TikTok could soon be awash with ads featuring artificial intelligence (AI)-powered “digital avatars” that brands can make to say virtually anything to promote their product
TikTok announced on June 17 that it’s expanding its Symphony ad suite with “stock avatars” and an “AI dubbing” feature it claims helps brands create and localize content.
The stock avatars are “all created from video footage of real paid actors that are licensed for commercial use,” and users can choose an AI-powered “voice and accent” to read out a script which will be dubbed onto the avatar, TikTok said.
A video demonstration shows a text-to-speech tool can dub over the actors with voices in multiple languages and attempt to mimic the mouth movements of the language. The script can even be generated by AI.
Ten languages and dialects are supported, including English, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. The tool detects the input language and dubs it into the users’ target language.
The new avatar feature is part of TikTok’s AI-backed ad suite rolled out earlier in 2024, which includes a “virtual assistant” that crawls the platform for trends and can generate ideas and a script.
The AI avatars, translation and dubbing features are in their beta versions, which TikTok has locked behind a waitlist for a limited number of users.
TikTok stars to get “custom avatars”
The platform also brings “custom avatars” that clone the likeness of content creators and brand spokespeople with the same “multi-language abilities” as the stock bots.
TikTok added that the custom avatars are being tested by its creator community.
TikTok will automatically label videos created with its AI tools as AI-generated “for full transparency.” A demonstration video featuring AI-cloned content creators shows a tiny box with the label in the bottom corner.
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The AI clones aren’t perfect. The video shows the mouth movements and gestures don’t match what is being spoken — a phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley.”
TikTok’s foray into AI avatars comes months after Meta rolled out an AI chatbot in September 2023 that donned the likeness of multiple celebrities.
Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg and former FTX promoter Tom Brady were among the nearly 30 high-profile figures who Meta cloned into AI bots and now manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
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