Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/actors-strike-sag-artificial-intelligence-hollywood-studios-background-1234788191/

by rawgabbit • 3 years ago

79 155 3 years ago

rollingstone.com

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

This feels like the start of a race to the bottom.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

It seems that everything good and special on this planet has been going that way.

PixyMisa• 3 years ago

The studios are starting from the bottom.

pinewurst• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/uAH8j

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

We wanted the singularity, but all we got was more unemployed artists.

justinjlynn5• 3 years ago

Perhaps the problem is people needing to be employed to justify their existence or as a proxy measure to their ongoing contribution to society and its degree?

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

I’m a firm believer in a post toil to survive reality. The end of employment is godliness would be a great thing. I’d rather see artists create art than work in artist hamster wheels for the health insurance.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

I generally agree, but the specific premise here is vile. Some megacorp gets rights to your digital puppet that they can exploit to their pleasure, while the actors get almost nothing? Yikes.

Even if we didn't need to justify our existence, a lot of actors would probably still like to & want to act.

Pxtl2• 3 years ago

How did we end up in a future where the robots get to write and paint but I still have to do my own laundry?

ronsor• 3 years ago

Because software is easy, but robotics hardware is actually very difficult.

juanani• 3 years ago

well are you doing your laundry by hand? I'm going to praise our washing machines here, glorious immobile 1-2 function robot.

antisthenes2• 3 years ago

If you owned the robots that write and paint, you could afford servants that do your laundry.

This is the future that hardcore anti-communists wanted. It's come true.

worrycue• 3 years ago

And unemployed support people.

Harbinger of things to come. AI will come for us all eventually.

It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment.

civilitty• 3 years ago

It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment.

We know exactly what happens next. It was laid out in Soylent Green and Day After Tomorrow

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

Artists are on alert now, but after spending a few weeks rewriting a project using a new-to-me framework and language with our current "Model T" generative AI as my pair programmer, I'm reasonably confident that software and hardware engineers are going to be in the middle of their own existential crisis soon.

rich_sasha2• 3 years ago

I suppose, if we ever get to the point where humans don't have to work, this is how the start of it looks like. Also the start of terrible dystopias...

But first we'll see AI chip away at jobs. More and more revenues will flow into AI and their owners and less into the hands of everyone else. Eventually AI would be the only game in town, plus an army of unemployed people. The only thing to do then would be to tax or socialise the profits of the AI and feed the masses with the proceeds.

Or see enormous inequality and a repeat of the French revolution. How apt to write this on Bastille day!

In fact, I think there is little difference between the AI hegemony and the landowner one on 18th century. Back then you had a tiny slither of population own all the land, most of everyone else was doing menial underpaid jobs.

polishdude20• 3 years ago

Back then though, there was less surveillance , less of a feeling of alienation among your countrymen. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone willing to join some revolution

WalterBright8• 3 years ago

On the other hand, making a movie is terrifyingly expensive. Substantially reducing the cost will mean more movies get made, which means more demand for front line actors.

After all, what happened when the printing press replaced the monks copying books by hand, letter by letter, in ink?

midoridensha4• 3 years ago

A lot of the cost is top-billed actors' salaries. They could reduce that greatly by simply not using A-list actors (unless they agree to a huge paycut), but they don't want to do that because A-list actors bring more viewers. Meanwhile modern movies usually have lousy scripts. This problem is one that the movie studios have created all by themselves.

WalterBright8• 3 years ago

I'm looking forward to the day when anyone can hand a book to an AI and tell it to generate a movie from it.

