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Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I wonder what the future is gonna hold for famous people. There's gonna come a time when a rando dev can just press a button and a beautiful, funny, and any other-positive-quality-you-could-want person will be generated. This person will never commit a sex crime, will never say a racist remark, never do anything controversial. I imagine once that happens that's just kinda it for famous people who represent a brand.
Soo Hatsune Miku?
You know I was once convinced Hatsune Miku was the primitive start of a huge shift in the entertainment industry.
No one believed me when I said AI would one day be seriously considered against flesh and blood entertainers.
Well whose laughing now, huh?!
Neuro-sama as well.
Hah, I only knew that name from Daisy 2.0, turns out is a whole rabbit hole!
Well, that's an unexpected but correct answer
I thought that said A.I. Pacino for a second...
Or Pixel Perfect, the classic Disney Channel Original Movie.
But it's not that easy. If this rando dev's creation never catches the public's attention how can they love it, hate it, forgive it and love it again. So this positive-quality-creature can’t be a star.
And how about acting? You don’t think that acting is an art. That actors actually create a character, that’s either boring for the audience or catching it’s empathy. If there’s no actor creating this character, than the rando dev has to create them.
And to make a movie they have to create a lot of different characters and some will turn out to be better in creating characters than others. So they will be famous for doing it great. The public will admire them and they will have their moments on the red carpet and get the chance to make a racist remark or slap someone in the face.
You know, Mark Twain was such a rando dev. And he got a lot of fame. And now the fame will be coming back to the authors…
Look at animated movies. They're giant collaborations of hundreds of mostly anonymous people, basically large software development projects. They hire stars to do the voices, not because they're all that great as voice actors (trained voice actors can often be had cheaper), but to be the face of the film in public and promote it.
That is, the skill of a Hollywood star is not really anything to do with the product, but simply being famous, recognizable, and likeable. They are a brand, like Mickey Mouse or Colonel Sanders (once an actual person!).
I bet studio execs and agents hate having to deal with their stars' erratic behavior off screen and their personal projects. AI stars voiced by unseen voice actors are much more easier to deal with and they can pay voice actors less. This is IT driven enshittification of the entertainment industry.
Once it's been trained on the data of every movie ever made, won't the AI be able to figure out what exactly makes a performance nuanced and captivating? We're at the very start of this AI journey and it's often indistinguishable from real life already.
Yeah I'm not sure why people think art is only creatable by humans.
Because we like to think we’re special.
Ding ding ding! The same reason we believe that our planet is more than an insignificant mote of dust in the vast dark void of chaos.
Because an AI is created by humans. If an AI can create art, that art is ultimately created by humans
Mark Twain was created by other humans… but his grand parents aren’t famous.
I see no reason the thousands of people who work on an AI will be any more famous than the thousands of non-acting artists who currently work on a movie.
Maybe directors (or the AI prompt writer) becomes more famous… but even that will self-automate pretty quickly
Mark twain was created by natural precesses such as evolution, by randomness and by education/environment. It is a different thing.
AI is tha peak product of the collaboration of many human beings across generations. Scientists, engineers, artists, common people, all have "worked" together to generate an amazing, extraordinary, artificial thing.
If such things can create art, that art is made by everyone, just like honey is the final product of the whole colony of bees.
We simply need to change our perspective on fame. No one deserves fame, we all deserve to be celebrated
So if you teach someone to paint all their art is created by you?
Don't think that stands up really.
If I teach a neural network to draw with only my picture, the art is mine and of all people who contributed to creating the AI technology, including theory, software, hardware (because each of them contribute to the final result as much as the training data - even more in reality)...
If I teach someone to draw, and I am the only input he's ever had in his life, art is his, but I contributed to it.
Computers are not people
People aren't anything special. We are essentially pattern recognising computers. Our hardware is just very different.
I don't think the question is art vs not art. "Art" is an abstraction bestowed upon something by the viewer.
I think a lot of people are still struggling with this, but popular "art" is already largely devoid of humanity, and reduced to formulaic focus group fluff, and has been for a long, long time now. AI just streamlines the processes we already have.
Any additional debate on this will reduce to linguistics. You can - "I know it when I see it" - all you want, but that's a cop out. The reality is that media which produces a specific neurochemical response in humans doesn't, and never has required human input. A breathtaking landscape. A feeling of tranquility during snowfall. A kinship with an animal. An AI generated image. These are all the same process.
Really well said. The definition of art could be argued ad infinitum, and nobody will be any closer to an answer. What is a fact, is that at it's core art requires a recipe, and each element can be interchangeable, whether it is colors, perspective, medium, tools, pressure, speed, shapes, etc etc, & with A.I., it is just a streamlined process like you said, of taking these elements and mixing them in novel ways. The argument that A.I. could never match human art is such bullocks since as we all know, there is nothing wholly new. It is all recycled content at this point, with variations and arguably, A.I., will be able to add and subtract for those variations a lot faster than humans ever could.
You know those AI programs making AI art... the content made is by definition art. It's in the name.
