often considered harmful, an example of this being the 2018 deepfake video of Obama produced by Jordan Peele – Oscar award-winning filmmaker for warning the audience regarding the trust they have in the material available online.
However, Baik considers AI as the future of election campaigns.
He divulged to AFP that it was very easy to create an enormous amount of content with the help of deepfake technology.
It is imminent that deepfake technology will be utilized increasingly.
