It’s funny to think of technology making us more human. The cool precision of most tech seems to move us closer to an automated, robotic world. However, at D-ID we believe that our products should help people feel more deeply and create more authentic human experiences. My Heritage’s Deep Nostalgia is a great example, where people were able to connect with generations past through our Live Portrait tool.

Over the past week, we’ve seen two very different organizations take our technology and create emotionally charged content with the potential to make a huge social difference.

Public Health France demonstrated a great application of our technology, to commemorate World HIV Day. In a video titled Letter To Myself, three HIV-positive individuals read a letter to themselves, reflecting on the day they discovered they were HIV positive and their lives since. In front of each reader is a photo of themselves from the time they were diagnosed, which has been animated by our Live Portrait tech.

The video is both moving and emotional. By going back in time to the moment when individuals thought their positive test was a death sentence, and telling the story of lives well lived, Public France Health promotes HIV screening while reducing the fear of what a positive result could mean.

Another project, Listen To My Voice, marked International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Our technology was used to animate still photos of domestic violence victims, using the voices of famous Israeli actresses to create powerful videos.

Michal Sela, who was killed by her husband in 2019, looks at the camera and tells viewers “In 2019, I was murdered by the man who was my husband, the killer Eliran Malul. And today, after I lost my life, I call on you: Listen to my voice.”

This collaboration between social tech entrepreneur Shiran Melamdovsky Somech, Israeli ad agency DIBOOR, Facebook, and others, allowed the women to tell their chilling stories in the hope that their message will encourage others who might be in the same situation to seek help before it’s too late.

Of course, image manipulation isn’t the only technology being used by NGOs to promote their mission and raise awareness. WaterAid launched a chatbot in 2018, inviting people to ‘Talk to Sellu’, a farmer in the Sierra Leone jungle, about life in a community without clean water.

Through the Chatbot, people were exposed to the health challenges facing those in the village of Tombohuaun without clean water, and how their lives changed when WaterAid got involved.  They saw pictures of the family, learned about educational opportunities in that part of the world, and were given the opportunity to make a difference.

Mencap is another organization that uses chat to raise awareness and understanding. The organization advocates and supports those with learning disabilities, helping them get the educational and health resources that they need to live their lives. Through the chatbot, visitors engage with Aeren, a 28-year-old woman with a rare learning disability stemming from a chromosome abnormality.

Chat participants learn about the different types of learning disabilities, the challenges those people face, and find out how they can make a difference. It’s an effective use of technology that puts a human face on a big problem.

It is heartening to see the different ways technology is being used to make the world a better place.

We expect to see more pro-social organisations adopt technology to engage their audiences, build awareness, and solve problems. At D-ID, we are proud to take part in this important work and look forward to seeing the different ways organizations deploy our technology.

If you would like to talk to us about how our technology can create more interest for your organization, please get in touch.

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A chilling campaign using D-ID’s Creative Reality technology to raise awareness for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women,

Yesterday a unique campaign called “Listen To My Voice” was launched in Israel to promote the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The campaign shared the stories of five women who died at the hands of their husbands. With the help of D-ID’s innovative AI-powered technology, images of the women are animated to share their chilling stories in the hope that it will encourage women who might be in the same situation to seek help.

Shiran Melamdovsky-Somech, a social technology entrepreneur, is the mastermind behind this campaign in collaboration with Mr. Haim Bibas the Chairman of the Israeli Federation of Local Authorities, and VP Strategy Mrs. Liron Doron Levi, Na’amat, Michal Sela Forum, marketing agency, Diboor, and many others who volunteered for this important cause. The performances and voice-overs were enacted by celebrated Israeli actresses Mali Levy, Hila Saada, Evelin Hagoel, Luna Mansour & Ruti Asarsai.

The work, supported by the families of the women who are featured in it, is a chilling reminder of the impact of gender-based violence. It increases awareness of the problem, empowers women to take action, and creates opportunities for discussion about the issue and its impact globally.

About D-ID

D-ID is a Tel Aviv-based Creative Reality startup specializing in patented video reenactment technology using AI and deep learning. Established in 2017, D-ID created the first facial image de-identification solution to protect images and videos from facial recognition software. D-ID’s products range from animating still photos to facilitating high-quality video productions and creating viral user experiences such as Deep Nostalgia, which has generated nearly 100M animations since its launch in late February. With $23 million in funding from Y Combinator, Pitango, AXA, Foundation VC, Maverick Ventures, AI Alliance, and others, D-ID aims to disrupt the media and entertainment industries with the creation of media using AI in traditional channels as well as the Metaverse. With international customers in the swiftly growing synthetic media market, D-ID’s core competencies in the human face and deep learning enable its partners to create exciting and engaging content that was until now unimaginable. To find out more, please visit www.d-id.com.

