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Actors decry 'existential crisis' over AI-generated ‘synthetic’ actors
- quantified 3y agoFunny how CGI employs more people than real actors do. Artists, compositors, digital effects, data wranglers, on an on. For a big movie that section is like a telephone book.
- Avshalom 3y agoThey're trying to replace all those people with AI too.
- itisit 3y agoEventually the audience will be AI as well.
- readthenotes1 3y agoFor tweets it already is. Plenty of companies already pretend to have users that are fake
- majormajor 3y agoIf you really want to start minimizing the contributions of people, only the writers matter? Without a story you'd just have shiny demos and people running around. There's a long-running arms race around presentation of storytelling, and to date it's resulted in more jobs. But make no mistake: the people holding the production wallets are interested in stripping down all those jobs: writing, acting, CGI, etc. Hopefully it ends up looking more like "better tools enabling people to do more and more visually-compelling things while remaining a thriving industry" than "suit in an office reviews a million AI-generated story concepts and then pushes buttons to turn them into videos cloning today's styles."
- failuser 3y agoThose are not union jobs.
- quantified 3y agoDo they share in residuals? I expect not.
- unspecldn 3y agoit's neigh impossible to read the content on a mobile device on that godforsaken website with all the ads and jumping UI... seriously annoying.
- SushiHippie 3y agoThat is why I redirect Reuters links to neuters. https://neuters.de/technology/actors-decry-existential-crisis-over-ai-generated-synthetic-actors-2023-07-21/ https://neuters.de/technology/actors-decry-existential-crisi... Neuters is a privacy respecting fronted for Reuters, like nitter (for twitter), libreddit (for reddit) or invidious (for YouTube). According to the about page https://neuters.de/about https://neuters.de/about it loads less than 10KiB compared to around 50 MiB that the original page loads.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoA PiHole running the default blocklist makes reuters appear as just white background with black text (no ads, none). Just a recommendation, and it's supereasy and I can never go back to unguarded DNS since.
- Someone 3y agoI’m certainly not less guilty than them, but this makes me think “First they came for the spinners and the weavers. The actors didn’t complain. Then, they came for the farmhands. The actors didn’t complain. Then, they came for the bank tellers. The actors didn’t complain. Then, they came for the shop assistants. The actors didn’t complain. Then, they came for the actors.” I can’t think of any argument for claiming there should be some fraction of the populations or number of people who can make a living acting. The problem, of course, is that all the above move the ability to earn money from people to capital, making those who have capital ever richer and those who have not poorer, if not in absolute terms at least relatively, and that’s enough to make people feel poorer.
- worrycue 3y ago> The problem, of course, is that all the above move the ability to earn money from people to capital, making those who have capital ever richer and those who have not poorer, if not in absolute terms at least relatively, and that’s enough to make people feel poorer. That’s the dystopia AGI promises to bring. Once AGI becomes a thing, it would be able to do all jobs. Trading human labour for money would cease to be a thing. The only ones who would still be able to make money are those who own the means of production. The economy would consist entirely of “owners” who would trade the output of their enterprises among themselves. Everyone else would just be left out of the economy because they have nothing to trade with.
- jareklupinski 3y agodo you envision this going into full "sky city / earth city" divide, or will 'owners' realize they are dependant on something 'non-owners' can only provide?
- rqtwteye 3y agoI think history tells us that capitalists/aristocracy/owners don't voluntarily share their gains with the rest. They are perfectly fine living in splendor while the populace lives in poverty. And they tell themselves stories why they deserve it. The cycle usually gets disrupted by war or revolution.
