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Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene
- rdtsc 3y agoPerhaps they embedded a deep commentary into the piece on how the crowd members operate on a level of simple automatons. The meta-commentary is they consider the movie audience as part of the crowd. /s
- matchbok 3y agoSeems like an improvement - nobody argues that a career as "bleacher actor #847" is something to aspire to. It's something we should AI away.
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- Teever 3y agoBut you know that the bleacher actor #847 of today is the single line actor of tomorrow and potentially one day a leading role. How do you expect actors to get a start if there's no where to start?
- variants 3y agoThey will start where the next starting line is
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThe next starting line has significantly fewer spaces available.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoYes. That’s what’s being criticized!
- zdragnar 3y agoDoes "bleacher actor 847" actually lend credible experience to getting bigger roles? If I'm putting someone in front of a scene, I don't really think I'm going to care that they've had more or less experience in the background amongst a sea of a thousand other people.
- BoxFour 3y ago> I don't really think I'm going to care that they've had more or less experience in the background amongst a sea of a thousand other people. You might! Having extra credits at least indicates familiarity with the film environment. It suggests you can: 1) Arrive punctually. 2) Handle extensive downtime. 3) Repeatedly execute identical actions for many takes. 4) Take basic film direction instructions and so on. For smaller speaking roles (which are generally a prerequisite for larger speaking roles), where consistent delivery on strenuous and fast-paced sets might be far more crucial than pure acting talent, this background can be a beneficial indicator.
- FireBeyond 3y agoSo union protectionism. What next, "Studios forbidden from using CGI extras if a SAG member is available and willing"?
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoNobody aspires to peak as a junior software engineer even though they mostly just do small, easily automated tasks. Is that a valid reason to completely gut a set opportunities that provide a foot in the door to something bigger?
- zamadatix 3y agoSure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds (or find some alternative) instead of roundabout reasoning which requires us to be inefficient to hide the real reason it's valuable. Anyone not expecting job roles, opportunities, or pathways to change in their career is going to have a very rough time, even more so than the hard time people from the last 50 years had.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y ago> Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds There’s no guarantee of this happening whatsoever. We’ve already seen private companies gut internal training programs in favor of increased hiring of experienced people and this is only going to continue. Economies have to provide work in order to facilitate consumption. If there are a handful of people making all of the money and gutting pay and job security to the core (i.e. improving efficiency), people are going to start rejecting the system wholesale and it’s not going to be pretty. The French Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum, once people lost all hope of having a semblance of a decent standard of living, they didn’t just let rich keep on living, did they?
- zamadatix 3y agoI think this is a great argument on the future role and place of loosely-controlled capitalism as these kinds of advances continue to come but, at the same time, a sorely lacking argument for why we should avoid technological advances which replace existing jobs for the sake of keeping the same jobs we have now. After all, the aforementioned French Revolution happened prior to the 1st (for the French), 2nd, and 3rd industrial revolutions but you don't see the French rallying to disown all technology and go back to the jobs of the time as a way to increase their standard of living - because it wouldn't, even if everyone were 100% employed and worked twice as much in doing so. As a further point, by this logic the very tasks of the Junior Developer role itself would never have been available - hell, society wouldn't even be investing in teaching everyone how to type in school because computers take jobs and people need work to do! It follows that societies are quite capable of A) finding new meaningful sources of work to be done B) having people do more than one course of work throughout their lives C) changing the ways they educate and train beyond the way they did it before D) ensuring fairer distribution of wealth by means other than artificially keeping previously useful jobs around (which is not what the e.g. French Revolution aimed to do).
- joneholland 3y agoThis isn’t even AI. This is just low budget VFX. Something that has been done since the 90s.
- gonehome 3y agoThe tech for this will obviously get better (is the example shown even recent?). The complaints in the Twitter thread are ridiculous imo. Disney is right to be experimenting with this stuff, it’s clearly going to be super relevant in the future.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoThere’s nothing wrong with calling out a company for putting out shoddy work during a contentious labor strike. Disney can play with this stuff all they want, but society is going to start asking these big questions in louder and more forceful ways, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. You can’t take away an entire industry’s livelihood and expect them to accept it lying down.
- zamadatix 3y agoI think the comment is in reference to the comments focusing on quality instead of the jobs impact. The whole debate around quality seems like a red herring in the first place, who is surprised or did not expect a direct to streaming high school romcom to have have the highest quality everything - even for the second row bleachers in a 1 second cut shot? Who is actually bothered by that problem vs the jobs debate you've highlighted?
- jsnell 3y agoThe movie was released in March, well before the strikes.
- jeffbee 3y agoThe tech for this is already better. "Massive" software has been doing CGI characters with AI behaviors for 20 years, including in famous films like Lord of the Rings. The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game.
- civilitty 3y ago> The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game. NHL 2000. Those animations look exactly like the awkward crowds from NHL 2000.
- PeterStuer 3y agoWith all that is terrible with Disney entertainment (and the rest of the last 2 decades of studio output), I do not think 'background crowd did not look real enough' would make my top 100 of things wrong with film/tv.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThat’s not what’s criticized despite the headline
- metadat 3y agoThink of the untold money that will be saved as the need for human involvement is increasingly liberated from the film production process. (Or should it now be called "generation process"?) All that money can now go directly to the studios, thank God.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoEven better, the studios won't have a monopoly anymore on creating blockbuster movies. Some kids in a garage with a cloud service subscription can do the same with their lawn-moving earnings.
- Lacerda69 3y agoExactly, contrary to doom sayers beliefs, ML models will enable a huge new segment of creators. It is already happening with people creating games/movies/books/music etc. that are of much better quality than those churned out by AAA.