True, anyone can call anything art if they want and the name can stick, just like anyone calling you a dumbass. ;)
True you can call someone a dumbass, but unless they're actually a dumbass, like you, then you're wrong.
There is no dumbass like me though.
Yeah I think people are always going to be seeking out something that's real, even if it's just to hate. (Celebrity culture has taught me that people love to hate other people). Well, of course, you can have an AI-generated person be controversial and racist, too, if that's what people want.
I suspect there's going to be an arms race around generating/detecting what is real.
We'll have social media celebrities which pretend to be real but are actually AI-generated. This will give Internet detectives plenty of material to work with to say "their hand looks a little weird in this one photo" or "notice how they've never posted a video? hmm suspicious" and expose them as being AI-generated. Then AI will get a bit better, and their hand won't look weird in that one photo any more, and they will be in (short, to start with) videos, and the Twitter sleuths will have to work even harder. (But they will never admit to themselves that they actually like the detective work involved in exposing/cancelling people). And the arms race in the social media sphere will escalate.
And then on the Hollywood side, dead celebrities and non-existent people will start making cameos and bit parts, as extras and things. And that will generate some controversy and hate, but people will watch it anyway. And studios will push harder and harder to make bigger and bigger roles for AI actors, seeing how much controversy things will generate, testing the waters, and seeing how many of us will watch it anyway. Maybe at first there will be a lot of mocap and other stuff to help the audience still feel like it's "real", but as the envelope is pushed, we will get more forgiving in what we expect to be "real".
Anyway, I think there will be a chase after people who are real, but I suspect eventually it'll just get too tiring or too difficult for most of us to find real celebrities.
Isn't animated content the precursor for this? Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse 'live forever'. We might also take a little from recast characters over time like James Bond, The Doctor, Captain Kirk, Superman...
I guess if we mean actors separate from characters it's a little different. Though I think wr still might take something from Bugs Bunny who's been in various shows, movies etc. And the famous part is the character, you have to be a big Bugs Bunny nerd to know or car about who is doing the voice or animation or writing really. So that might well be where we go - the character is tied to the brand / company that owns it but no particular person.
I don't think there's gonna be a big backlash really. This may make actual actors in movies like the etsy handcrafted stuff vs the knock off brand on Amazon, but both have a market. The "more expensive" real market might well shrink a lot and if you want to be an actor you're back to actual stage performance.
There's already a smaller fandom of actual AI VTubers. VAs of VTubers don't seem to care at all, and even being amazed by the tech.
Yes ... interesting and on point! Only two thoughts to add ...
Now's a good time to pay attention to what industries come off as the most creepy and dystopian, as AI is sort of allowing them to reveal themselves as always that way
And, relatedly, something I keep thinking of with stories like this is that we should maybe try to realise how continuous the transition into dystopian behaviour is. Like, with your artificial celebrity ... are we not somewhat headed that way already with the underlying real life person merely being the mold onto which an artificial celebrity is cast? From "photoshopped" images and footage, scripted and produced social media statements, ads everywhere, and branding driving everything ... is it really a huge discrete step to simply digitise the likeness of someone ahead of time?
The lesson ... fighting against small things can matter ... a lot. Just like the parable of "First the came for X and I didn't care ... ". Once you let the line be moved a little in the wrong direction on something that matters, it can end up moving a lot!! And if we're truly going through some late-stage-capitalism dystopia ATM, a lot of it, IMO, comes down to forgetting the importance of doing things on principle.
Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile.
Give em an inch and they'll take your arm and your first born child.
But there's the rub. Right now the "principle" here is basically being a luddite to me. I don't see a big moral quandary - I see a contract dispute between 2 well funded groups regarding voluntary employment. And a demonstration of why Unions might be good for workers.
Stage theatre will make a come back.
Just like vinyl albums are now $50+ a piece
At what point does the AI just write the script, build actors and environments for it, "shoot"/render the movie, advertise it, and send it out without any human interaction? Will the movies of the future just all be animated? Would definitely be far cheaper than buying equipment, paying staff, and renting locations.
The AI is gonna huff it's own farts eventually and start degrading in quality as more and more AI content is generated. AI creates a novel imitation of what's been done before. It doesn't make anything truly novel itself.
I think you're overestimating what humans do
Well, we have a source of input that AIs don't for the moment, and that's our actual experiences in the world. Once we turn that into art or text or whatever, the AIs can train on it, but we're like the photosynthesizing plants at the bottom of the content food chain.
But controversy is good, it generates attention. My fear is that the "optimized" artificial celebrity will be exactly that and it will be a whole new level of shitshow. When you think about it, there are already people who maintain "controversial" public personas for that exact reason (not naming any, since I don't want to give them more attention), so it's not even that far fetched.
I can't wait to see all the Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson A.I.-likes.
I really hope the trolls put those people's (and others like them) likenesses in compromising positions using A.I. fuckery.
That assumes perfection. An AI is going to make mistakes. Maybe not the same mistakes a human will, but they will still make mistakes.
It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to convince some corporate juggernaut to inflict it upon us.
Basically the idea of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Square was just 20 years early.