[The new free iOS app Hotshot uses image generating AI to create photos of users and anyone in their contacts doing “anything.” If the images it produces aren’t convincingly real now it’s hard to imagine they won’t be soon. The story below from Futurism, supplemented by excerpts from The Chainsaw, provides details. Wonderful Engineering echoes other coverage with the statement that the app “raises important questions regarding ownership, consent, and authenticity. Genuine human connections cannot ultimately be supplanted by manufactured experiences and visuals.” Mosaic ML has an interview with the co-founders of the company behind the app, Natural Synthetics, that includes this:
“What was the inspiration for your Hotshot app?
Aakash Sastry (Natural Synthetics Co-Founder & CEO): We’ve been building different social apps since 2012. John was building visual communication apps before I met him, and I was building a video chat app where you would be live on camera as soon as you opened it. I thought that live broadcasting to your friends would be really fun, but it turned out that it was intimidating for users to be instantly streaming. The failure of that app gave us the insight that we needed to create an environment that made people more comfortable and confident when expressing themselves online. In 2017 we started our company, Natural Synthetics. We released Hotshot in the iOS App Store in January 2023.
What do you think is next in the Generative AI space?
AS: I think a lot of people are looking for different ways to express themselves visually online. We see a ton of potential to make people even more confident and comfortable with their visual communication by using Generative AI. We’ve already seen a pretty massive shift in the industry with these Generative AI models. I believe we’re going to see a Cambrian explosion in actual applications for consumers and businesses. At Natural Synthetics, we’re fascinated by this idea of personalized media. If you think about it, it’s kind of odd that we all consume the same media on a daily basis. What will the world look like if media that previously took years or months to create can now be done by one person. What will the world look like when our daydreams become tangible and can be shared with our friends in a matter of seconds?
We’ll be releasing our next big model update to Hotshot soon – stay tuned!”
–Matthew]
New AI Service Makes Fake Photos of You Hanging Out With Your Friends, Laughing and Having a Great Time
“My Current Friends Would Kill Me If I Tried This.”
By Maggie Harrison
May 7, 2023
Fancy Salads
Don’t want to spend time with other humans, but still want to make it look like you’re hanging out with your pals IRL? Boy, do we have just the thing.
A new app called Hotshot makes use of the power of AI to generate fake photos of you and your pals — whether they agreed to the arrangement or not.
[The Chainsaw: This means that you don’t have to say yes to the next pub night with the boys if you’re not feeling it – you can just download the app and let technology take you there instead.]
“Imagine if Midjourney knew what your friends looked like… Introducing Hotshot!” tweeted one of the app’s cofounders Aakash Sastry. “Make photos with ANYONE IN YOUR CONTACTS doing ANYTHING.”
In a demonstration, Sastry shared some Hotspot-generated photos of himself and his cofounder together eating salads in a fancy restaurant.
The results arguably leave a lot to be desired. The photos fall squarely in the uncanny valley, making both their faces appear like cartoonish AI interpolations.
[The Chainsaw: Sastry added that the quality of the photos “are designed to get better as people use them,” because after all, it is an AI model that relies on user data.]
“Making memes of your friends,” reads the company’s page on the app store, “has never been easier.”
Involuntary Participation
Of course, while we love goofy photos of our friends as much as the next guy, something about using an AI app to create images of you and your friends hanging out together — rather than just hanging out with them in real life — feels just a too little dystopian for our taste.
Especially given the fact that face-to-face human interaction is more important than ever in a post-pandemic world, Hotshot feels a little like a regression. Besides, even if you don’t live close to your friends, video chat programs like FaceTime and Zoom also exist.
Users on Twitter weren’t exactly impressed, calling the app “pretty creepy.”
“My current friends would kill me if I tried this,” another user wrote. “Rightly so.”
[The Chainsaw: “If anyone used my photos like this without my permission, we’d probably not be friends any longer,” commented a user.
“The potential here for abuse and criminality is just humongous. This is exactly the sort of product that the FTC was warning about the other day,” said web developer Baldur Bjarnason.]
That said, skipping out on hanging with your friends may not have been the intention. Bitmoji, an app that allows you to turn yourself into your own emoji avatar, did have a moment, so maybe there is some appeal to this kind of AI app.
At least, its creators also claim in the app’s privacy policy that all user photos are deleted 24 hours after they’re uploaded and will never be shared with any third-party platforms — which is rarely a given these days.
We won’t stop you from generating images of you hanging out with your besties. But at least promise us that you’ll try to eat salads with friends in real life sometimes, too.