As someone who is in touch with a lot of people acting as VTubers in order to keep privacy while being able to express themselves, I'm very happy to see this!
EbSynth gave Joel Haver a trademark style[1], and I feel this might be the next step.
Agree in principle, though this likely might be easily reverse engineered to extract the masked face, so might actually be dangerous if someone was depending on it to hide their identity.
Seems like a form of virtual eugenics, a sensorship or the body in a way that's oppressively homogenizing. I feel like this is part of why zuck leverages cartoons to market metaverse for corporate settings, or why all the retail-safe anodyne pop muzak is full or autotune and flawless software-based overproduction. Not to be overly dramatic but imagine you are enraged but all anyone can see is a tranquil smile and your words replaced by positive endorsement; you have no mouth and you must scream
On the plus side I can see this being used to self-anonymize by individuals who want to protect themselves from facial recognition or other forms of id from undesirable parties, but that's more of a coping tactic for a society that fails to incorporate any honest ethical QC into product development to begin with.
I don't think this is directly more homogenizing than (say) makeup, which has the added property of being cemented by centuries of public presentation and beauty expectations.
That being said, I think there are probably lesser social ills that come from these technologies, ills that we'll have to adapt to. For example, we know that human interaction and emotional feedback are an important part of child development; it's as of yet unclear what effect this will have.
Current example would be the filters that modify appearance that's used a ton on influencer platforms. We've been photo shopping for years but now anyone can create a false identity online. The bad side of this is like catphishing and unrealistic body standards causing non obvious mental health issues across generations.
Future would be continuing to push the boundaries of auto formatting filtering styles based on your preference or the populations preference. Scamming, impersonation, money to be made from gullible people.
This is just the surface. I'm sure there are tons of fictional books exploring this or people with more destructive ideas.
Just because I'm terrified and am listing the bad, that doesn't mean I don't recognize the good that can come from it. I'm not sure if that out weighs the bad yet.
Staring at a filtered, "beautified" version of yourself trying to capture the perfect selfie directly causes facial dysmorphia by making the you in the mirror look ugly compared to the you in the phone display.
Quite excited for the eventual application of AI art like this into game dev and film.
Will be a very interesting time when a solid programmer and artist combo can generate, with AI tools, an entire studio's worth of content (animation, 2D/3D, etc) for their projects.
EbSynth gave Joel Haver a trademark style[1], and I feel this might be the next step.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq_KOmXyVDo