@ Luke:
I thought it was entertaining enough. It’s worth seeing how they go about creating and selling Simone :)

@ Mart:

You know, I wish we had this technology. I would totally not mind being able to download a female celebrity AI persona onto a blank robot. Hmm… At this point in time I think I would probably go for an Ellen Page-bot or maybe an Emma Stone-bot. :P Who would you download?

Also, my blog would not suffer due to this since this is probably the farthest thing I could do to try to impress the opposite sex. ;)

@ Dileep:

You know, one of these days I will need to play Deus Ex. Seriously.

@ Liudvikas:

Heh, it is probably not that far fetched. Making pop music ought to be easy to automate. The more difficult task would be to write an AI that would analyze the market and book her concerts and release CD’s without any human input.

You know, this might be exactly what we need to get the AI industry off the ground. :)

@ nitro2k01:

Yes, true. But if I read the article correctly the voice actor merely provided baseline for the software initially. You can use it to write new songs by feeding in lyrics and auto-tuning.

@ Sameer:

I have not seen that movie. Is it any good? Sounds intriguing, and I think I saw a trailer for it once back in the day. Should I check it out?

This really reminds of the film S1mOne starring Al Pacino. Only thing is the audience didn’t know about Simone’s true heritage. This is not a far stretch I think, in fact, why not implement this? Why bother going through casting-sessions searching for an actor/actress who can properly depict your protagonist when you can create him/her? I’d be interested to see how people react. I love Leto Atreides II for instance and I’d die for John Connor. I know they’re not real people but that doesn’t mean I care any less. To me, Muhammad Ali IS the greatest of all times but I’ll never meet him or talk to him upclose. All I’ve ever seen from him was recorded and made available (online). It is different and I’m not saying what real people do holds the same value as what scripted fictional characters do but the way we “worship” them might not be so different.

Actually, you’re half-wrong about Miku. Each of the Vocaloids are created from real voice material, even if (as far as I understand) that material is only used to set parameters for the synth. The voice of Miku is modeled after voice actress Saki Fujita. However, Miss Teal Hair is certainly the symbol of virtual star fandom like no other!

I love Hatsune Miku, or at least the idea behind her. I can’t wait until nothing is human in her, when the music and lyrics will be written by computer I will claim victory for human race.

I think Ion Storm tried to pull the same trick with ‘NG Resonance’ in Deus Ex 2.

Well, whatever you do, just remember: Don’t Date Robots!!