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The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. The tech will so

The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. The tech will soon arrive that such things are easily generated at an extent and quality that it’s cheaper to do it with an all digital pipeline without models that are trained on these people or are perhaps trained on them in countries where any hard won battles here are ignored. You won’t have 30 background actors. You’ll have one digital artist with tools. You might have 30x as many movies if you’re lucky.

Avamander 3y ago
I'd say it's an obvious negotiation tactic.
deegles 3y ago
I just watched Oppenheimer, and I remember thinking how this would be much better as an HBO style multi season drama. But there's no way they'd be able to sign actors consistently for the many seasons it would take to cover all the material... using AI actors however, they would be able to keep consistent characters even as the actors switch out. Of course it's a race to the bottom, but think of all the talented actors who can't work because they don't have the right "look" and didn't get a lucky break.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  It's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI. If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines. Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset. There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone. And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI. Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.
echelon 3y ago
This is a rerun of photographers complaining about digital photography and stock photo websites. Despite their worries, there's still plenty of work in shooting weddings and corporate events. Outside of folks like Roger Deakins, the person behind the lens has always has been fungible, so any argument that AI removes the humanity is dishonest. In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling. AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served. The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together. Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators. Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  One way to parse “Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served,” is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage. If a person now alive pictures the state of “content” getting far worse, that’s something profound to consider.
  - echelon 3y ago
    > is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage. Do you value content on YouTube? Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value? If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem. --- edit: because of downvotes, I can't respond anymore. (Dang: you really need to fix this.) Here's my response to a child comment: > No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity. The domestic market supports roughly 1,000 productions a year. Most of which you won't be the target demographic for. Most of it will suck. That's a very small pipeline for "quality" to fit through. Frankly, I don't like being limited to 1-2 "amazing" and 5-10 "good" things a year. We're not here for long, and we deserve so much more. Humanity has the capacity to do better than this. The creativity of youths on TikTok and other platforms is absolutely inspiring, and we have barely begun to tap into it. I've always seen more amazing content from indie creators and foreign markets than most big studios produce. Independent animation and web comics have been labors of love, and these new tools are going to empower those folks to do more than they've ever done before. The pipeline of creators is going to widen as people see how fun and accessible it is. There might be more noise, but there will be orders of magnitude more interesting content that fits the curvature of your interests like a fine glove. If you have a thing for space noir vampires, I'm sure someone will deliver it and do the concept justice. If we can suck people out of busywork jobs and put them into satisfying careers delighting the human spirit, that's a great and worthwhile thing to do.
mschuster91 3y ago
> The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard. Almost all of those earning many millions of dollars now started as small scale actors or writers themselves, and while there are a few who got completely fucked over from affluenza, most still remember their roots and know who and what was responsible for them being able to rise where they are. This is something that the IT industry could finally learn... for example, if the AWS Cloud engineers, support staff and all the other high paid employees went on strike in solidarity with their delivery workers who have to piss in bottles, guess how fast Amazon would clean up its act? There's a reason why so many of the richest people in the world made their riches in tech: because tech workers couldn't be arsed to engage in collective organization, instead preferring hyper-competition with everyone fighting for himself and only himself - while not realizing that they could have enjoyed far more of a share of the profits, had they collaborated!
- gruez 3y ago
  >That is the power of solidarity Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Moreover, if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net, then it stands to reason that studios that use that technology will outcompete studios that don't. The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Which is why it is backed and enforced by contracts. Unions in moviemaking, mining or construction have a long (and bloody) tradition... there's a reason why inane-seeming rules such as only members of a specific trade union being allowed to even touch something as a lighting rig, it's to prevent greedy studios from using staff with lower-paying jobs to undercut collective agreements. Think outside of the box and now you'll realize that as inane as it sounds, what it guarantees is that money ends up as wages in the pockets of the workers instead of profit for the bosses. > The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban. Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is. Many have tried to outcompete American studios and they all failed - it's either survival off of "national production quotas" for TV networks for them or domestic focused/otherwise niche content ("Bollywood", anime). This relatively simple power balance is what gives the SAG the leverage it has.
espadrine 3y ago
> It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. Guessing the future is hard, but I’ll try to change your mind by comparing future change to past change. AI came for chess. When it became superhuman, did chess professionals go out of a job? Not really; people come to the tournament for the story, for the human achievement. VAs are under the same scope: people want to see stars form, even when they are microcelebrities. I don’t doubt that there will be an increase in AI-generated content and a paying public, just like there are people right now that pay to watch AIs play chess against each other. But it doesn’t remove the genuine article. (Contrary to what many believe will happen, they weren’t replaced by people that use AI either.) As a cherry on top, while the game AIs are policy-based RL and can become superhuman with no human data to bootstrap it, LLMs currently are effectively SL and need to feed off human data. If the production of the latter dropped, the results would decline.
- zinodaur 3y ago
  I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language. They might even be able to take limited actions based on the outcome of the conversation. I 100% support bleeding whatever you can out of the megacorps, but I don't know if I'd rely on VA careers long term
