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Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas – for free, forever
- centro 3y agoThis should obviously be illegal if it's not already. Hopefully case law directs the legal system towards the correct conclusion.
- ars 3y agoIt should be illegal for me to make a digital version of myself if I want to? Why?
- obliteratus 3y agoThe parent comment was most likely referring to the idea that someone else should compel you to give away the replica to an organization, in perpetuity, without compensation or rights. I don't think anybody is against a digital replica used privately where you can be sure you control the data and any derived income.
- em-bee 3y agono, it should be illegal to pay you only a pittance of a lump sum to be able to use your digital version in a movie. for example maybe you should have the right to get paid for every minute that your digital version appears on screen, like actors are paid today.
- ars 3y agoIsn't that just a contract negociation? Why does it have to be a law?
- em-bee 3y agobecause this is a negotiation between weak individuals and a very strong movie companies. as the movie companies have shown that they won't hesitate to exploit people working for them, laws are needed to protect the individuals.
- ars 3y agoModels who pose for digital animation are not weaker than other humans, who don't require specialized laws to protect them. People have agency and can decide for themselves if a job offer is worth it. Do clothing models have special laws? Do the people who pose for stock photos have special laws?
- em-bee 3y agoyou don't get the point. every individual is weak in the face of a large corporation seeking to exploit them. that's why we have laws to protect employees. People have agency and can decide for themselves if a job offer is worth it if they desperately need a job then they don't. the pandemic actually demonstrated that. many more people than before are refusing to work when a job forces them to be in an office. that means previously they accepted that work even though they would have preferred not to. but they didn't have the agency to voice that preference. only the demonstrated evidence that work from home is possible and the collective awareness of that gave them that agency. likewise, most people are uninformed as to the consequences for signing away the right of a digital version of themselves. at a minimum they are not aware of its value. that is a power imbalance the film industry seeks to exploit, and that power imbalance must be corrected by giving individuals more protection. it is similar to copyright. i know the US doesn't recognize this but at least in europe copyright includes the inalienable right for a creator to be associated with their work even if they sold away the right to profit from it financially. Do the people who pose for stock photos have special laws? yes, they have the right to control how their image is used. in a similar manner, at a minimum it must be recognized that an individual should always have the right to use their own digital version as they wish and to control how their digital version is used by others and that selling the rights to someone else must not prevent them from doing so. where there large likelihood of individuals being exploited, the law must step in to reduce the risk for that exploitation. that's why we have minimum wage laws. that's why in europe health insurance is mandatory for any job and even available if you don't have one. that's why in many countries you can't dismiss an employee without proper justification, or you can't evict tenants unless they egregiously violate their tenant agreement (and failing to pay rent on time is not such a violation). there are plenty of examples of how the law protects individuals from being exploited. to suggest that such laws are unnecessary is completely missing the power imbalance that exists here, or worse willfully ignoring it.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoAI actors seems like a good thing. Generative AI will allow small groups of creatives to stick to their vision and create truly unique art. The massive staff required for movies today seems like a major cause of the blockbusterfication of hollywood where every movie is trying as hard as possible to play it safe.
- __loam 3y agoI think you're going to have to come up with a better explanation for why destroying acting as a profession is somehow good for "creatives".
- Legend2440 3y agoIt'll be a revolution for indie filmmakers. $0 budget movies with top-notch visuals. When movies take $100 million each to make, you need execs and investors to make it happen, and they want safe returns. When they cost $0, anybody with an idea can turn it into a film - the kind of stuff studios would never have greenlit.
- __loam 3y agoI don't think you guys understand the media market (or art for that matter) at all.
- TillE 3y agoThe "AI is going to destroy creative work" view requires either 1) wild optimism about the future of AI, a belief that it will quickly become orders of magnitude better than anything we can do today, or 2) a lack of understanding and appreciation for good art. Like yeah you'll probably be able to churn out some hideously mediocre content slop with AI. I'm extremely skeptical that we're anywhere near producing anything good with AI.
- em-bee 3y agoit's a matter of perspective. obviously AI won't be able to compete with traditional movies for some time, but for amateur film makers who don't have a budget for sets and actors, AI is going to help them make their work better. i don't know if that is good or bad though. one side effect of AI helping to make movies is that there will be so many more of them. think about all that cheap content on youtube. imagine a bunch of that enhanced with AI. it will still be cheap content, but it will look better, which means we will have a harder time to detect it and dismiss it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 3y agoThe title is semi-misleading: there aren't any royalties, but instead there's a upfront cost of one day's pay. The fact that they actually offered that low of an amount for biometric AI data in perpetuity makes it clear they are operating in bad faith (more than usual)
- squokko 3y agoIf you don't want to sell your data, don't.
- minimaxir 3y agoWell yes. That's why SAG-AFTRA is going on strike.
- ars 3y agoIsn't the strike to prevent other people from selling their data? You don't have to go on strike to not sell your own data.
- dkh 3y agoThey are a union. They negotiate as a collective. And its members voted to the tune of 98% in favor of the strike.
