The late CPI(M) stalwart E.K. Nayanar was a crowd-puller for the party during elections. Nearly two decades since his death, the affable leader made a ‘comeback’ to the bustle of electioneering thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI). A 28-seconds-long Instagram story featuring the former Chief Minister seeking support in his voice for the Left Democratic Front (LDF) candidate from Attingal Lok Sabha constituency V. Joy has gone viral on social media.
“Nayanar was universally liked and guaranteed an immediate connect with the people, which was the reason he was chosen. We split the story into two parts: video and audio. The audio part was more challenging as we had to get his modulations and slang spot on. We created a data set of his voice, trained an AI model and integrated it with a base voice of a person whose slang almost matched the Kannur lingo of Nayanar. We also used open source software to filter out noise,” said Arun Raj, a visual artist who created the story.