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    You'll probably die before that happens... It's hard enough for humans to understand natural language spoken by other humans, and we have the biology for it. Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there; these methods (especially LLMs) are incapable of the understanding needed for natural language processing or actual AI.
    - krisoft 3y ago
      > You'll probably die before that happens... Why? “I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language.” That is as simple as popping together a speech-to-text model with an LLM and pipe the output to a text-to-speech module. We can have a demo by tomorrow, and something actually enjoyable in a week. The challenges are purely of engineering (to for example reduce the latency so the conversation flows, and to fit the models on the average consumer’s hardware) and art direction (what do you want the npc to say?). To make the npc act on the conversation is a bit harder, but stil within weeks. > Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there Get us where? :) I think you are way overthinking it. What do you think is so unachiavable about what the commenter wrote?
hackermewz 3y ago
Did any actors or writers complain when a huge chunk of the studio and streaming tech work went overseas, native workers in the US lost jobs, and tech work got limited to a small sliver of connected individuals in south bay? Even today, if you are a white or black American it is very difficult to get jobs in the entertainment technology industry. You are told it is because the jobs are uber competitive and the workers are the best of the best...but then you see the workers that actually work there and they can barely speak articulate sentences.
- supertimor 3y ago
  I mean, did the tech workers even complain when those jobs went overseas? Perhaps tech workers should try to unionize then. The only reason we are even talking about this is because the actor’s and writer’s unions give them a loud enough voice for the rest of the country to hear their complaints. Kind of disingenuous to put the blame on writer’s and actor’s not putting up a fuss when tech work got shipped overseas, when tech workers themselves didn’t even bother to put up a fuss (or unionize).
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
Perhaps, but it’s still wild to me how many people approach these topics with complete apathy and surrender, as if the AI takeover is inevitable and therefore we shouldn’t try to fight it. Regardless of how you see the future playing out, it’s pretty gross to characterize a people’s fight for their livelihood as “dumb”. Maybe it’s dumb to you, but they’ve given their lives to their work so we can enjoy the content they have a hand in making. Imagine the day that your skills are completely replaceable with AI and your attempts to fight it are met with “that’s dumb.” What an impersonal and apathetic attitude to have.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  so your main problem is that they were able to reach a conclusion fast? is there an empathic approach that also accepts reality?
  - komali2 3y ago
    We could start talking about what we should do in general when the value of human labor has dropped to pennies across multiple industries. Or we could talk about how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing their working hours, improving their working conditions, and giving them a large cut of the new profits the new technology unlocks. Buuuut those conversations under this system have been DOA since the luddites. It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.
    - LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
      > It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary. Yep. Those of us who’ve lived in the west have never seen massive worker uprisings, although they’re present throughout history. A society that becomes so unequal that it can’t provide opportunity for its people faces a reckoning. What’s so damning about this is that the ultra wealthy know this and are planning for it.
crazygringo 3y ago
I think you're misunderstanding the debate. This isn't mostly about background actors -- digital extras are already widely used for things like large crowd scenes. And it's far cheaper currently to hire an extra to be a bartender who hands the main character a drink, than to 3D render that -- so it's not about that either. It's about studios wanting to own the likenesses and voices of every actor they hire for a project, so they can hire someone with a really unique look for a single episode, then be able to produce the rest of the season with a cheaper actor and use AI to do a face swap and voice swap. And that's unacceptable. Actors should be able to retain the rights to their likenesses, end of story. A standard contract shouldn't require that an actor signs over all rights to their likeness for an entire series just in order to be paid for a single episode. That's not right.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  This. This is exactly what the studios tried to demand in their original offer, and it's the reason why SAGAFTRA went on strike instead of negotiating.
- rhdunn 3y ago
  But the other extreme of saying no AI ever is also untenable. If SAG-AFTRA get that demand, it then means productions like Rogue One (AI Leia and Moff Tarkin), The Mandalorian (AI Luke), and de-aged Professor Xavier and Magnito in the X-Men are not possible. It also prevents an aspiring writer from using AI tools to help with the writing process -- not do it all for them, but work co-operatively like copilot and other auto-complete tools do for programming. Even using tools like Photoshop, Blender, Unreal Engine (as used in shows like The Mandalorian) could be dicey as they incorporate AI models and techniques. -- Would things like NVidia's AI upscaling tech count for raytraced CGI? (I ask as it looks like SAG-AFTRA are after a blanket AI ban, not just around actor voice/image or writer text.) Another thing that the production companies could do is to use public domain audio, video, and scripts as SAG-AFTRA cannot ban the use if AI on those.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Nobody's saying no AI ever. The union is just saying that if you want the rights to use an actor's likeness without actually employing the actor to act, you have to pay separately for that, and pay what it's worth. Which makes perfect sense. In your example of a de-aged Luke Hammill in the Mandalorian, Luke Hammill was paid $$$ for that. They didn't get to cast him for free just because he was in previous Star Wars movies. Nor should they. That's all this is about. Go ahead and use AI, but pay the actors for their likeness. Don't force them to give it away for free as a condition of doing a single episode.
xen2xen1 3y ago
I mostly agree, but the actors and all are worried that they will lose their bargaining power completely, and the studios are gonna do really crappy things like use their faces / bodies /voices with little to no compensation. It's not just about replacement, it's about wholesale theft of their persons.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  Reminds me of the Streamberry episode of Black Mirror https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Streamberry_Corporation https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Streamberry_Corporation Anyone know how Netflix agreed to air (and create a likeness to itsself) such an episode. I enjoyed the episode, and was impressed with Netflix's liberal stance on allowing this, and impressed with the cautionary tale it tells -- i'm surprised because it seems against Netflix's interests.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  The stupid part is the insistence that “their” faces are meaningful.

