Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas – for free, forever

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794224/sag-aftra-actors-strike-ai-image-rights

by mfiguiere • 3 years ago

102 176 3 years ago

minimaxir4• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

If you don't want to sell your data, don't.

minimaxir4• 3 years ago

Well yes. That's why SAG-AFTRA is going on strike.

mattigames• 3 years ago

But enough other actors will and it will be much cheaper to use their replica than hiring real actors so even those who didn't sell their data are going to see their income heavily reduced thanks to this antics.

ladon86• 3 years ago

Using the likeness in perpetuity is insane.

I think this could be fair for background actors _if_ it was scoped to a single project.

Come in, get scanned, maybe do some mannerism mocap and then get the negotiated day rate. The rate for a single day should be higher than it is currently, but still less than the studio currently pays for multiple days of background work.

This would be closer to a win-win: the background actor gets paid more money for fewer hours of work, and the studio spends less money overall on background actors.

falcolas• 3 years ago

I think this could be fair for background actors _if_ it was scoped to a single project.

That’s how it’s been done, more or less, as far back as The Scorpion King. Digitally inserted extras have been a thing for awhile, but it still required the actors to do mocap and be scanned in costume.

rcarr8• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

I 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.

rs999gti2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

The 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.

spywaregorilla4• 3 years ago

Ryan Reynolds and Leonardo DiCaprio come to mind.

Chris Pratt a bit.

rcarr8• 3 years ago

The issue is that all the modern actors have emerged from the tongue-in-cheek Marvel franchise or similar. Tom Cruise almost exclusively plays dramatic roles (the only comedic role I can think of is the one where he's in Harvey Weinstein-esque prosthetics for Tropic Thunder) and he picks his roles very carefully. He dedicates 100% of his life not just to the movie he's in but to the role and mystique of the movie star which is at complete odds with social media marketing and trying to be a relatable person to get the public to like you.

Compare Cruise with Chris Hemsworth who's probably the closest thing to a bankable action star we've got right now (The Rock doesn't count because he essentially isn't acting, but is just playing the Rock in every movie). Chris Hemsworth makes some good movies but he doesn't choose the directors and projects he works on carefully the way Cruise did with Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson etc. Hemsworth is also out there hawking his fitness app, he's doing comedic bit roles and he relies quite heavily on his physique in a way that's closer to Stallone and Arnie. Cruise doesn't do any of these things because he knows that the more you see behind the curtain the less mystique there is. Hemsworth or an actor like him might raise his net worth by creating and selling his own whiskey but his value as a movie star declines when he does it - it cheapens him and his work, which have now become a vehicle to sell things outside of the movie. In contrast, Tom Cruise cares, above all else, in being a movie star. He dedicates himself to it not just inside the movies, but with his entire life outside of it too.

She's since changed, but there was a good interview with Lady Gaga on Johnathan Ross' talk show just after her first album came out. She was sat on the sofa in one of her extravagant costumes and Ross was trying to get her to admit that she went home afterwards and stuck her jogging bottoms on and her takeout stained t shirts and just chilled like the rest of us. Obviously it's true - you'll even see her in her casual attire around the house in her documentary. But at this point in time, pre-social media, Gaga refused to cave. She didn't want her fans to associate her with that - she wanted to be an embodiment, a symbol, an archetype, whatever you want to call it, of the elevated, mysterious pop star. Because that is what feeds the fanatic energy - people want their heroes to be bigger than them, to be above the drudgery of normal life, because that is what inspires them to dream bigger themselves. Tom Cruise is basically the last actor in the lineage of the mysterious movie star, dating right back to the early days of Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and later, Clark Gable, Cary Grant etc where movies and moviemaking themselves were both novel, mysterious and glamorous.

Until Hollywood stops making every leading role an ironic tongue in cheek comedian and also stops with the relentless "we're just like you" YouTube video press machine, you won't get another Tom Cruise because Tom Cruise is the embodiment of the movie star archetype. Between the current crop of actors and the studios, none of them seem interested in going to the lengths necessary to craft the mystery, spectacle and otherness necessary for a movie star anymore.

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

It feels almost like Hollywood is trying very hard to make Timothee Chalomet's career take off and it just... I don't know, I might be out of touch, but it just isn't?

I recently saw the Wonka trailer that he stars in, and I just don't buy him as Wonka. He doesn't pull off the "weird" or "eccentric" correctly for me. Also, the moment when they are flying in the trailer and he meets an Oompa-Loompa, despite the realism and visual detail elsewhere, made the whole thing look tonally confused.

not-my-account• 3 years ago

but also, why the heck are they making another wonka?

I don't think that the big studios are worth watching anymore - they're attempting to maximize expected ROI, not make a great movie (which is understandable in their position). Luckily there are many other smaller studios that will continue making much better movies for the sake of making art.

carabiner2• 3 years ago

It's because they're nepo babies. Really forgettable people installed from parental connections.

linksnapzz• 3 years ago

Before him, they were trying to launch Shia LaBeef the same way; then Sam Worthington...this is an ongoing project for agents, publicists, studios...like Hollywood's version of a new SpaceX rocket. There will be explosions and failures, and then back to the drawing-board.

