Andrew Lippman

Amy Smith, Hope Schroeder, Ziv Epstein et al.

Text-to-image generative models have recently exploded in popularity and accessibility. Yet so far, use of these models in creative tasks that bridge the 2D digital world and the creation of physical artefacts has been understudied. We conduct a pilot study to investigate if and how text-to-image models can be used to assist in upstream tasks within the creative process, such as ideation and visualization, prior to a sculpture-making activity. Thirty participants selected sculpture-making materials and generated three images using the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generator, each with text prompts of their choice, with the aim of informing and then creating a physical sculpture. The majority of participants (23/30) reported that the generated images informed their sculptures, and 28/30 reported interest in using text-to-image models to help them in a creative task in the future. We identify several prompt engineering strategies and find that a participant's prompting strategy relates to their stage in the creative process. We discuss how our findings can inform support for users at different stages of the design process and for using text-to-image models for physical artefact design.

Anku Rani, Valdemar Danry, Paul Pu Liang et al.

Given the growing prevalence of fake information, including increasingly realistic AI-generated news, there is an urgent need to train people to better evaluate and detect misinformation. While interactions with AI have been shown to durably reduce people's beliefs in false information, it is unclear whether these interactions also teach people the skills to discern false information themselves. We conducted a month-long study where 67 participants classified news headline-image pairs as real or fake, discussed their assessments with an AI system, followed by an unassisted evaluation of unseen news items to measure accuracy before, during, and after AI assistance. While AI assistance produced immediate improvements during AI-assisted sessions (+21\% average), participants' unassisted performance on new items declined significantly by 15.3\% in week 4 compared to week 0. These results indicate that while AI may help immediately, it ultimately degrades long-term misinformation detection abilities

Mehul Agarwal, Gauri Agarwal, Santiago Benoit et al.

Music is a deeply personal experience and our aim is to enhance this with a fully-automated pipeline for personalized music video generation. Our work allows listeners to not just be consumers but co-creators in the music video generation process by creating personalized, consistent and context-driven visuals based on lyrics, rhythm and emotion in the music. The pipeline combines multimodal translation and generation techniques and utilizes low-rank adaptation on listeners' images to create immersive music videos that reflect both the music and the individual. To ensure the ethical use of users' identity, we also introduce CHARCHA (patent pending), a facial identity verification protocol that protects people against unauthorized use of their face while at the same time collecting authorized images from users for personalizing their videos. This paper thus provides a secure and innovative framework for creating deeply personalized music videos.

Ian Magnusson, Aruna Sankaranarayanan, Andrew Lippman

We present Wav2Lip-Emotion, a video-to-video translation architecture that modifies facial expressions of emotion in videos of speakers. Previous work modifies emotion in images, uses a single image to produce a video with animated emotion, or puppets facial expressions in videos with landmarks from a reference video. However, many use cases such as modifying an actor's performance in post-production, coaching individuals to be more animated speakers, or touching up emotion in a teleconference require a video-to-video translation approach. We explore a method to maintain speakers' lip movements, identity, and pose while translating their expressed emotion. Our approach extends an existing multi-modal lip synchronization architecture to modify the speaker's emotion using L1 reconstruction and pre-trained emotion objectives. We also propose a novel automated emotion evaluation approach and corroborate it with a user study. These find that we succeed in modifying emotion while maintaining lip synchronization. Visual quality is somewhat diminished, with a trade off between greater emotion modification and visual quality between model variants. Nevertheless, we demonstrate (1) that facial expressions of emotion can be modified with nothing other than L1 reconstruction and pre-trained emotion objectives and (2) that our automated emotion evaluation approach aligns with human judgements.