AI Avatars Could Dominate TikTok Ads Going Forward

TikTok is poised to introduce advertisements featuring AI-driven digital avatars, allowing brands to create promotional content without using real actors. Recently announced on June 17th, TikTok is expanding its Symphony ad suite by offering stock avatars and an AI dubbing capability. These avatars are generated via video footage of paid actors licensed for commercial use. Users can select an AI-generated voice and accent to narrate a script, which is then dubbed onto the avatar.

AI Takes Over

A demonstration showcases a text-to-speech tool that overlays voices in multiple languages and attempts to synchronize mouth movements accordingly. The script itself can even be AI-generated. This feature supports ten languages and dialects, such as English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean, automatically detecting and translating input languages into the desired target language.

This new avatar functionality is part of the new AI-powered ad suite introduced earlier this year, which includes a virtual assistant that monitors platform trends and can suggest content ideas and scripts. These AI avatars, translation services, and dubbing capabilities are currently in beta and accessible via a waitlist for a limited number of users.

Need For Caution

TikTok is also developing custom avatars that replicate the appearance of content creators and brand representatives, offering similar multi-language capabilities as the stock avatars. These custom avatars are being tested with the creator community.

To ensure transparency, TikTok will automatically label videos created using its AI tools as AI-generated. This labeling includes a small box denoting the origin of the content. However, the AI-cloned content creators demonstrate imperfections, such as mismatched mouth movements and gestures, a known challenge referred to as the uncanny valley.

More importantly, crypto scams on TikTok are a prevalent issue where users are targeted with fraudulent schemes promising quick financial gains through investments or giveaways. These scams often utilize fake profiles, impersonate reputable figures in the crypto industry, and the aforementioned AI avatars may only exacerbate this issue.