Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

The day will come where movie actors and celebs become CGI intellectual property, without unions, dressing rooms, personal problems off-set, etc. He's right to have this concern, it's happening now.

View on HN

You need physical actors because you need someone relatable for the audience. Despite experiments like Tamagoshi, showing that computers can provide occupation of mind, I believe love can still only be provided by humans, no matter how faulty they are.

Sofia and Hatsune Miku have shown that you can have a relatable, non-human persona. Combined with the K-pop model/marketing machinery and performance capture by replaceable gig-work session actors/contractors, I can easily see a host of virtual performers who are celebrities in their own right, but with Jet Li's martial art prowess as part of their library, and fully owned by corporations.

What's not to like, no ever-increasing salary demands, multiple scenes with the same "actors" can be filmed simultaneously, the celebrity never ages, and the non-celebrity human performers behind the scenes are easily replaceable cogs: there will be huge cost savings.

Pixar doesn’t show physical actors.

Whether they show their faces or not is by the by. The parts are played by actors (and animators).

Do you know the animator or animators of, say, Frozen? Would you even notice if they switched that to another animator?

Compare this to an actor. People often decide to view or not view a movie based on the actors on it.

I don't see how that is a problem. If a computer can do an equal or better job then it makes little sense to keep such a heap of actors around. "real" actors in movies should then just become a curiosity just like still see horse carriages around as curiosity.

It's a problem if you are an actor.

Then they have to find something else to do. Just like the myriad of other jobs that are redundant because of innovation.

It the computer can do a better job, but can only do that by exploiting your work as training data, then it’s not the same thing.

Why? The actors were paid for that training data.

I would negotiate a different contract, depending on how my work would be used. Being paid is only half the story. Like software licenses: you can use this for free if you release your own code as GPL, but we’ll come to a different agreement if you want to use it differently. Different terms for different use cases.

I agree. But afaik most contracts in the acting industry make the footage of the actor completely owned by the employer.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change at some point. There was no reason to exclude impossible uses in the contracts, but as those uses become possible, people will probably want to have provisions that they share in the fruits of their own labor.

Since a lot of these new uses seem to be ‘fair use,’ it might require changes to IP law.

horse carriages are seldom the protagonist of any movie, you realize...

I don't understand what you are getting at. If you mean horse carriages are not people. You are right. But the "drivers" of horse carriages were.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com