ETHICS: Our code of Ethics for Avatars
If, by creating brand owned, personality based Avatars for digital and Mirrorworlds in the metaverse, we create a new form of relationship, an emotional bond with a consumer, then we have a responsibility.
People, and especially children, need to know if an Avatar is a real person, a brand-owned character, or pure entertainment. This allows consumers to choose to suspend disbelief (if entertainment) or understand the motivations of a brand or creator owned character immediately. There are three key things to consider;
Ownership – who owns the Virtual Human - what are their motivations?
Accountability / traceability – so that V.Is are responsible and have ramifications for their behaviour – no trolling
Labelling – watermarking the Virtual: Immediate identification of the motivation – Human / Brand / Creator
We have created a system we call ABC, where each Avatar has to define its category:
A = Avatar - of a real person
B = Brand - owned by a brand
C = Creator - owned by a creator
Effectively we need to create self-regulation as synthetic media (the 3rd media movement) becomes ubiquitous.
Different companies in the space are coming up with different approaches with Adobe leading the way.
ADOBE
Adobe have created the Content Authenticity Initiative of which VIA is a member.
The system aims to provide provenance for digital media, giving creators tools to express objective reality and empowering consumers to evaluate whether what they are seeing is trustworthy.
It focuses on being able to ‘track’ authorship and is a simple, extensible and distributed media provenance solution.
Facebook have a made commitment that for all of their ‘eyewear’, they will seek to create product that has no access to any form of private data.
While this is not strictly related to Virtual Human ethics, it shows a strong commitment to ensure that the privacy for their hardware,, when it comes to Avatars, we have presented our code of ethics which was well received but there has been nothing concreate around identification of Avatar owner - this is a concern.
SAMSUNG
Samsung have created their ‘Neo’ Virtual Humans, and want to encourage ‘anonymity’.
This is quite breath-taking in its lack of understanding of the risks this creates. A 50 year old man pretending to be a 12 year old girl? Or an auto-generated Avatar made by a nefarious government to sow disinformation? It would be an absolute disaster.
European Advertising Standards Association (EASA)
In August 2020 we were invited by the Consul General of the European Advertising Standards Agency (EASA) – the umbrella body that runs each Advertising Standards Authority throughout Europe – to speak at the yearly EASA meet. At this yearly session I outlined the code of ethics and suggested creating a Virtual Human / Avatar Practitioners Association.
Interestingly the only advertising authority that makes any references to Virtual Humans is the French code – this code covers all Virtual Human characters but specifically refers to VH’s used for advertising purposes. A Europe-wide code of ethics would, of course, need to go beyond this.
If you are an agency or designer who wants to sign up, email me on dudley@virtualinfluencer.agency
