What in the deep-faking Black Mirror is this?
Apparently, you can now be paid £150,000 to let a robot use your face and voice. The singularity nears, my friends.
Tech company
Promobot is on the lookout for people who are willing to sell their physical likeness in order to create a new, hyper-realistic line of robots to be rolled out into customer-facing roles.
https://twitter.com/Metro_Tech/status/1465296773375836163?s=20
Those who sign-up for the scheme will essentially sign off on their face and voice being recreated onto a 3D model which will hope to be used in hotels, shopping centres, airports and more across North America and the Middle East from as early as 2023.
Labelled the "Humanoid_project", the Russian-based company's application process states it's looking for people with “kind and friendly” appearances from any race or gender, so long as they are over 25.
It stipulates that as well as giving your likeness, those successful will have to dictate at least 100 hours of speech material to create a lifelike voice that can properly communicate during intricate conversations.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CV3fU7jsfhX/
However, it would seem that the project itself has already closed, with the company website stating that it received
over 20,000 applications in the space of a day. Given the size of the pay packet and how much of our lives data companies have already sold off, it's not hard to see why.
But fear not, Promobot insists that there will be plenty more projects in the future, urging willing volunteers to keep an eye on their website and
Instagram.
At present, this is what their service robots look like, although we can't decide what's scarier: seeing this cheery guy turn his digital smile upside down or a more lifelike version giving us directions at B&Q?
https://www.instagram.com/p/CS6kHtVNOSv/
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