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.