Onslaught of technology on reality should be checked

When Guo Degang, a crosstalk performer, began performing Chinese crosstalk in English, and Zhao Benshan, a comedian, started telling his iconic jokes in a Cockney accent in popular AI-generated short videos on social media sites, many felt artificial intelligence has "matured".

Speech simulation and synthesis technology have been widely used in many productions, from movies and TV shows to video clips. The AI-generated videos of Guo and Zhao, too, reflect the advancement of technology. For example, the simulation appears realistic, because the voices, emotions and inflections in the videos seem to match those of Guo and Zhao.

The video clips show the efficacy and power of AI, in terms of finesse of text, audiovisual quality, and even composite multimedia content generation, have reached a very high level. That means the world is on the cusp of adopting AI technology in content production on a mass scale.