- seydor 3y agoAi cgi will inevitably be better than any actor. It was good while it lasted
- whartung 3y agoIt's funny, having recently watched the Boba Fett series on Disney. At one point, there's Luke Skywalker. But it's the young Luke Skywalker, not the current Mark Hamill. It was a synthetic Luke we were seeing on screen. Mark Hamill did not participate in the filming, it was someone else with a CGI Luke head. Mark Hamill gets a credit in casting, but as I understand it, much of the dialog was synthetically generated based on his original voice in the original trilogy. Now, maybe he did voice the lines and they just used the training to process them and change the sounds and such. But in the end, what were were seeing and hearing on screen was not Mark Hamill, it was Something Else. Similarly, but perhaps more mundane, there were episodes with the original Mandalorian character. As I understand it, what we see on screen is not the Mandalorian actor, but a double in the suit. The original actor, Pedro Pascal, was not available during the shoot. But he did come in later and dub the lines. So, it just seems to me that in some cases, we are already "there", and the AIs don't even need to come into play at all.
- UberFly 3y agoIf you watched "The Jungle Book" remake, it was astonishing that there was only 1 actor (the boy who played Mowgli), and everything else was generated. I ripped that movie and while putting in my KODI collection, I couldn't decide whether to put it in Movies or Animated Movies. I think soon everything will go into the Animated Movies folder.
- nimbius 3y agoThe problem with AI generated actors isnt in the fact that they disenfranchise real actors, but in the purely capitalist direction studios have chosen to move. new characters, new actors, new stories and new roles all incur significant and unproven investment over time. building a hit --no matter how easy pixar makes it appear-- is nontrivially difficult. so conversely studios have decided that ever more barrel-scraping is not only a more consistent effort, but a safer one as well. Hence there have been twelve star-wars films, five indiana jones films, Fifteen batman movies, and enough marvel flicks to rend dull groans from home movie collectors cabinets just pondering them. This is a downward spiral because people change over time but a franchise without end has nothing new to offer. panic buttons like gender swaps and race swaps come across as hastily constructed, hamfisted attempts to peddle relevance to an increasingly disinterested audience of gen Z while alienating older fans of a series. Scripts become more predictable, plots become more dependable, and all the while profit --while safe and quantifiable-- dwindles lower. So AI is here to take that last bit of capital preventing realization of a purely and endlessly profit-driven effort by armies of disconnected studio executives clamoring for ever less pie. faces names places and likenesses in perpetuity, and in exchange, the customer can consume another dozen Star Wars movies just as flavourless as the packaging theyre shipped in. content will be created, until the last skywalker picks up the last light saber and delivers his 45th speech in which the dark side and the force are forever memorialized in a 90 minute recitation of the owners manual for some executives old porsche. traditional "hollywood" film will have died by its own pocked withered hand. The new currency will become the ability to generate new content; ideas themselves. Fewer films but with greater quality and less reliance on enchanting special effects will command the attention of the consumer after these goliaths of the post-vaudeville cinema are gone. real actors and cinema will still exist to some degree but gone will be the days where actors championed themselves as stuntmen, pandemics arrested production, and studios could crank out endless rehashes of old properties until the last star falls from heaven.
- wilg 3y agoIn the context of visual effects, AI isn't really significantly different. You could just hire ILM or whatever to make a fake actor before with "traditional" CGI.
- digdugdirk 3y agoExcept that traditionally took a wild amount of work, from a very large team. Think of it as if the virtual "actor" is a puppet, which requires careful design and construction from a team of highly skilled craftspeople, and then another separate team of craftspeople to make it move in a natural way. And then another team for all the little finishing touches - lighting, clothing, skin textures, reflections, etc. These teams are all full of wildly skilled people, with huge amounts of experience with digital tools (obviously), biomechanics, physics, cinematography, etc. As AI tools get better, you start lowering the barrier to entry and shrinking the size of those teams until you get to the point where someone can film something with a smartphone and AI does the rest to make it cinema quality. Or just hallucinates something from a prompt. Its a whole different ball game.
- Barrin92 3y agoI don't see it as any larger of a jump than moving from hand-drawn to computer animation. Just look at that industry and how incredibly labor intensive traditional animation was. This is already commodified now as animation work is usually outsourced to some cheap studio for almost any new Netflix show. (often with mediocre results). Just compare the new Ghost in the Shell show they did to the old one. If someone wants to put out something that has genuine artistic merit they'll still employ people who can leverage new tools to make something that stands out, but visual art production is being automated for a long time now.
