SEE Magazine
Copyright © 1998. All Rights Reserved.
ON THE WEB
BY RICHARD CAIRNEYRemember the good old days of virtual artificial intelligence? The pop culture version exploded during the mid-1980s when Coca-Cola hired Max Headroom to flog soft drinks. Max, you will recall, was the virtual human - a stut-stut-stuttering man trapped in fallible computer code and manifested as an on-line wise guy. Headroom had his own TV series on the BBC.
But the virtual star was reality-based. Actor Matt Frewer played the role because creating a computer-generated character was too damned cumbersome - although by logical extension, you gotta figure Frewer must have cost less, too.
Today that's changing. Virtual humans are destined for assembly-line production as programs similar to HTML code, used to create websites, are being fine-tuned. Character traits are even being written into model humans. Soon we'll all be creators of our own virtual humans.
The question is, what will they look like? And what will they do? There's plenty of legitimate concern over who uses whose images and to what end. Because some of the first photographs ever taken were pornographic, and some of the first film shot was too, and because the Internet fairly runneth over with sex, it's safe to assume that virtual humans will become the focal point of sex sites.
There's also the very real possibility that celebrities will be kidnapped - or more accurately, their images will be kidnapped - and used to sell Coke or some other mass-market product. It's easy enough to dig up old footage of, say, Fred Astaire, then make a full-motion commercial for some tux rental shop.
If you check out work being done by a firm called Virtual Personalities, you'll see what I mean. Surf on over to the site and you'll meet Sylvie 1.0 and, soon, Sylvie 2.0 and Ka the Alien. These virtual characters are called Verbots and, according to VP's site, they're cheap - they go for about $10.
What would you do with Sylvie or Ka?
Use these verbally enhanced characters to host your own website, as characters in games, banking (imagine your on-line bank using a digital teller). Verbots appear to be sort of on-line slaves. Other uses VP suggests include taking orders on line, reading news (A-Channel news anchors, beware!) or reading stories to children.
Because of the potential for this technology to be used for evil - like employing a Michael Jordan Verbot to host your NBA fanzine website - there are real-life agents waiting to police electronic use of celebrity images.
An on-line agency called Virtual Celebrity spends its time protecting copyright of celebrity images. At a recent conference on Virtual Humans, held June 16 and 17, silver screen siren Marlene Dietrich's grandson told delegates his famous grandmother "is still alive" and that the estate has always had trouble ensuring her image isn't used without permission. With new virtual human technology, he said, his grandmother could conceivably make a new movie.
I wonder if she'd win an Oscar.
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