At least there'll be no more complaints about "not following the book!"

richardw• 3 years ago

Nah, just generate the A listers, or make better actors that are better looking and have better voices. Generate the directors, generate the whole movie. Put me in the movie, make me better looking. Toss the studios.

h0l0cube3• 3 years ago

There’s hardly a scarcity of movies at the moment

WalterBright8• 3 years ago

Compared to books, it's orders of magnitude.

cloverich4• 3 years ago

I think there _is_ a scarcity of quality movies that don't follow predictable / mainstream cliches. Because its too risky to sink a lot of money into something niche. AI will change that. The number one thing it is going to do is reduce the time, effort, and money involved in creating quality films. The result will be more trash for sure. But also more high quality stuff, and a LOT more stuff tailored to narrower interests. And its probably going to be very cheap, and perhaps free for much of it.

We'll still see mainstream franchises though, because IMHO it serves as a form of social glue, i.e. gives people common things to talk about and experiences to share.

dclowd9901• 3 years ago

Yellow journalism happened

coolandsmartrr2• 3 years ago

More movie means more choice in the market to the point of confusion among consumers. Further increasing film output may be detrimental to the market; moviegoers may get alienated by unfamiliar choices, and films may find it more difficult to recoup costs.

The reasons franchises, especially superheroes, have been thriving in the last two decades is because of the excessive choice of movies. The general public struggles to pick which one to watch, so they pick franchises with expected plots. This market trend is partly why Disney's Bob Iger bet on franchises, acquiring Marvel and Lucasfilms.

The paradox of choice is best illustrated in Sheena Iyengar's "The Art of Choosing." An experiment showed that when supermarket shoppers were presented with more choices for a category (e.g. jam), they stuck to the choices they were already familiar with.

WalterBright8• 3 years ago

Does the great mass of books available confuse people?

LapsangGuzzler3• 3 years ago

The reasons franchises, especially superheroes, have been thriving in the last two decades is because of the excessive choice of movies. The general public struggles to pick which one to watch, so they pick franchises with expected plots. This market trend is partly why Disney's Bob Iger bet on franchises, acquiring Marvel and Lucasfilms.

I don’t think this is true. Consolidation of film properties was largely caused by the death of the tape/dvd market, which represented a significant revenue stream for movies, so the studios focused on properties that would have huge box office numbers. Matt Damon talked about this in an interview recently, saying that so many of his movies, like Good Will Hunting, would not be made today because they tended to have long tail VHS sales.

verve_rat• 3 years ago

It doesn't have to be fantastically expensive to make a movie. The death of the mid budget feature is entirely of the studios' own making.

bleuchase2• 3 years ago

Martin Luther also threatened the Catholic Church by translating the Bible from Latin into German. That was the first time people other than priests had wide access to the text directly.

slantaclaus• 3 years ago

Hmmmmmm

scrumper3• 3 years ago

Well done AI researchers, keep digging. The balrog isn't far below you now.

valine3• 3 years ago

Why is this the fault of AI researchers? Hollywood executives are trying to own everyone's likeness for free. That has nothing to do with AI; it's run of the mill greed.

They tried to do the same thing to Crispin Glover back in the 80s. There are many ways to reproduce someone's likeness, and diffusion models are just the latest. Hanging a body double upside down accomplishes the same thing.

uoaei6• 3 years ago

It's the fault of AI researchers in the same way that deaths in conflict zones are the fault of weapons manufacturers. It doesn't matter who pulls the trigger, since whether the weapons exist or not is the primary factor determining whether they can be used by malicious actors.

imglorp2• 3 years ago

The studio talking about AI for actors at this exact moment might have an element of truth, but more likely it sounds like a negotiation tactic to devalue those striking actors.

In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.

foota• 3 years ago

I don't think this is accurate, isn't motion capture used for a ton of action movies? It may not be AI, but there's not much real difference.

Pxtl2• 3 years ago

In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.

For now.

Not too long ago the photos generated all had wonky fingers.

It's all happening too fast.

cool_dude85• 3 years ago

These fights are often about what will come in the future. Remember, the initial fight over streaming residuals for writers went on during the last WGA strike in '07. The tech might be there now, but how about in 15 years?

jredwards6• 3 years ago

I honestly think we're a lot closer than that.

