Artificial Intelligence, the metaverse, and digital diplomacy are rapidly converging and Ambassador David Saranga is leading the charge, making Israel one of the first countries to pioneer the use of this ground-breaking technology. Ambassador Saranga, the Digital Diplomacy Bureau Director at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made a bold statement with an AI generated video of himself speaking in eight different languages. With a single video, Saranga was able to reach 2 billion viewers, sending out a message of peace and goodwill to international audiences in Arabic, Chinese Mandarin, Persian, Greek, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish. This is only the beginning of how AI technology can be used to augment the long-standing practice of diplomacy.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was quick to embrace digital media, setting up a Twitter profile in 2009 and now maintaining accounts in more than 50 languages. They currently get around 2 billion impressions a year, providing the country with a substantial global reach. In particular, this past year the Persian-language content generated nearly 450 million engagements in Iran, a country Israel does not have diplomatic ties with. Ambassador Saranga also notes that the use of the metaverse and AI in digital diplomacy is still at its very beginnings. The Israeli Embassy in South Korea recently created a diplomatic mission in the metaverse, believed to be the first of its kind. To bypass strict social media bans, Israel has utilized Instagram for public diplomacy and made strides in reaching out to younger audiences on TikTok.
Tel Aviv-based startup D-ID has provided the Israeli Foreign Ministry with its speaking portrait platform which utilizes text-to-video generation of digital presenters or avatars to send out messages of peace and goodwill to foreign nations. As the field of generative AI grows, D-ID makes sure to abide by ethical regulations as set up by the Partnership on AI and the Content Authenticity Initiative. They are sure to include digital watermarks on all of the videos they produce to clarify that the image is computer-generated and place limits on the type of content that can be uploaded. Moreover, they are devoted to using their great technology for ethical and positive purposes such as addressing issues like domestic violence and HIV. This month, D-ID unveiled a platform that allows users to simulate face-to-face conversation with AI-generated digital humans.
D-ID has positioned itself at the forefront of the generative AI field with their speaking portrait platform and multiple initiatives to promote a positive use of AI. Founded in 2017, D-ID works towards their mission to exist to preserve human identity through computer vision by leveraging face recognition and text-to-video for a variety of ethical applications. Under the leadership of D-ID Co-founder and CEO Gil Perry and VP of Product Marketing Yaniv Levi, the company has earned a strong reputation in the AI community and set an example of how AI can be used to benefit diplomacy.