- digdugdirk 3y agoBut it is a jump. And each jump means fewer people working in the industry, and more of the work that exists going to less experienced workers.
- learn_more 3y agoSee also the Michael Crichton movie Looker https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/ which is about this topic
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slackstation 3y agoMovie studios don't want the tech to be a button that spits out a movie. Because if a movie studio can do it, then Netflix can do it better in-house. If Netflix can do it, then a group of dedicated fans can do it for the fun of it. Imagine a bunch of Marvel fans mad over the last few Thor movies making a gritty, comics accurate version. Imagine fans making the DC vs Marvel move that literally couldn't exist because of the studios would never allow it? Star Trek/Starwars crossover? In a world where entertaining media becomes easy to produce, the only thing about the studio system worth anything is the distribution. Netflix would eat them alive. The end state is something like media becomes so easy to create that most of it is only watched by the person who created it and even then probably not even that. How many stable diffusion images are glanced at out of the 4 that pop up in MidJourney and are never looked at again but, just sit on MidJouney's servers forever? Eventually movies and video games will be this disposable. Out of that might come gems that would have never otherwise been made but, most of it will be garbage.
- gloryjulio 3y agoThis would be like Japanese manga industry in contrast to marvel/dc. U have so many one man armies who are working on so many different topics. The endless creativities are just unmatched. You could have a single person to create the media empire like one piece. The manga space is much more interesting than typical comics. I'd love to see the same thing in the other media
- livueta 3y agoYeah, I think it'll be a lot like how Vocaloid hasn't destroyed the market for real vocalists. If anything it's the exact opposite, where people get into the medium via it and end up as actual vocalists, like Reol with No Title-/No Title+. Besides just vocalists, the lower barrier to entry has produced a lot of producers, many of whom also eventually migrate to working with real vocalists.
- jimcsharp 3y ago>The end state is something like media becomes so easy to create that most of it is only watched by the person who created it and even then probably not even that. Sounds like how Trek envisioned holodeck programs. Though I guess a lot of those were "what if I could chill with a book character"
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- b1n 3y agoThis seems like an Innovator's Dilemma (adjacent) trap. The actors will prevent hollywood or the mainstream studios from using synthetic actors, writers, etc. so it will be left up to some completely new entity to create that infrastructure. It will happen anyway because it is so compelling, and there are tens of thousands of actors who never make a living who would happily become digital. * The Innovator's Dilemma - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
- argentinian 3y agoIf the results are very similar but the method is much cheaper, it will certainly be applied. At least with extras.
- dengxiaopeng 3y agoIt seems that the plot of Stanislaw Lem’s “The Futurological Congress”, adapted into the film linked below, is fast becoming reality. The convergence between virtual reality and intellectual property here is a fascinating one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
- emmo 3y agoNot a perfect movie, but quite a trip!
- atleastoptimal 3y agoAt the rate AI is progressing, LLMs combined with embodied diffusion models and rendering software could create better movies than any human has, ever. But I would assume that that tech will precede the technological singularity by a short window of time (6 months at most). All this feels like if Native Americans, in the years after contact with the Europeans, were to complain that trading for guns is putting spear craftsmen out of a job. There are far greater, perhaps more catastrophic changes coming that all this low hanging fruit SaaS stuff with AI is only a canary for.
- mavhc 3y agoThe only reason actors and Hollywood exists is it's very expensive to make films. If it's not very expensive then it's democratised. So the only question is: Are your skills something a computer/robot can't do yet? And will people pay for them? Wheat picker? No. Fruit picker? Yes for now, but no one's paying much for them. If you can't act better than a computer, why are you an actor?
- tzm 3y agoCould SAG start their own studio, backed by members and community at large?
- beej71 3y agoI'm not sure this future is avoidable. Sure, they're trying to use real actors' likenesses right now because they want to use people we know. But if the actor were created from scratch to start with...