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.

You may not have read far enough into TFA, which specifically notes: The reported proposal hinged on the ability for background actors to be “scanned, get paid for one day’s pay” and for that company to “own that scan of their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

To continue with the video game analogy, studios are proposing to own your likeness, expressions, mannerisms, gait, and whatever else they can capture/model, for use as background NPCs in whatever projects they like, forever, for free.

applied_heat• 3 years ago

Depends on what you get paid for the day. Maybe someone doesn’t need to work after that

imglorp2• 3 years ago

I was generalizing, yes. This seems like another negotiation tactic starting with a low ball offer. SAG is free to make an outrageous counter offer.

moneycantbuy• 3 years ago

The reported proposal hinged on the ability for background actors to be “scanned, get paid for one day’s pay” and for that company to “own that scan of their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”

…

“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” Deadline reported one studio executive saying.

i worked as an extra for almost 10 years. averaged less than $20k/yr, but at least it was enough to scrape by while i got an education. ironically i now make $200k/yr working in ai for a pharma co. the studios want to pay a person only once to use their image forever. late stage capitalism at its finest. i’m sipping the last of anchor steam. what’s capitalism’s endgame? elon or jeff get all the money and head to mars while everyone else starves in streets lined with benioff’s empty houses?

xkqd2• 3 years ago

Well don’t be silly, we’ll be post-employment and we’ll just pass life recreating and eating grapes all day.

In all seriousness, your opinion doesn’t seem to be popular here, but I was hoping to see some debate. I personally think you’re closer to the truth than a lot of the rose tinted opinions on how this’ll bring us closer to god.

scrumper3• 3 years ago

The endgame - as advocated for by several people on this very page - is that AI takes all the creative and interesting jobs while us displaced humans exist on UBI funded by taxes on excess AI-sourced profits.

Which is fucking bullshit. What the hell are we doing trying to build a future where we transfer all the benefits of a sense of purpose and meaningful contribution to non-sentient AIs? It's insanity.

blamazon4• 3 years ago

Fun fact: This is the first time since 1960 that the actor's and writer's guilds are striking at the same time.

The leader of the actor's guild in 1960 who signed off on that strike? Ronald Reagan.

coolandsmartrr2• 3 years ago

That's really ironic, as Reagan completely reversed his stance on strikes by the time he became president.

blamazon4• 3 years ago

For anyone unaware:

On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

trafficante• 3 years ago

Reagan the Actor had very different politics than Reagan the Candidate.

Check out his stump speech for Truman[1]. Quick highlight quote:

“Remember that promise: a real increase in income for everybody. But what actually happened? The profits of corporations have doubled, while workers wages have increased by only one-quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as much as wages, and the small increase workers did receive was was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings” - Somehow Ronald Reagan

[1]https://youtu.be/uJDhS4oUm0M

WalterBright8• 3 years ago

“I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”

― Ronald Reagan

forgingahead• 3 years ago

So - Drescher 2024 then?

ALittleLight3• 3 years ago

Some time relatively soon I expect the studios won't even need to scan extras but will instead be able to generate 3D models. This is probably why the studios don't really care about maintaining the ecosystem of hairdressers and makeup people - they don't see it lasting that long any way.

Game engines with generated art seem like a plausible future for entertainment. AI writers generate concepts, do drafts, revisions, and maybe in a few years just do the whole thing.

This seems inevitable to me. Bad for actors, good for consumers as it will mean much more content. I also think this system will eat Hollywood in the end too. The technology will reduce the cost for developing high quality films and will commoditize the film industry deleting any most Hollywood has.

PrimeMcFly2• 3 years ago

I think the same way. The demos from Unreal Engine 5 are incredible. Combine it with LLMs and we really are not too far from being able to as the computer to generate a story and giving it some details, and having it be rendered and look pretty damn lifelike. That 5, maybe 10 years away at most.