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The Metaverse, which recently grabbed headlines when Facebook changed its name to Meta Platforms and announced a $10-million investment in Reality Labs, is an immersive 3-D world wide web. Highly interoperable, the Metaverse is expected to change the way we interact with one another and with the things in our lives. 

Through this partnership, we’ll be adding a new dimension to the Metaverse. Our highly realistic AI-powered Create Reality technology will pair with the Glimpse Group’s advanced VR/AR solutions to create authentic experiences for users that are immediate and realistic.

“The Metaverse is going to change everything, starting with the way humans interact with each other, the way we see the world, and the kinds of possessions we own,” said Gil Perry, CEO and Co-founder of D-ID. “From commerce, to entertainment, from dating to healthcare, the success of the Metaverse depends on realistic digital personas in order for people to embrace it as an essential part of their daily lives. They will dance at virtual concerts, enjoy museums with friends, interact with brands, and more if they feel the experiences are truly immersive and the avatars are relatable. Our collaboration with Glimpse will shape and bring life to the Metaverse.” 

We’ve already begun work on a proof of concept (PoC), as we explore ways that our technology can complement each other’s. In our PoC, users can simply animate still photos directly on their mobile device by leveraging our technology with Glimpse’s subsidiary company PostReality’s solutions.

For D-ID, this has been a year filled with major milestones, and our partnership with Glimpse demonstrates our continued growth. This partnership follows the launch of Deep Nostalgia   for MyHeritage, an interactive marketing campaign for Mondelēz, a partnership with Warner Bros. Pictures and Oblio that allowed viewers to star in the Hugh Jackman film Reminiscence, and a partnership with Josh, India’s version of TikTok. 

The post D-ID Adds Glimpse to its Growing Partnerships appeared first on D-ID.

Deep Nostalgia

Deep Nostalgia was built using D-ID’s proprietary Live Portrait technology, and was just the first step in our relationship with MyHeritage. Earlier today, we announced a new multi-million-dollar deal with MyHeritage to expand our partnership and develop new AI features for historical photos.

“We built D-ID with the dream of using technology to push upon the boundaries of reality, and are now helping people connect to their past in a way that was never believed to be possible,” said Gil Perry, CEO and Co-founder of D-ID. “With MyHeritage as a partner, we are amplifying our power to do exactly that, bringing these connections to millions of people across the globe.”

“Together, D-ID and MyHeritage are instilling millions with a newfound appreciation for their ancestors that transcends the generational divide,” said Gilad Japhet, Founder and CEO of MyHeritage.
“Deep Nostalgia resonated the world over, and was merely the first step. Thanks to the expansion of this partnership, exciting innovations for historical photos will be coming soon.”

While more details are still to come, MyHeritage users can expect new uses of artificial intelligence that further deepen their engagement with genealogy and generations past. The technology offers today’s generation a tangible link to their ancestors and proves that artificial intelligence can be leveraged to deepen one’s connection to their family history. 

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It goes without saying that  everyone involved in Synthetic Futures, us included, believe in the benefits our technologies can bring to society. But still, the potential for unethical use of  synthetic media is a big issue facing our industry.

You hear concerns voiced not just from regulators or journalists but also from friends and family. ‘What does this mean?’ people ask. ‘So, we won’t be able to trust anything we see from now on?’. ‘Will someone be able to video call me pretending to be my daughter and swindle me out of my money?’

While some of the concerns run well ahead of the reality of the tech, you can forgive people for being worried. And you can’t help but wonder how much better Facebook, Twitter etc might be if they had been a bit more concerned about the ethical impact of their technology as they were building it rather than trying to tack it on afterwards.

With all this in mind, we at D-ID decided to roll up our sleeves and set to work creating an ethical framework we could work and live by and which we hope will be the start of a wider set of industry guidelines.

We have just launched the results which you can view here.

We learned from the process of creating this pledge, which we also thought would be worth sharing with others in our space. So, if you’re setting out on a similar journey, here are five of the issues you are also likely to face:

1. What even IS ethical?

When you’re a global business you need a global ethics policy.
But unfortunately, values vary massively across the world. From the German or Swiss who are hyper-concerned about privacy to the more laissez-faire Middle East, attitudes to privacy are not unified. (And that’s even if you exclude the People’s Republic of China, which is a whole other article.)
You will have to tread a line that works for you.