- r_hoods_ghost 3y agoCan you give me a single example of people creating games/movies/books/music etc. bia ML that are of much better quality than those churned out by AAA?
- unsupp0rted 3y agoYes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDADjJ_jy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDADjJ_jy4 It's not "much better quality" so much as "the quality is good enough that you concentrate on the generated content, and the generated content is more fun to watch than anything put out by Disney Star Wars lately". Granted that's a low bar, but it's early days.
- SoftTalker 3y agoWhat lawn mowing earnings? Robots will be doing that soon enough
- ShamelessC 3y agoThe discussion focuses on AI generation, but shitty CG humans have been possible for a very long time. This seems to just be a lousy and maybe less expensive effort for CGI actors, but not AI generated actors? It does indeed seem like a bad idea overall, especially given the current climate. I just don't have any reason to assume generative AI was involved.
- insickness 3y agoUsing likenesses of a person is different than creating CGI extras in the background. They're not using anyone's likeness with background actors. And where would the NO FAKES Act draw the line? Would the studio be unable to create hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a battle? What if the soldiers were humanoid aliens or robots?
- besus 3y agoYeah, just think of how the battle scene at Helm's Deep would look if they weren't able to use CGI. AI generated CGI is just the next step forward. Write and produce good content and we'll watch, subscribe, and buy.
- XorNot 3y agoYes but if we all approached this sensibly, then someone on Twitter couldn't get offended on behalf of a hypothetical person, in an industry they don't work in our understand, about a topic that's become the flavour of the month for virtue signalling and thus get their own big break as the internet's main character for the week. And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry? No one thinks of the real victims here /s.
- dylan604 3y ago>And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry? I would love to see it all burn in the dumpster fire of its own making. It would be the ultimate in karmic self-correct. Too bad I don't really believe in that kind of stuff.
- dylan604 3y agoThey don't want you to buy though. They want you to subscribe/rent. So I'm guessing that before too long, the "buy" button will go the way of the dodo. Phase I has already been initiated with Best Buy discontinuing sales of shiny round discs: https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-blu-ray-disc-sales-1235754919/ https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-bl...
- bluedino 3y agoLooks like the crowd from a console video game
- prepend 3y agoThis seems like a dumb complaint. Movies have been using painted backgrounds for 100 years. Would that be forbidden? This is a cheap b movie, so they aren’t going to pay for the extras that a Cleopatra or big production would afford. The fix for this seems to be better AI (a la Lord of the Rings 20 years ago) rather than employing more extras.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoI don't get it. We've been using CGI for backgrounds for... Decades? And in a direct-to-tv disposable low-budget movie nonetheless. We also have a whole genre of animated movies with no human actors which are of course bread and butter for Disney. So while I feel there is outrage to be had, I also feel we are going waaaaaay over any reasonable line which will diminish the impact of our outrage. This seems like a silly distraction away from real systemic issues.
- vlunkr 3y agoYeah they are taking a viral clip of bad CGI and conflating it with current AI controversies. And although it’s Disney, these Disney channel movies have always been made on the cheap. Nothing to see here folks.
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- DoesntMatter22 3y agoWhy would people be outraged about something like this?
- wahnfrieden 3y agovfx were favored when presented as an option over actor/set talent because vfx studios were not union
- cyanydeez 3y agoThe next generation won't even know what a fake crowd scene looks like.
- FireBeyond 3y agoYeah, this is just SAG-AFTRA acting as the union it is, trying to protect jobs for its members. Next it'll be "Studios shouldn't be allowed to use CGI as long as there is a SAG member willing to play that role."
- xwowsersx 3y agoA few questions since I'm clearly missing some basics here: 1) we've had CGI for a long time, right? What's new here is using AI to automatically generate the CGI so some CGI designer doesn't need to go and generate the whole thing by hand? 2) There has to be better CGI than that second row of "people" in the clip here, no? I mean this is so bad, but there is or will be AI that can do way, way better than this, no? Perhaps not enough to cross the uncanny valley, but what we're seeing in this clip is just comedically awful, obviously.
- jncfhnb 3y agoThis is not AI generated. This film is not worth the effort to do good CGI and that’s about the short of it. These characters are probably reused from some other context where they would be much further away. The thing that makes them look so awful here isn’t the rendering (which is bad) but the fact that they’re animated in a way that clearly uses an awkwardly small amount of bones. E.g. their fingers don’t move. And their faces. We can surely do better CGI. But it might not be worth the cost here. To be clear, a background actor probably is worth the cost here because they are incredibly cheap. AI could bridge this gap in both quality and cost though. Just need better tooling
- jncfhnb 3y agoUghhhh this is not AI generated nor is it “capturing background actor likeness”. The guild needs to stop pushing this stupid argument. It’s not going to help anyone. Background actor likeness DOES NOT MATTER. It is not a valuable asset. This is digging their own grave. Those protections would not have avoided this at all.
- gedy 3y agoYeah if anything it's a sign of directors making changes in post production vs reshooting the scene. Looks like a "we need more excitement in this scene, add some people", etc tweaking
- simbolit 3y agoThe website claims cookies for 890 different adtech vendors as covered by the "legitimate interest" clause. Eighthundred-and-ninety.
- yomly 3y agooff topic, but if I view using incognito then just click YES or REJECT ALL->confirm is that a way to escape this madness? Or should I just nope out of pages like this, seems like the content was pointless anyway
- ganzuul 3y agoIt really disturbed me that I could not distinguish between CGI and YouTube compression artifacts during a stream of one of the key moments of SpaceX's technology demonstrations, some years ago. The scene composition seemed artificial but that could also have been over-eager production. It made me think deeply about the Moon landing conspiracy theory, and mankind's transition from mythos to logos.