I don't think the movie/tv industries will disappear, but they will be lessened when people can generate at least reasonable looking entertainment from home.

I think movies and tv will basically become like books already are. People might have read some best sellers, but there won't really be anything that is super widespread or you can count on most people having seen like Seinfeld or The X-Files.

ALittleLight3• 3 years ago

Easy to imagine in ten or twenty years people will be several "seasons" into shows that no one else has ever seen. Combine auto generated content with TikTok style customization and infinite scroll...

nprateem• 3 years ago

Yeah I came to say this. The striking actors maybe have another 5 years max before studios can just generate AI actors and won't need to scan humans anyway.

xkqd2• 3 years ago

good for consumers as it will mean much more content

It is my personal belief consumers could benefit from reducing their medium consumption, and many of us myself included could touch a little more grass

ALittleLight3• 3 years ago

From that perspective it'll be very bad for consumers.

dirtyid• 3 years ago

There's still room for face capture mocap for actors to deliver credible human performances. I see tech getting more accessible so you don't need studio level resources to produce content. More amateur talent can work together on sustainable niche productions to cater to specific tastes. Actual golden era of non market research content, but also a lot of shit fanfics.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

More discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36715686

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

23B1• 3 years ago

It's a negotiation tactic, a red herring. Next slide.

wefarrell• 3 years ago

Commercialization of someone else’s likeness sounds like the type of thing that should be heavily regulated, and skewed in favor of the person whose likeness is being exploited.

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 years ago

Doesn't matter what makes sense.

Really only matters who's paying lobbyists the most money to legally bribe politicians.

cloverich4• 3 years ago

While I agree, there's another part of me that thinks, that's just going to siphon money into the already established and rich celebrities. Its all the non celebrity people that will be left out, and at the end of the day, that's what matters more. As a result, although I agree w/ you, I actually don't know how concerned I am about it.

seatac76• 3 years ago

This is the type of thing that requires government action. Without it this story will repeat many times, it’s Hollywood now, tomorrow it’ll be music artists, video game sound artists etc.

Better to pass a law to make it illegal or opt in worst case.

bleuchase2• 3 years ago

This is the type of thing I don’t trust the government to act on. The people that would write the legislation have been bought and sold by the same people trying to make movies from cloned AI actors.

satvikpendem4• 3 years ago

Regulatory capture by the likes of OpenAI et al would be a terrible thing. Imagine, open source AI devs suddenly needing an expensive governmental license to continue developing, it would crush open source.

owyn• 3 years ago

This is the type of thing that requires government action. Without it this story will repeat many times, it’s Hollywood now, tomorrow it’ll be music artists, video game sound artists etc.

I don't think this is a thing that government can solve. The technology is world wide now, passing a law doesn't stop it. If you can hire an amazing acrobat from anywhere in the world and morph any actor from anywhere in the world as input, nothing stops you. Same with music.

I do think that there's some kind of "celebrity brain" in people that does want to be a part of a fan base, whether it's a musician or an actor there's a part of us that likes watching other people, and celebrities are very good at being those "other people" professionally. That's never going away.

Acting is a real skill! It's not standing around being yourself and getting paid for nothing. Maybe being a celebrity is not acting unless you are a celebrity hired to be an actor or an actor hired to be a celebrity being an actor being a celebrity or...

So maybe if there is some upside to all this, it's that actors may come up ahead of celebrities. The manufacturing of a top 10 list of celebrities in a cut throat competition is probably more efficient for a business than funding 1000 community theaters to generate a bunch of actors, because 10 people are easier to manage than 10000. I'm not optimistic about this strike ending in favor of the celebrities, they're expensive and annoying and possibly un-necessary? That's not a good bargaining position.

But as long as we are all human, art will never die.

wilg• 3 years ago

Face scanning and likeness rights have nothing directly to do with AI.

cheeze• 3 years ago

I completely disagree. When it's AI that is the thing that enables the large-scale usage of the scan and the likeness, its' directly related.