- __loam 3y agoI often see anti-union sentiment in tech circles which is hilarious considering how companies like Apple and Microsoft have already tried to fuck us with non-competes.
- pierat 3y agoBut you know 100x hyper-libertarian-48lawsofpower-dude can definitely negotiate better than a dirty liberal... Union! (I swear, I've had that exact conversation here, with nearly that same tone. And of course, verbal contortions that they are somehow better individuals with 'special skills'. They're just more meat for the grinder.)
- rcarr 3y agoI could literally see a future where films and tv become more like extended video game cut scenes. The studios are already struggling to make the next generation of Hollywood stars. People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars. I could see them doing away with them all together and then just hiring less expensive actors to do motion capture work. The director would then have an application which is a hybrid between an AI and the character creation screen of a video game. They put in a brief description of what they want into the AI and it then creates a photo realistic 3d model which the director can tweak to their liking. The director then applies the skin to the motion capture and boom - movie. The bankable big name actor dies and the cgi character rises in its wake. Even the voice acting work could be handled by AI. Leaves the professional actor with no other choice but to go back to the origins of the profession with theatre work. Scary stuff if true.
- Sahbak 3y agoI don't know if "sorry" is what I'd feel for Hollywood stars like Tom Holland. I'm not sure what I will feel, if at all, but it is probably not close to empathy.
- rs999gti 3y ago> People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars. Who is the next Tom Cruise? No one in Hollywood or British Film is like him. He is a relic from the early days of film, such as Burt Lancaster or Steve McQueen
- TylerE 3y agoThe Rock was the next Tom Cruise. The better question is who’s the next The Rock, since he’s not exactly box office gold these days either.
- rs999gti 3y agoThe Rock was more of an Arnold or Stallone replacement from the 80s-2000s. A muscle bound, action star. Maybe the next Rock is Kumail Nanjiani? He has been getting pumped for more Marvel Universe movies. Tom Cruise is more like Steve McQueen - a normal looking movie star. The only actor like him is maybe Leonardo DiCaprio?
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoWhy wouldn't studios use a LLM for biometrics instead of using an individual's attributes? They could churn out new unique virtual actors continuously.
- minimaxir 3y agoA LLM cannot output a likeness. Deepfaking is still a manual process that cannot be automated, and the legal rights there are very up-in-the-air.
- Legend2440 3y agoAn LLM can't, but StableDiffusion can. Deepfakes are very much automated for still images, and it's really just a matter of time until it's automated for video and 3D.
- minimaxir 3y agoEven with modern tricks for Stable Diffusion to focus on a specific subject (e.g. Dreambooth LoRAs/Textual Inversion) it is not anywhere close to the level of replacing actors.
- satvikpendem 3y agoUnreal Engine's MetaHumans is getting quite good. I assume in 20 years it will be on par or surpass the quality of actor likenesses in current movies.
- charlieo88 3y agoThe studios don't want a unique virtual actor. They want the one someone else has proven as successful. They aren't driving down Sunset Blvd asking to scan in unknowns. They want the big name stars.
- haunter 3y agoBasically that's the movie Simone https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/
- LispSporks22 3y agoJeff: We at Miramount, want to... want to scan you. All of you - your body, your face, your emotion, your laughter, your tears, your climaxing, your happiness, your depressions, your... fears, longings. We want to sample you, we want to preserve you, we want... all this, this... this thing, this thing called..."Robin Wright". Robin Wright: What will you do with this... thing ? That you call Robin Wright? Jeff: We'll do all the things that your Robin Wright wouldn't do. The Congress https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/
- milesward 3y agoCame here just to say The Congress!
- pentagrama 3y agoThis movie blew my mind, it goes so forward in time. Should be talked more.
- ilaksh 3y agoSounds like outright class warfare. Within a five years it will be possible to create realistic AI virtual actors and sets that generate the entire video sequence including the performance. We can already do simplistic and less realistic versions of this.
- duped 3y agoThis ultimately misses the point of art
- goblinux 3y ago1000% they don't want to make art, they want to make content
- babyshake 3y agoAnd the ones that want to make art get iced out or pushed out.
- silisili 3y agoHave you missed the whole explosion of terrible movies that make tons of money(Marvel, Avatar, etc)? Apparently, the masses don't care about art.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoIt's fascinating how this has exposed two different fundamental outlooks on art. One that doesn't care if art comes from an algorithm, as long as it's "good" enough on some linear measure. And another that considers the context/subtext of the creator's intent, process, etc. so much as to render art empty or pointless or meaningless if that dimension isn't there.
- __loam 3y agoOne sees it only as a commodity to be consumed and the other actually gives a shit about art.
- greenimpala 3y agoThe verge cookie warning is cool. Stare at her eyes for 10 seconds, then press back.. An imaginary pink box appears.
- LightBug1 3y agoHappy April Fools Day everyone .... err, everyone? hello?
- babyshake 3y agoGood on the actors for not being pushovers on this issue. One way or another, we'll look back in twenty years and now that the arrangements made now were very consequential.
