Discover AI – XPLR: MEDIA Brings Bavarian Cases To re:publica

Artificial intelligence – opportunity or risk, job eater or useful tool? The discussion on the six stages and numerous side stages was broad and long, many questions are still unanswered, but: there is great interest in the possibilities of the technology. Also at the XPLR: MEDIA stand. “The presentation was in tune with the times. You can tell by how many people were interested and looked at the cases,” says Thomas Endres. He is Managing Director at the Munich-based company TNG Technology Consulting and part of the “Innovation Hacking” team.

Deepfakes and generative AI at the stand

At the XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria stand, Thomas Endres and his team presented two AI use cases that playfully introduced visitors to the possibilities of the technologies while also highlighting their limits and risks. The deepfake mirror changed the faces of visitors to the stand in real time, retaining only the facial expressions of the original face. Television formats such as “Galileo” have also worked with TNG deepfakes. The AI-Slides application example was even closer to the everyday working lives of most interested parties. The tool uses systems such as GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion to generate presentations based solely on a title - and also performs them itself.

“I think it's great that XPLR: MEDIA in Bavaria is focusing on AI topics at the stand,” says Tina Lorenz. She is responsible for the digital theater division at Staatstheater Augsburg, which curated an appearance in the exhibition itself this year - “to show innovative and technology-savvy people that theater can be just as digital as their field of work.” For her, the topic of AI is particularly exciting, as theater is all about texts, (moving) images and copyright. “AI will significantly change our field of work. We have to learn to curate, we have to learn to prompt. I'm really looking forward to working with the new possibilities.”

AI start-ups are emerging in Bavaria

The AI hype in the media industry and beyond is inspiring many young people to integrate the technology into their day-to-day work or even develop business models from it. This is what Philipp Heideker from the Responsible Technology Hub in Munich did, for example. “AI is already very important here at re:publica. I use Chat GPT myself every day and am currently building a start-up, weteachyou.ai. We give Chat GPT courses for students.” He was delighted with the Re:publica panels on AI in the world of work and the examples from Bavaria and is optimistic about his own project. “Munich is almost ahead of Berlin when it comes to start-ups and digitalization topics. I think we are very well positioned in Bavaria in comparison.”