AI-generated avatars are further blurring the lines of reality as more life-like characters and animations are integrated into social media and digital platforms.
It’s now possible to generate avatars in minutes using audio, images or videos and produce content with hundreds of different backgrounds, outfits, tones and languages or gestures. But do you as a marketer aim for realism or steer clear of the uncanny valley? Increasingly, they are trying to balance the quirky with the realistic in an avatar’s look and feel to strike the right tone.
The uncanny valley refers to an unease or negative response (that creepy vibe) we feel when encountering something that seems almost human — but it feels off. Think early forms of generative AI-designed avatars that look like a real person, but has no eye movement, or a digital representation that looks exactly like an influencer, but is lacking natural movement or features.
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The so-called TikTok-ification of social media, in which the platform’s short-form, viral, and algorithm-driven content, has fueled the exponential growth of the influencer marketplace and creator economy. As it swells, marketers are tasked with allocating ad dollars to maximize return on investment. As it stands, smaller, more niche creators are delivering the best bang for buck, according to five influencer marketing execs Digiday spoke to for this story.
That means general lifestyle influencers have to adapt and find a niche or run the risk of fizzling out.
“It’s attention, really,” said Sophie Crowther, global talent partnerships director at Billion Dollar Boy, and head of creators at FiveTwoNine, the influencer marketing shop’s creator community membership program. “Attention is in new formats, new creators that are tapping into something completely brand new, basically.”
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If there’s one thing Steven Moffatt loves to do with Doctor Who, it’s to find a monster buried in the mundane. He’s made statues, shadows, lost children and even the idea of silence into some of the show’s most terrifying villains. Sadly, the mysterious extra door you often find in older hotel rooms isn’t as universal a concern, but it’s still a rich seam for him to mine. That’s the inspiration for “Joy to the World,” Doctor Who’s 2024 Christmas Special. Which is light, fun and a little bit scattershot, much like Christmas is meant to be, right?
When Doctor Who returned, the show was woven back into the UK's cultural firmament in a way it never had been before. Part of that process was adding the show to the BBC One Christmas Day schedule, making it a universal cultural touchstone. For most of its post-2005 run, it has aired an episode next to the Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders’ festive specials. Imagine the British equivalent to those everyone-gathered-around-the-TV events like the Super Bowl or the Macy’s Day Parade, but on Christmas Day. Even if you don’t like any of the fare on offer, you’re still expected to sit with the family and consume it.
With these specials, the prestige timeslot, longer runtime and bigger budget are burdens as much as they are benefits. The show has to play to a far broader audience than normal, with diehard fans sitting elbow-to-elbow with elderly relatives filling every silence with gossip about their neighbor's garden project. Consequently, the story needs to be a little looser, with less need for the audience to be paying undivided attention to what’s going on. And it needs to be an oasis of fun in the melodramatic drudgery that is the BBC One Christmas Day schedule.
Normally, the festive special would be the sole province of the showrunner but Russell T. Davies handed the reins to Steven Moffatt. Moffatt succeeded Davies as showrunner the first time around, co-created Sherlock and is widely-regarded as the best Who writer of the 21st century. With a pedigree as impeccable as that, and having already written "Boom" for the Ncuti Gatwa’s first season in the title road, expectations are high.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
Moffatt is an arch farce writer and has a strong grasp of structure, so it’s no surprise we open in medias res. The Doctor is offering room service to a variety of people in different time periods including Edmund Hilary’s base camp at Everest and the Orient express before stumbling in on Joy in a miserable London hotel room in 2024. After the credits, we spool back to the Doctor arriving in the Time Hotel, which allows guests to vacation throughout history. Don’t worry about causality or any A Sound of Thundershenanigans, the Hotel is somehow built to protect its guests from screwing up the timeline.
The Doctor is looking to steal some milk for his coffee from the hotel buffet, but his eye is caught on something sinister: A person carrying a briefcase with a handcuff chain is trying to check into a room. The Doctor recruits Trev, one of the employees, to keep watch while he scouts ahead to work out what scheme could be afoot. As it turns out, the case is sentient and evil, leaping from host to host and possessing each one in turn. Once it’s leapt to the next host, the last one disintegrates.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
It’s here the Doctor bumps into Joy who, through hijinks, winds up handcuffed to the case in place of the hotel manager. When the Doctor opens the case to try and find a solution, the case threatens to kill whoever it’s connected to unless it gets a four digit code. Who shall provide the code? The Doctor, emerging from his own future, taking Joy with him while leaving “our” Doctor trapped in 2024 without the TARDIS. As the hotel door closes, the Doctor hurls abuse at his future self, about why he’s always alone and people are always leaving him. He’s doubly upset as he never normally has to travel “the long way around,” one day after the other.