Avamander 3y ago

I'd say it's an obvious negotiation tactic.

deegles 3y ago

I just watched Oppenheimer, and I remember thinking how this would be much better as an HBO style multi season drama. But there's no way they'd be able to sign actors consistently for the many seasons it would take to cover all the material... using AI actors however, they would be able to keep consistent characters even as the actors switch out. Of course it's a race to the bottom, but think of all the talented actors who can't work because they don't have the right "look" and didn't get a lucky break.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
It's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI. If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines. Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset. There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone. And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI. Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.

echelon 3y ago

This is a rerun of photographers complaining about digital photography and stock photo websites. Despite their worries, there's still plenty of work in shooting weddings and corporate events. Outside of folks like Roger Deakins, the person behind the lens has always has been fungible, so any argument that AI removes the humanity is dishonest. In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling. AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served. The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together. Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators. Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.

singleshot_ 3y ago
One way to parse “Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served,” is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage. If a person now alive pictures the state of “content” getting far worse, that’s something profound to consider.
- echelon 3y ago
  > is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage. Do you value content on YouTube? Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value? If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem. --- edit: because of downvotes, I can't respond anymore. (Dang: you really need to fix this.) Here's my response to a child comment: > No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity. The domestic market supports roughly 1,000 productions a year. Most of which you won't be the target demographic for. Most of it will suck. That's a very small pipeline for "quality" to fit through. Frankly, I don't like being limited to 1-2 "amazing" and 5-10 "good" things a year. We're not here for long, and we deserve so much more. Humanity has the capacity to do better than this. The creativity of youths on TikTok and other platforms is absolutely inspiring, and we have barely begun to tap into it. I've always seen more amazing content from indie creators and foreign markets than most big studios produce. Independent animation and web comics have been labors of love, and these new tools are going to empower those folks to do more than they've ever done before. The pipeline of creators is going to widen as people see how fun and accessible it is. There might be more noise, but there will be orders of magnitude more interesting content that fits the curvature of your interests like a fine glove. If you have a thing for space noir vampires, I'm sure someone will deliver it and do the concept justice. If we can suck people out of busywork jobs and put them into satisfying careers delighting the human spirit, that's a great and worthwhile thing to do.