...and yeah, Willy Wonka is a tough role, mostly because Gene Wilder's version has become the standard that you'd be held to.

AbrahamParangi• 3 years ago

By and large the boomers won't vote for someone younger than them (notice our politicians are the oldest they've ever been and have been getting older since the boomers started voting).

I bet their other preferences have a lot to do with the decrease in new 80s-type movie stars, because the other thing that we've seen is the retention of stars well past their prime. I mean, they brought back Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher for the new Star Wars.

JohnFen12• 3 years ago

As of 2022, boomers only make up 20.58% of the US population, though.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...

ars10• 3 years ago

Why is it scary?

It would become like books: A single author creates the entire work, except it's audiovisual instead of written. You can already do that now with written text, audio (if you have a talent for voices), and animation (if you can draw), why does adding realistic video make it "scary"?

Why is that bad? It seems great to me - way way way more stuff will be available, and it will be open to anyone (the cost is high now, but it will go down of course).

Dalewyn5• 3 years ago

It's "scary" for present-day actors who will likely see their entire occupation erased by the end of the century. It's also "scary" for consumers today who, justifiably, don't want the temporary but inevitable drop in quality that the switch over to "AI" will create.

But on the grander scale, I agree with you. It isn't scary. "AI" is poised to democratize art like we've never seen before, and if "AI" can replace human artists that points more to the brutal reality that art actually isn't as valuable as some of us want it to be.

Avshalom2• 3 years ago

It would become like books: A single author creates the entire work,

The writers are also on strike.

JohnFen12• 3 years ago

I find it disconcerting because it represents the death of a unique form of art. A movie is much more than just the story. The actors interpret the roles and therefore add add an additional dimension/layer to the piece. That's one of the things that makes movies special.

A movie is not just a book with visuals. They're completely different art forms.

Although, personally, I tend to prefer live theater over modern movies, so am less attached to the movie as an art form. But it does threaten to be a loss of an art form, and that's rarely a good thing.

satvikpendem11• 3 years ago

Indeed, it democratizes the storytelling experience. I'm not sure why, if I want to make a feature length film, and I have access to AI, I should also hire people just to even act in my film, much less produce and edit it. If I can make everything myself via AI, imagine the explosion in creativity by people all making their ideas come to life without having excess costs like productions currently take.

Salgat• 3 years ago

We're going to get to a point where ML will just dynamically generate entire movies custom tailored to each person's taste; all you do is pay for the compute time (plus a small fee) to generate the movie.

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

A shared culture is valuable to society. With social media vs. old school television, we don't have nearly the same shared reality with media/news/life. We walk around with headphones listening to nothing but our custom playlists and watching our custom shit. Now, we're going to have customized movies and content that we can't explore with society at large?

I'll cash out.

__loam15• 3 years ago

Sounds completely awful.

SantalBlush• 3 years ago

Then nobody will understand each other's memes.

JohnFen12• 3 years ago

I have less than zero interest in such a thing, personally.

satvikpendem11• 3 years ago

Sounds amazing to be honest. I can have limitless worlds to explore. Those who don't want this might simply be limited in their imagination.

carabiner2• 3 years ago

It's because they're nepo babies. Nepo babies are the logical actor extension of sequels churning and critical viewers are tired of recycled content. I think movies are becoming more like packaged goods, not just in stories but also the actors, and studios are fine with becoming more like McDonalds because McD's makes a fuckton of money.

souplesse• 3 years ago

Are you saying that the current generation of Hollywood stars are generally nepo babies? I’m not saying it’s not true, but Tom Holland and Timothee Chalamet are not good examples for that.

throwaway143563• 3 years ago

hybrid actors

throwaway143563• 3 years ago

picture for example stalone and schwarzenegger combined into one person.

friend_and_foe2• 3 years ago

That's not scary. That's actually fantastic for movies.

"Movie stars" were created as a concept by Hollywood to enable people who otherwise wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief to watch a guy they've seen play 10 characters already play another. This was capitalized on by good actors who knew their worth and made a lot of money. Now you don't go watch a movie and expect a unique person for every role, you actively seek out films with the same face in them.

Imagine every movie you watch is not a recycled face with a cult of personality, it's just a story with people in it. I think movies without celebrities would be much better.

rcarr8• 3 years ago

What you're describing is literally Netflix. I can go on Netflix and watch unlimited shows with completely unknown actors from across the globe.

When I was 19, I decided to make my way through the entirety of the imdb top 250 (which actually meant something at the time) as well as a few other big movie lists. To this day, I can remember many of those films and they influence how I see the world. I'm not convinced the Netflix shows I've watched carry such clout.