And so, the episode essentially stops to give us an extended sequence of the Doctor making friends with Anita, the hotel manager. The Doctor gets a job as the hotel’s handyperson, and slowly lets his guard down, spending more time with Anita until they’re a platonic couple. It’s a sequence you’d never see in a regular episode, with snatches of the Doctor and Anita’s life. He makes the microwave bigger on the inside, repaints Anita’s car TARDIS blue and they even sit and talk to one another on chairs — a key visual given the lack of chairs on the TARDIS. But as the year elapses and it’s time for the Doctor to return to his own show, he waves goodbye to Anita.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
Returning to the time hotel, the Doctor bursts back in on the events of a year ago, sharing the code and yanking Joy off to new adventures. The Doctor works out the briefcase holds the embryonic form of an artificially-created star that would offer a source of imaginable power to whoever owned it. But unless you own the Hand of Omega, stars take a long time to develop, far longer than anyone would be able to wait and test their experiment. Unless, of course, you hijack a time hotel and send it back to dinosaur times, waiting for when human history begins to see if it works.
Joy, still possessed by the case, heads to the hotel’s dinosaur room while the Doctor tries to break its hold over her. To do that, he provokes an emotion strong enough to poison the link between the case and its host before it obliterates them. He bullies her, goading her into disclosing why she's staying at a downmarket London hotel. Turns out she’s grieving the loss of her mother who died of COVID-19 in an isolation ward and Joy was unable to say goodbye to her in person. Sadly, before the Doctor can deactivate the star seed, it’s eaten by a (brilliant-looking) dinosaur, putting it out of his reach.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
The Doctor and Joy head back to the hotel and, 65 million years later, find the star is now ready to detonate. It’s been locked inside a stone structure with a heavy stone door that neither of them can move, and time is running out. So, the Doctor, who boasts that he’s “good with rope,” steals a rope from the Everest base camp, hanging it off the back of the Orient Express to haul the stone away.. It’s an impressive and kinetic sequence let down only by the dreadful CGI when Gatwa’s standing on the train. Typical Doctor Who: It can now do convincing dinosaurs, but now can’t do a convincing train.
It’s here things lose their coherence, since Joy’s eyes flash with possession energy, but by the time the Doctor returns, Joy has… eaten the star? Absorbed it somehow? Made friends with and bonded with it? He finds her standing on a cliff edge, where Joy says she’ll merge with the star and take it to the heavens, where it will do nobody any harm at all. At this point in my notes, I wrote “Don’t let this be Bethlehem,” when the camera pulls out to reveal that’s exactly where they are, complete with three camels parked outside a stable. Oy.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
Joy reunites with her mother and the Doctor goes back to traveling, but not before he gets Anita a job running the Time Hotel. We also get a little shot of Ruby Sunday, who will return to the show for its second season proper.
As I said at the top, you can’t judge “Joy to the World” on the merits of a regular episode since it’s serving multiple masters. But I don’t think we could call it the strongest episode of either Steven Moffatt’s oeuvre or the show’s various Christmas Specials. Like all of the Disney-era episodes, it has a slightly incoherent quality where the pacing sags and zips in all the wrong places. I’m for the lengthy aside where we see a “normal” year in the life of the Doctor, but the story framing it should have been tighter to balance out the slowness. It’s a fun enough way to pass an hour with a stomach full of holiday turkey (or your preferred equivalent) with enough mawkishness to make you think you’ve seen something quite profound. But I don’t think I’ll be coming back to watch this one again and again like I would for, say, “The Christmas Invasion.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/doctor-who-joy-to-the-world-review-what-a-star-190018215.html?src=rss
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Hello! Here's a holiday gift: an episode of the 404 Media Podcast that was previously only for paying subscribers! It gives a lot more context on the how and why we cover AI they way we do. Here's the original description of the episode:
We got a lot of, let's say, feedback, with some of our recent stories on artificial intelligence. One was about people using Bing's AI to create images of cartoon characters flying a plane into a pair of skyscrapers. Another was about 4chan using the same tech to quickly generate racist images. Here, we use that dialogue as a springboard to chat about why we cover AI the way we do, the purpose of journalism, and how that relates to AI and tech overall. This was fun, and let us know what you think. Definitely happy to do more of these sorts of discussions for our subscribers in the future.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