mschuster91 3y ago

> The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard. Almost all of those earning many millions of dollars now started as small scale actors or writers themselves, and while there are a few who got completely fucked over from affluenza, most still remember their roots and know who and what was responsible for them being able to rise where they are. This is something that the IT industry could finally learn... for example, if the AWS Cloud engineers, support staff and all the other high paid employees went on strike in solidarity with their delivery workers who have to piss in bottles, guess how fast Amazon would clean up its act? There's a reason why so many of the richest people in the world made their riches in tech: because tech workers couldn't be arsed to engage in collective organization, instead preferring hyper-competition with everyone fighting for himself and only himself - while not realizing that they could have enjoyed far more of a share of the profits, had they collaborated!

gruez 3y ago
>That is the power of solidarity Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Moreover, if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net, then it stands to reason that studios that use that technology will outcompete studios that don't. The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Which is why it is backed and enforced by contracts. Unions in moviemaking, mining or construction have a long (and bloody) tradition... there's a reason why inane-seeming rules such as only members of a specific trade union being allowed to even touch something as a lighting rig, it's to prevent greedy studios from using staff with lower-paying jobs to undercut collective agreements. Think outside of the box and now you'll realize that as inane as it sounds, what it guarantees is that money ends up as wages in the pockets of the workers instead of profit for the bosses. > The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban. Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is. Many have tried to outcompete American studios and they all failed - it's either survival off of "national production quotas" for TV networks for them or domestic focused/otherwise niche content ("Bollywood", anime). This relatively simple power balance is what gives the SAG the leverage it has.

espadrine 3y ago

> It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. Guessing the future is hard, but I’ll try to change your mind by comparing future change to past change. AI came for chess. When it became superhuman, did chess professionals go out of a job? Not really; people come to the tournament for the story, for the human achievement. VAs are under the same scope: people want to see stars form, even when they are microcelebrities. I don’t doubt that there will be an increase in AI-generated content and a paying public, just like there are people right now that pay to watch AIs play chess against each other. But it doesn’t remove the genuine article. (Contrary to what many believe will happen, they weren’t replaced by people that use AI either.) As a cherry on top, while the game AIs are policy-based RL and can become superhuman with no human data to bootstrap it, LLMs currently are effectively SL and need to feed off human data. If the production of the latter dropped, the results would decline.

zinodaur 3y ago
I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language. They might even be able to take limited actions based on the outcome of the conversation. I 100% support bleeding whatever you can out of the megacorps, but I don't know if I'd rely on VA careers long term
- gamblor956 3y ago
  You'll probably die before that happens... It's hard enough for humans to understand natural language spoken by other humans, and we have the biology for it. Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there; these methods (especially LLMs) are incapable of the understanding needed for natural language processing or actual AI.
  - krisoft 3y ago
    > You'll probably die before that happens... Why? “I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language.” That is as simple as popping together a speech-to-text model with an LLM and pipe the output to a text-to-speech module. We can have a demo by tomorrow, and something actually enjoyable in a week. The challenges are purely of engineering (to for example reduce the latency so the conversation flows, and to fit the models on the average consumer’s hardware) and art direction (what do you want the npc to say?). To make the npc act on the conversation is a bit harder, but stil within weeks. > Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there Get us where? :) I think you are way overthinking it. What do you think is so unachiavable about what the commenter wrote?

hackermewz 3y ago

Did any actors or writers complain when a huge chunk of the studio and streaming tech work went overseas, native workers in the US lost jobs, and tech work got limited to a small sliver of connected individuals in south bay? Even today, if you are a white or black American it is very difficult to get jobs in the entertainment technology industry. You are told it is because the jobs are uber competitive and the workers are the best of the best...but then you see the workers that actually work there and they can barely speak articulate sentences.

supertimor 3y ago
I mean, did the tech workers even complain when those jobs went overseas? Perhaps tech workers should try to unionize then. The only reason we are even talking about this is because the actor’s and writer’s unions give them a loud enough voice for the rest of the country to hear their complaints. Kind of disingenuous to put the blame on writer’s and actor’s not putting up a fuss when tech work got shipped overseas, when tech workers themselves didn’t even bother to put up a fuss (or unionize).

