ML text rephrasing harbingers our AI-adjusted VR future

Used almost all of the current hype words in the title but could not think of a better one, sorry:)

A few years ago I interviewed at Grammarly and installed their extension to see what value it brings to users.

One of the features really caught my attention and sparked some thoughts. It was tone detection. The feature read your sentence and decided if it was “formal” or “friendly” and also offered to rephrase it according to your needs to change the tone to the desired one.

https://www.grammarly.com

For me, it looked like a first step towards possibility of a mass-altered communication in a company or even wider group of people. I imagined that if a similar and slightly more advanced system was deployed across all text communication channels in some organization, it could check, adjust and even “censor” all the messages being sent. Depending on the needs it could make everyone sound either very polite, or extremely direct, or even change the content to forbid discussions of some topics. In a fully remote async workspace where people mostly use text, some could try enforcing specific behaviors and culture values!

Of course, in the real life we still use audio and video calls, often meet in person, and impact of adjusting only text will be very limited. But with the second coming of VR when Apple releases their Vision¹ the idea might become a (dystopian) reality. Instead of video of our faces we might quickly get used to talk using generated avatars (https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23750096/apple-vision-pro-headset-persona-facetime).

And the latest generative AI technologies allow to not only rephrase text, but also to generate realistic audio with the simulated voice of any person. So what you say can be “dubbed” to adjust what other people hear from you. This dubbing is not real time yet, but probably soon will become close to it.

And thus, we can imagine combining all these features together. Now your disappointed and angry colleague will say some harsh words, but their avatar in your VR headset will smile and politely explain you the situation they are upset with.

What they say…

…vs what you see.

Looks like a scenario from a Black Mirror episode, but the technology is almost here. Will we use it and if yes, then to which extent is an open question though.

1. And the competitors will obviously catch up with their analogues