What synthespians can teach us about IP - and about Grok’s horrifying actions

Earlier this month, diginomica looked at how humanoid robots could be trained to carry out complex tasks on farms by remote tele-operators – casual workers based overseas, who would previously have migrated in the harvest season. In this way, seasonal labor shortages could be eased, and at the same time, robots could be trained to do manual work that would be difficult to simulate, or to teach by other means. An interesting concept, if an ethical minefield, given that migrant workers would be training their long-term replacements. And in the interim, they would be dehumanised by being the invisible, remote operators of onsite robots

So, what has all this got to do with synthespians and Grok-generated porn?

In a way, text-to-video AI provider Synthesia built its platform using a similar process to the robot farmers example, above. From its foundation six years ago, the company employed consenting human actors to train ...