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago

Perhaps, but it’s still wild to me how many people approach these topics with complete apathy and surrender, as if the AI takeover is inevitable and therefore we shouldn’t try to fight it. Regardless of how you see the future playing out, it’s pretty gross to characterize a people’s fight for their livelihood as “dumb”. Maybe it’s dumb to you, but they’ve given their lives to their work so we can enjoy the content they have a hand in making. Imagine the day that your skills are completely replaceable with AI and your attempts to fight it are met with “that’s dumb.” What an impersonal and apathetic attitude to have.

yieldcrv 3y ago
so your main problem is that they were able to reach a conclusion fast? is there an empathic approach that also accepts reality?
- komali2 3y ago
  We could start talking about what we should do in general when the value of human labor has dropped to pennies across multiple industries. Or we could talk about how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing their working hours, improving their working conditions, and giving them a large cut of the new profits the new technology unlocks. Buuuut those conversations under this system have been DOA since the luddites. It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.
  - LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
    > It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary. Yep. Those of us who’ve lived in the west have never seen massive worker uprisings, although they’re present throughout history. A society that becomes so unequal that it can’t provide opportunity for its people faces a reckoning. What’s so damning about this is that the ultra wealthy know this and are planning for it.

crazygringo 3y ago

I think you're misunderstanding the debate. This isn't mostly about background actors -- digital extras are already widely used for things like large crowd scenes. And it's far cheaper currently to hire an extra to be a bartender who hands the main character a drink, than to 3D render that -- so it's not about that either. It's about studios wanting to own the likenesses and voices of every actor they hire for a project, so they can hire someone with a really unique look for a single episode, then be able to produce the rest of the season with a cheaper actor and use AI to do a face swap and voice swap. And that's unacceptable. Actors should be able to retain the rights to their likenesses, end of story. A standard contract shouldn't require that an actor signs over all rights to their likeness for an entire series just in order to be paid for a single episode. That's not right.

gamblor956 3y ago
This. This is exactly what the studios tried to demand in their original offer, and it's the reason why SAGAFTRA went on strike instead of negotiating.
rhdunn 3y ago
But the other extreme of saying no AI ever is also untenable. If SAG-AFTRA get that demand, it then means productions like Rogue One (AI Leia and Moff Tarkin), The Mandalorian (AI Luke), and de-aged Professor Xavier and Magnito in the X-Men are not possible. It also prevents an aspiring writer from using AI tools to help with the writing process -- not do it all for them, but work co-operatively like copilot and other auto-complete tools do for programming. Even using tools like Photoshop, Blender, Unreal Engine (as used in shows like The Mandalorian) could be dicey as they incorporate AI models and techniques. -- Would things like NVidia's AI upscaling tech count for raytraced CGI? (I ask as it looks like SAG-AFTRA are after a blanket AI ban, not just around actor voice/image or writer text.) Another thing that the production companies could do is to use public domain audio, video, and scripts as SAG-AFTRA cannot ban the use if AI on those.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Nobody's saying no AI ever. The union is just saying that if you want the rights to use an actor's likeness without actually employing the actor to act, you have to pay separately for that, and pay what it's worth. Which makes perfect sense. In your example of a de-aged Luke Hammill in the Mandalorian, Luke Hammill was paid $$$ for that. They didn't get to cast him for free just because he was in previous Star Wars movies. Nor should they. That's all this is about. Go ahead and use AI, but pay the actors for their likeness. Don't force them to give it away for free as a condition of doing a single episode.

xen2xen1 3y ago

I mostly agree, but the actors and all are worried that they will lose their bargaining power completely, and the studios are gonna do really crappy things like use their faces / bodies /voices with little to no compensation. It's not just about replacement, it's about wholesale theft of their persons.

TuringNYC 3y ago
Reminds me of the Streamberry episode of Black Mirror https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Streamberry_Corporation https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Streamberry_Corporation Anyone know how Netflix agreed to air (and create a likeness to itsself) such an episode. I enjoyed the episode, and was impressed with Netflix's liberal stance on allowing this, and impressed with the cautionary tale it tells -- i'm surprised because it seems against Netflix's interests.
jncfhnb 3y ago
The stupid part is the insistence that “their” faces are meaningful.