2. Money vs. Morals

The commercial challenge is one of the biggest. If you’re a start-up, like D-ID, there are tremendous pressures to grow FAST, and it feels unnatural to put any blockers on that. Everyone will find their own limits, but where those limits are won’t necessarily be obvious.
For example, you might not want to work with cigarette manufacturers, but how about vape companies? What about when they’re the same company?

3. When is consent needed?

There are certain Synthetic Media services such as voice cloning where consent is relatively straightforward. But when you’re dealing with faces, it’s less so. For example, one of our big, early hits was powering MyHeritage’s DeepNostalgia which allowed people to bring to life images of family members who are no longer with us. By definition, dead people can’t give consent, but to us, the social good of  being able to connect people more closely to their family outweighed that issue. And the result was  surprisingly emotional – you can view some of the responses here.

4. The whole company

The other big lesson we learned was that it’s a project which touches on every part of the business from product and tech to marketing and sales. Without their buy-in you risk one of two scenarios: guidelines which are so weak as to not be worth creating or, perhaps worse, making a promise you can’t live up to.

5. You won’t be able to do it all

You will need other people in the ecosystem to play their part. It’s all very well embedding a digital watermark to make the provenance of a piece of media clear. But unless that watermark is read by the main platforms, it’s close to useless.

Despite all these head-scratchers, the process of building our pledge was more than worth it. Not only did we learn a lot about where we really stood on certain issues, it also forced us to put in place processes and procedures which we might not have otherwise considered.

The whole point of Synthetic Futures is to share thinking and shape a positive future for synthetic media, so, if this is a step you’re also considering, we’d love to hear from you.

The post How We Got To Our Ethics Pledge appeared first on D-ID.

It’s a family time of year and the brand, owned by global food giant Mondelez, wanted to tap into the memories of the festival and carry those feelings forward to the next generation, to show that those stories never fade.

The campaign, created by Publicis Vietnam, was accompanied by a, D-ID-powered website created with Live Portrait technology. Consumers could upload family photos from previous years and multiple faces in the image are brought to life. Being naturally shareable it created a viral effect in the country.

“The Kinh Do brand has been synonymous with celebrating the Mid Autumn festival in Vietnam for over 20 years. This year – more than ever given the current pandemic – celebrating the season with loved ones is vital in upholding the stories of cherished moments in years gone by. Mondelēz is proud to uphold those values by enabling consumers to revisit, personalize and share those cherished memories. We are thrilled to be working with D-ID on this extraordinary campaign, and look forward to future collaborations,” said Simon Crowther, Vietnam Marketing Director at Mondelēz.

Anish Kotian, Deputy Managing Director at Publicis Vietnam said, “This is a coming together of head, heart and hand in one idea,” said. “Activating the Power of One, we formed a group of experts across Publicis Groupe from creatives, data, technology and media to bring the magic of Trung Thu to life.” The D-ID team have been great partners who have helped in bringing this innovative idea to life.’ 

If you would like to find out more about how D-ID can help your marketing campaign, please get in touch and let’s chat.

The post Marketing AI – Driving Consumer Engagement for Mondelez using Creative Reality™ appeared first on D-ID.

LOS ANGELES and TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Warner Bros. has partnered with Oblio and D-ID to create a first-of-its-kind film promotion, harnessing AI Video to give viewers a starring role in the new Hugh Jackman film, “Reminiscence.”

“Reminiscence,” a fast-paced science fiction film directed by Westworld’s Lisa Joy, premiered in theaters and on HBO Max on Aug. 20. The film centers on the character of Nick Bannister, played by Hugh Jackman. Bannister is a private investigator of the mind, navigating the alluring world of the past.

Thanks to patented machine-learning technology from D-ID, the Creative Reality company behind Deep Nostalgia, Warner Bros. and Oblio have created a web portal where viewers can create their own scene in the film — a memory brought to life. Users of this ground-breaking technology need only provide one still photograph to insert themselves, alongside Jackman, into a personalized movie preview that can then be shared across social media channels. The tool has generated 70,000 animations to date so far.

Now, rather than passively watch a movie, viewers can actually be a part of it. This next generation film promo represents a new trend we are about to see much more of from Hollywood.

