There is a little bit of Shahrukh in every Indian's Cadbury treat! #ai #deepfake #srk #ai #youtube

The ad campaign lets local store owners to create an ad for their shops featuring Shah Rukh Khan for free. Thanks to the magical power of AI & ML, as these technologies were used to recreate Khan's face and voice in a way that it sounds like the actor is saying the local store or brand's name.
Another Diwali is around the corner and another Cadbury ad has stolen the limelight, this time with an AI twist.

If you were living under a rock for the past one week or longer, then let me bring you up to the pace. Cadbury has launched an ad campaign featuring the Bollywood Badshah Shah Rukh Khan. But, the plot twist is that it is not “just a Cadbury ad” or as per the Gen Z lingo- #NotJustACadburyAd. Instead, this one lets local store owners to create an ad for their shops featuring Shah Rukh Khan for free. The local shops can now use the face and voice of the actor to promote their brand without spending a penny.

Thanks to the magical power of AI & ML, as these technologies were used to recreate Khan's face and voice in a way that it sounds like the actor is saying the local store or brand's name.

Pretty awesome, right?

To launch this ad campaign, Cadbury collaborated with an Indian AI startup called Rephrase AI- a synthetic media production platform that principally uses AI for video personalisation.

"Rephrase AI is proud to partner with Mondelez (the parent company of Cadbury) to help enable personalised ads for all local stores in the country. This shows the power of the Generative AI technology we've been pioneering for the last three years,” said Ashray Malhotra, CEO and Co-Founder of Rephrase AI to INDIAai.

“This is the start of the synthetic media revolution where we help businesses communicate with their customers on a one-on-one basis with their brand ambassadors, help CXOs talk to their employees personally at scale, and help run hyper-targeted ad content,” he added.

Despite the ad campaign putting most of us in awe, numerous concerns have been raised about its ethics and close similarity to another type of synthetic media called deepfakes, which has gained significant notoriety in the last couple of years.

Rephrase AI points out that their work is not deepfakes but they do share the same techniques for creation. According to Rephrase AI, while deepfakes essentially means creating synthetic videos with deep neural networks, the colloquial use of the term is for transferring movements and expressions of one person to another; an equivalent in the real world would be voice mimicking for speech.

According to Rephrase AI, for this particular ad campaign, real videos were created from scratch and they used facial re-enactment tools, where we predict the lip movements, facial expressions, head movements, eye blinks, and everything that goes into making the AI-driven presenter's face look photorealistic - to drive the campaign.