FredPret• 3 years ago

We wanted flying cars; we're getting Tom Cruise forever.

I'm kidding though - it'll be cool to have entirely personalized movies played by AI lookalikes. It'll probably make the human actor more money too, if they own a corporation that licenses their likeness.

jredwards6• 3 years ago

Mission Impossible 78 is going to feature a 35 year old Tom Cruise two decades after Tom Cruise dies.

riccardoj• 3 years ago

Given there is 27 years between Mission Impossible 1 and 7, I think MI78 is going to be released around 2290, so at least VR Tom Cruise should be pretty good by then

elif5• 3 years ago

Personally, I find the prospect of doing 1 day of work, and potentially having an impact on hundreds of various artistic works thrilling. It also seems a little bit of a missed argument to say that these workers are often forced into 18 hour days, as it bolsters the studio's potential arguments.

Maybe it's because of radical self-acceptance, (or low standards according to some social lens), but honestly I can't imagine a single role in any movie I would be offended to have. I consider it an honor to be attached to any piece of art, as it only increases the breadth of my identity's perseverance. If it's a piece of shit film, it is either never seen or hilarious in my mind.

Not to mention that these are background actors, hardly any uses will be problematic anyway.

As for losing the "stepping stone" into the industry, I think that is just a hyperfocused perspective on a broader societal problem transitioning to the postcapitalist AI singularity.

havnagiggle• 3 years ago

So what's your daily rate for 1 day of work, ever?

elif5• 3 years ago

I wouldn't need any compensation to have my image used artistically. It would cost me literally nothing other than a day of novelty experience doing some poses and emotes for a camera array.

I imagine there are enough "scabs" like like me that this grueling 18 hour occupation doesn't need to exist.

NoRelToEmber• 3 years ago

Personally, I find the prospect of doing 1 day of work, and potentially having an impact on hundreds of various artistic works thrilling.

At issue is compensation. The studios don't want to share the income they gain from your "impact". They want all the benefits of this new technology to accrue to themselves. Reminds me of self-driving cars coming with EULAs that forbid commercial/taxi use of self-driving.

treis• 3 years ago

Isn't that what we all do? Code I write today is used indefinitely and I get paid once plus some token equity.

elif5• 3 years ago

I also have no problem owning a self driving Tesla with the provision that fully autonomous commercial use shares revenue.

Just like studios paying gfx artists to incorporate my visage, the Tesla engineers are doing all the work. I literally do nothing in both scenarios. Why would I be entitled to compensation?

LapsangGuzzler3• 3 years ago

Maybe it's because of radical self-acceptance, (or low standards according to some social lens), but honestly I can't imagine a single role in any movie I would be offended to have.

This is always relative. There are millions of people who would do anything to live in America and have a job cleaning bathrooms, just as there are many young people that want to write software professionally and would take any software job. But if you’re an experienced dev, you wouldn’t just take any old job, you’d look for something that fits your career goals.

elif5• 3 years ago

Yes but it would be a 3d model programmed by a team of vfx artists cleaning toilets, not me...

Why would I be upset about having to not clean toilets?

WalterBright8• 3 years ago

If a studio starts using a scanned image of a background actor in multiple movies, it could become popular like the "Wilhelm Scream" enabling that actor to get frontline jobs.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Why would they need to scan when AI can generate a persons image and even a 3d facial image.

nathanaldensr• 3 years ago

This is just the beginning. Do studios even need an actor's face, or can they just generate an infinite number of random, plausible faces instantly?

aurizon• 3 years ago

We are almost at the stage(are we already?) where a fully synthetic actor can be created with no known actor's face at all, who will perform a fully synthetic script, with some directors fiddling to make it move/fit/lips etc. Will it be watchable? Barely, but it will get better fast. This is the analog of a carpenter with a hand drill versus a high speed punch press - what did the furniture makers do - grew old, and the customers went to Ikea. Skip to the end game - what will actors/writers do? WIll the stage return? or will correctly shaped MIT robot dogs be used? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgoYGL9m_xE

We speak of the Luddites against spinning machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

It is a direct analog.