“If Hollywood is a place where dreams are made, AI is the ultimate tool for expanding those dreams into extraordinary experiences,” said Gil Perry, CEO and co-founder of D-ID. “D-ID is the global leader in using AI, deep learning and image processing technology to bring still images to life. We are beyond excited to partner with one of the historic leaders of the film industry to deliver this technology to filmgoers, and we look forward to working with Warner Bros. on future projects.”

The partnership between D-ID and Warner Bros. was facilitated by Oblio, a digital studio specializing in the use of technology in film. Viewers might recognize Oblio’s innovative creative content from other Warner Bros. hits including the “Wonder Woman” series, “Shazam!” and J.K. Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts” series. Their collaboration with D-ID is the latest push toward AI-based synthetic media in Hollywood, where the appetite for new, innovative ways to lure audiences back to theaters has been growing since the advent of COVID-19.

“It doesn’t happen very often that creative and technical capabilities overlap so perfectly,” said Ben Posedel, a producer at Oblio. “With the foundational piece of the film narrative in ‘Reminiscence’ being the idea of going back through memory, we immediately thought about the innovative work being done in this space and how we could build with the tools D-ID has developed.”

About D-ID

D-ID is a Tel Aviv-based Creative Reality startup specializing in patented video reenactment technology using AI and deep learning. Established in 2017, D-ID created the first facial image de-identification solution to protect images and videos from facial recognition software. D-ID’s products range from animating still photos, to facilitating high-quality video productions, and creating viral user experiences such as Deep Nostalgia, which has generated nearly 100M animations since its launch in late February. With $23 million in funding from Y Combinator, Pitango, AXA, Foundation VC, AI Alliance, and others, D-ID aims to disrupt the media and entertainment industries with the creation of media using AI. With international customers in the swiftly growing synthetic media market, D-ID’s core competencies in the human face and deep learning enable its partners to create exciting and engaging content that was until now unimaginable.

The post Warner Bros. Partners with D-ID to Create Next Generation Film Promotion appeared first on D-ID.

Josh fits perfectly within India’s music and dance tradition, which dates  back 30,000 years ago to paleolithic cave paintings in Madhya Pradesh. Over the years, India has pushed musical innovation, and its influence can be heard in music performed around the world.

At D-ID, we are excited to become a part of this tradition. Earlier today, D-ID’s Live Portrait technology went live on the Josh app, which  is known for its music and video editing and sharing tools.

Thanks to D-ID’s deep learning and artificial intelligence-powered technology , users can upload still pictures to the app, and automagically animate faces. The faces do more than blink their eyes, nod their heads, and lift their eyebrows. They move in time with the music playing, bobbing, and shaking with the music. It creates a fun, immersive experience that captures the imagination and takes photo sharing to the next level.

We empower Josh users to take their favorite photos and bring them to the next level, dancing to the beat.

Users have already started creating and sharing their videos, and the initial reactions to this new tool have been great.

This is Indian superstar rapper Badshah showing users how to use the new feature:

Over the last year, we’ve seen our technology used to animate ancestors and preserve legacies. Through our partnership with Josh, we are excited to see our platform evolve into the entertainment sphere, and can’t wait to see where it pops up next.

The post Welcome to Josh appeared first on D-ID.

So when he approached us about his latest project, launching an NFT collection, we could not have been more excited.

Michael asked us to animate one of his most iconic images, Heedless of the Snow, an image he shot in Tibet in 2000, at the Labrang Monastery, the largest in the traditional Tibetan region of Amdo. The monastery is a focal point for Buddhist celebrations and pilgrimages. Xiahe, Gansu, China.

In the image, the monks, dusted in snow, wait for early prayers. 

“I wanted people to see what I could see when I was taking the picture. Seeing all the heads moving as the monks looked around.  And that’s exactly what D-ID were able to do – take what was a single image, a moment in time and transform it into an experience, transport the viewer back to my point of view as the photographer. I look forward to working with this visionary company now and in the future.”

The feeling is very much mutual, Michael.

The next auction of the world-renowned photographer’s M.Y. Earth Collection will take place on August 2nd at 10 PM EDT and last for two days

The auction will be hosted by Origin Protocol, whose inaugural NFT drop saw $11.7M worth of sales for popular house DJ 3LAU, and who have also hosted NFT sales by rapper Lupe Fiasco and others.

With the growing carbon footprint of the NFT industry in mind, proceeds of the sale will be used to offset its own carbon emissions and those produced by all NFTs minted as of Yamashita’s Earth Day announcement.

If you’d like to talk to us about bringing to life your artwork using Live Portrait, please get in touch

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