2.3 Advent of high-fidelity video avatars
Modern video creation underwent a renaissance in the early 2000s when
laptop and smartphones became ubiquitous, including native recording and
editing tools, supplemented by app store options, allowing novice users
readily create polished creative video content. Free access distribution
platforms like Vimeo and YouTube, combined with these creation tools,
allowed everyone from entrepreneurs to MNC CEOs alike to have a low-cost
video presence, even though formal training was not common (Lind, 2020).
In the post-COVID era, in which priorities shifted towards artificial
intelligence (AI) (McKendrick, 2021) and computing speed acceleration
curves sharpened (Henshall, 2023), modern video creation experienced a
second renaissance. AI-driven tools dramatically offered to reduce time
and energy costs while augmenting the creative skills of video creators
(Truly, 2023). Such tools range from automatically cutting dead air out
of clips to sophisticated color correction (Mileva, 2023).
The literature, however, has not kept pace with the AI-powered video
tools’ development and their impacts on entrepreneurial ventures. Of
interest to this article is the rise of humanlike synthetic AI-powered
avatars available as video spokespeople, which offers a radical possible
shift in the landscape of entrepreneurial digital oratory. Programs like
Synthesia (Browne, 2023) and HeyGen (Schwaiger, 2023) are at the
forefront of this technology, offering polished avatars to users like
entrepreneurial pitch creators at a click of a button. These AI video
generators allow the user to create polished videos with professional,
synthetic human avatars, from scratch, by simply typing in a script. The
script not only gets converted into audio using sophisticated
text-to-speech voice modeling, it also animates the mouth and
expressions of the spokesperson avatar to make the avatar appear like a
real human that you recorded in a studio, performing your script. This
is accomplished using real footage of recorded actors/models that have
been intricately analyzed using the platforms’ advanced software. When
combined with their user-friendly editing features and slick templates,
the results are a very low-cost and high-professionalism final video
product.