AI's getting better at faking crowds. Here's why that's cause for concern

"Crowd scenes have been challenging to create in a seamless fashion using AI, as the recent controversy over a Will Smith concert video shows."

"But the technology is improving fast, and there are serious implications for how these "fake" crowds might be coopted by entertainers, politicians and others at a time when success is often equated with popularity."

Creating seamless crowd scenes with AI has been technically challenging, as highlighted by a controversy over a Will Smith concert video. The underlying generative techniques are improving rapidly, reducing visible artifacts and increasing realism. As realism improves, artificial crowds become easier to produce at scale and cheaper to deploy. Entertainers, politicians, marketers, and other actors can coopt fake crowds to manufacture impressions of popularity and momentum. The conflation of success with popularity increases the incentive to deploy synthetic audiences to influence public perception and social proof.

Read at www.npr.org