The Controversy Surrounding Kate Middleton's Video: Real or AI?
You may have heard that there’s a lot of speculation online as to whether Kate Middleton’s cancer reveal video is truly her or an AI generated version of her. This is an interesting conundrum, and given the ability of AI to mimic people these days, it is not unfair to ask this question.
This is especially true because the royal family did admit that the photograph that was shared on Kate Middleton’s social media account recently was in fact, at least photoshopped, if not in part manipulated by artificial intelligence.
We will be seeing more of these stories soon, and it will become an interesting challenge in the future to detect what images and videos are AI and what are not. The cat is already out of the bag, and I’m not sure if there’s any going back. We do have some tools that could potentially detect AI fakes, but will they be able to do that as the technology advances? I’m not sure.
So what is really important here? Is it is it important that the actual Kate Middleton sat down and gave us this speech? If she’s not feeling well and they decided to use some AI because she’s a bit weak and didn’t want to appear on camera, then I think that’s actually a somewhat legitimate reason to use AI…even though it is somewhat, as we could say, mendacious of the royal family.
Does the royal family have a responsibility to the public to be transparent when using tools such as AI in such case? They are, in fact, important figures in United Kingdom. It’s not like they are average celebrities who are just working actors who don’t really have any impact on sociopolitical structures. So if the royal family is using AI, there is potentially a problem here.
What about if they were just using some special effects, such as a green screen? Many people have commented that the flowers and the trees behind Kate aren’t moving at all, and that seems unnatural. But does it but does that mean that it’s AI? I think it could simply be that she was filmed in front of a screen, and that in and of itself would not have been a scandal except for the AI angle.
Other people have commented that it looks like the bench that she’s sitting on has an a very odd number of slats, and the spacing is different, and that perspective doesn’t really count for the way the bench looks. They see this as evidence of AI, and maybe it is.
They also say she’s wearing a sweater that she wore years ago, which may or may not have anything to do with AI. It may just simply be that she likes the sweater.
Another example of potential AI is that the ring on her finger apparently disappears for a moment or two in some in some frames of the video. Does that mean that it’s AI, or is this just bad editing? I don’t know.
At any rate, because the previous picture that was put out was shown to be altered, it is not surprising now that people are very much insisting that this recent video of Kate is actually not genuine. To me, the issue is not whether the background has changed or they put her on a green screen. I don’t really think that in and of itself is problematic.
What would potentially be problematic is if that’s not actually Kate sitting there, but it’s actually a facsimile of her using an AI cloned voice and a cloned body in order to speak. If that is what happened, it would mean that she is perhaps much sicker than they are letting on. And in that case, I don’t think we should be angry about it. We should feel sorry for her and send her our well wishes and prayers.
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