The cult of personality emerges when the rare talent warrants it. The face may be the same but the character transformation sure isn't. If they haven't got it then the cult soon flounders with all but the Kool-Aid drinkers which seems to be what we're witnessing with the current crop of actors. Try telling me Christian Bale's Batman is the same as his Machinist performance or Jake Gyllenhaal's Nightcrawler is the same as his Jarhead. These two are literally next level at their craft, and watching a top performer in any craft is immensely satisfying. If we lose that to CGI it will be a massive shame.

Balgair• 3 years ago

The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen, editor of Empire magazine, goes into the 'why' of the 80's action movie stars. Great book, well worth a summer read.

TL;DR: Unique factors of the stars themselves mostly growing up in poverty, the Cold War, and the film industry coming out of 'funks' in the 70s lead to this hyper-masculine juiced to the gils ur-hero of relatively 'cheap' films. Stalone really isn't like the others but was kinda forced into it by all the money he was making (guy's more of a tender-soul/starving artist in reality). Schwarzenegger is his own beast, as many will attest to. Segal is just woah ... looney tunes. Norris is also a strange duck that was super comfortable doing TV movies for some reason. ETC.

Again, great book, well worth the read!

centro• 3 years ago

This should obviously be illegal if it's not already. Hopefully case law directs the legal system towards the correct conclusion.

ars10• 3 years ago

It should be illegal for me to make a digital version of myself if I want to?

Why?

obliteratus• 3 years ago

The 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-bee6• 3 years ago

no, 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.

HDThoreaun3• 3 years ago

AI 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.

__loam15• 3 years ago

I 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".

Mountain_Skies• 3 years ago

Why wouldn't studios use a LLM for biometrics instead of using an individual's attributes? They could churn out new unique virtual actors continuously.

minimaxir4• 3 years ago

A 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.

Legend24406• 3 years ago

An 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.

charlieo88• 3 years ago

The 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• 3 years ago

Basically that's the movie Simone

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/

LispSporks22• 3 years ago

Jeff: 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/

milesward2• 3 years ago

Came here just to say The Congress!

pentagrama• 3 years ago

This movie blew my mind, it goes so forward in time. Should be talked more.

ilaksh2• 3 years ago

Sounds 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• 3 years ago

This ultimately misses the point of art

goblinux• 3 years ago

1000%

they don't want to make art, they want to make content

silisili• 3 years ago

Have 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-div2• 3 years ago

It'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.

nitwit005• 3 years ago

Studio executives have never made art, nor cared about it for the most part.

cogman104• 3 years ago

I'm way more pessimistic here. One of the weaknesses of LLM and the current state of AI is it's forgetful.

Sure, you can ask it to draw a beach, but can you ask it to draw the SAME beach with a character interacting with items on that beach?

The current simplistic versions of this have very tightly bound environments for the characters to interact (I'm thinking endless Seinfeld).

krapp• 3 years ago

This isn't about the current state of AI, this is about laying the foundations for the legal framework and infrastructure for AI in the future, when all of this stuff is feasible.

Legend24406• 3 years ago

It's not class warfare. The endgame here isn't "Hollywood execs fire all the actors and make billions for themselves", it's "an app on your phone makes whatever movie you want for free, and the Hollywood execs don't get anything either".

dkh5• 3 years ago

Sure, it's both sides trying to survive a little longer than the other, but the studios are also better positioned to create or run this hypothetical app.

Throughout the years, the one thing that has remained unchanged is that the power ultimately lies in controlling distribution.

Joeri2• 3 years ago

So basically we’re inventing the holodeck, and people are freaking out as if it is the end of acting. The holodeck does characters better than humans, but they still go to plays on the enterprise.

There will always be humans willing to act and humans willing to watch them. Maybe there won’t be 10 million dollar wages for a single role, but so what?

greenimpala• 3 years ago

The verge cookie warning is cool. Stare at her eyes for 10 seconds, then press back.. An imaginary pink box appears.

LightBug1• 3 years ago

Happy April Fools Day everyone .... err, everyone? hello?

babyshake2• 3 years ago

Good 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.

Legend24406• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years ago

Not 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

Avshalom2• 3 years ago

Right now they are not trying to replace human workers, they are trying to replace human artists.

rcarr8• 3 years ago

Wasn'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.

__loam15• 3 years ago

Ah yes, the total ossification of our culture. Amazing.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

more discussion over here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36715052

LapsangGuzzler• 3 years ago

The 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.

Legend24406• 3 years ago

Only 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• 3 years 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.

Joeri2• 3 years ago

You’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.

JohnFen12• 3 years ago

I'm watching Indiana Jones as interpreted by Harrison Ford. The actor's interpretation of the role is an important part. I'm less interested in some "purer form" of the character, because that's effectively a different character.

JohnFen12• 3 years ago

Yeah, this business with de-aging actors or even including dead actors in new productions is way over the line for me. I can't watch it.

dkh5• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Honestly 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• 3 years ago

Such 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-div2• 3 years ago

Yeah it doesn't matter what happens to Marvel content. But we don't want all media to gravitate to becoming Marvel content.

deng• 3 years ago

BTW, 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• 3 years ago

Of 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• 3 years 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.

Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas – for free, forever

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