I am not sure how this will unfold or how quickly it will happen or how we will adapt, but it will proceed apace.

It is an extension of the machine evolution of the last 100 years, from Henry Ford to all manner of personal function, actor, dentist, surgeon, you name it.

I am not sure how soon dentists will be replaced, it will be easy to automate certain fixed stages of function - much like robotic prostatectomy is now being done. https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Prostatectomy

cheese_van• 3 years ago

A less dystopian avenue would be if the background actor to license his avatar per use. That is, the actor retains choice, just licenses his likeness for one movie only, and only for the movies the actor wants to be in.

I can't imagine a worse situation than when a studio could use likenesses in movies that the actors would be horrified to appear in.

jredwards6• 3 years ago

Look, in the not-too-distant future, creatives are just screwed. I don't think there's any possibility of halting the advance of this technology. The only reasonable play is for government to intervene to capture the prosperity that it generates and distribute it to the population instead of letting the shareholders keep all of it. It's that or we eat the rich.

This is playing out in Hollywood right now, but it's coming soon to a theater near you.

StockHuman2• 3 years ago

If your timeline for “not-too-distant” is measured in decades at the earliest and centuries otherwise, maybe. It doesn’t look like authentically enjoyable creative output is making nearly as many strides as summarization and code completion. GPT-MidJourney autopoiesis similarly degenerates into novel-but-unremarkable prompts & images.

Maybe a limit of training these systems on internet text and images, but it seems to me that we’d need something trained on the human experience itself to get expression that doesn’t read hopelessly derivative. Now and likely for a long time, all these tools need a puppet master.

And, of course, celebrity culture requires a celebrity in the flesh. At which point an AI analogue would be so sufficiently similar to us that they might be afforded a SAG membership themselves.

jredwards6• 3 years ago

I think you’re underestimating the rate of advance and the appetite for derivative work.

oneTbrain23• 3 years ago

Back in the 60s in my youth time, I expect creative works to be immune to AI. Mundane repeatitive things like ad, copywriters, announcer, API programmers, call centre, spams replace by AI first. Heck doctors wpuld be the first few to get affected as no human can store huge chunks of medical text and pattern matching better than machines (just like what happen to letter postal sorting). Instead, creative works now being likely sacrifice first over all my earlier expectation.

rich_sasha2• 3 years ago

Before photography, if you wanted any likeness, for a book or a desk family picture, you needed a painter to paint it by hand. Then you needed a photographer. Then you needed an expensive camera and a photo shop. Now you just need a smartphone.

Photographers still exist, but there is no longer a market for "basic" photography. Similar with the horse industry: at one point it was the only way to move things overland. Now it still exists, mostly as a luxury, and supports a tiny industry.

I very much sympathise with the people affected by this. But also I guess a lot of what Hollywood produces isn't high class art. It's the horse plodding from A to B, painter drawing a boring suburban family equivalent. Reading a synopsis of the "fast and furious" film series, for example, an AI could probably happily do all of it, better, and with less brain damage to the poor humans involved in the creation (the first 3 films I enjoyed).

Either way, if AI chips away at jobs, we need to figure out how to take care of the people left behind.

28304283409234• 3 years ago

Interestingly, family photography by professionals is booming. E.g. this lady making the rounds in the Netherlands: https://nienkekoedijk.com/en/documentary-family-last-moments...

The term is "documentary family photography" I believe.

6510• 3 years ago

I think we are entering new territory with owning peoples appearance and using them as puppets on a string to do and say whatever you desire. Your clone can quite easily be more famous than the original you.

We might think we can be mature about it but one will be one shot away from losing the other job as well. We cant have a bus driver who..... woah!

Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal

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