- Legend2440 3y agoI'm not on their side here. Imagine if we were still weaving our clothes by hand because the weavers union signed a contract in 1846. Anything that stops technology from replacing human workers is a bad thing.
- para_parolu 3y agoNot to start arguments but rather to provide anecdotal example why it’s not total absolute. Cluster bombs replaced archery as weapon. Not exactly a good thing
- Avshalom 3y agoRight now they are not trying to replace human workers, they are trying to replace human artists.
- rcarr 3y agoWasn't the whole point of making the technology to free up time to let people do things they love doing? Acting, drawing, prosthetics, set making, costume design - these are all dream jobs for many, many people. They're the embodiment of "do what you love for a living and you'll never work a day in your life". To a lot of people it seems like technology is replacing the wrong jobs. People want robots that can clear out the sewers or replace the mind numbing factory job and educational AI that can up-skill those replaced workers into engineers. Not a lot of people want to take another person's dreams away like this is doing.
- satvikpendem 3y ago> Wasn't the whole point of making the technology to free up time to let people do things they love doing? Who keeps repeating this? No, there was never a "point" to making technology, technology is invented and it's up to users to find a use case for it. Same thing with nuclear energy versus atomic bombs.
- __loam 3y agoAh yes, the total ossification of our culture. Amazing.
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agomore discussion over here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36715052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36715052
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoThe beginning of the new Indiana Jones movie has an extended sequence of Harrison Ford de-aged, he basically looks like how he did in The Last Crusade. It really weirded me out. It looked fine on the surface, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by what it represents for film as an art form. It’s very possible that we’ll be watching some version of Harrison Ford in movies for hundreds of years, and that is an unsettling thought. Modern technology has a way dehumanizing people, extracting just what is valuable and discarding the rest. Maybe the luddites were on to something when they rebelled against the shoe-making machines.
- Legend2440 3y agoOnly if people want to be watching Harrison Ford movies for that long. You forget how much power people have as consumers. Studios keep making unoriginal movies with old actors because people keep going to see them. If Star Wars sequels didn't make billions of dollars, Disney wouldn't keep making them.
- bsder 3y ago> It’s very possible that we’ll be watching some version of Harrison Ford in movies for hundreds of years, and that is an unsettling thought. Well, it's really weirder than that. Think about having a Harrison Ford that can actually act. That would be super weird. I suspect that the the end state of all of this is that it uses technology to split performing into "acting well" and "being attractive" as separate things. And the "being attractive" will get scanned, archived and used over and over and over and ... Yeah, Hollywood actors should definitely fear this.
- Joeri 3y agoYou’re not watching Harrison Ford, you’re watching Indiana Jones in a purer form than today’s Harrison Ford is able to play him. In a universe without digital trickery they would have recast the character and rebooted the series. For an actor being asked to be the face of a character for all time should be the high mark of their career, and what a way to honor them after they pass away.
- 3y ago
- dkh 3y agoI find it interesting that the Director's Guild agreement (which was agreed to by the studios in about five minutes) included the acknowledgement that A.I. is not a person and cannot/will not be used in place of humans for any jobs covered by the DGA (directors, production managers, stage managers, etc.). The studios had no trouble agreeing to that very quickly, yet seem determined to negotiate the ability to replace actors as they see fit, using human actors to do it. They acknowledge that some jobs are too important for A.I. to be allowed anywhere near, just that acting is not among them.
- scarface_74 3y agoHonestly it’s easy because a directors job is harder to replace than an actors job. The studios weren’t losing much. So far, in the last couple of years we’ve already seen what are basically CGI actors - current actors de-aged in three major movies - Samuel Jackson in Captain Marvel, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones. Not to mention Mark Hamil in the Mandalorian. How are you going to replace Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, etc?
- linuxftw 3y agoSuch a large amount of scenes in many big movies are CGI now, I don't see what the difference is. I'm convinced that the Avengers movies, the actors weren't even filming on the same set. They all did their parts green screened individually.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoYeah it doesn't matter what happens to Marvel content. But we don't want all media to gravitate to becoming Marvel content.
- deng 3y agoBTW, this is not a new issue. Crispin Glover sued Zemeckis for using his likeness in Back to the future II. Glover hated the ending of part I so much that he refused to take part in the sequels (well, he also thought he was underpaid). Back then, they used prosthetics on another actor and used old, unused footage from part I, and he successfully sued the producers for 750k... Since then, the SAG includes a clause in their contracts which explicitly forbids this kind of fakery.
- disambiguation 3y agoOf course they do, but does it really matter when AI ownership is contingent on data ownership? Ideally people would own their own data and image, but we actually have the opposite situation. The data is too freely available, they couldnt monopolize it if they tried. There's already plenty of open source deep fake voice and image models. Fighting this fire is just a proxy for the deeper issue of universal individual rights to data ownership.
- spants 3y ago“If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines.” Welcome to the real world's job market right now.
- lee101 3y ago[dead]