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mindvirus

I wonder where this leads in the long term.

Do we have different actors deepfaked in for different markets?

Do actors even act anymore? Do companies just pay actors for their likeness and do the rest?

Do we get to a point where you can choose who is acting in a film you're watching?

How are deepfaked voices? Can we substitute audio as well?

I understand that deepfakes are still a bit of a manual process, but presumably that will change.

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Well, why are good actors so sought-after? What makes someone an actor whose likeness people seek and what makes a B-tier actor?

Part of it is inertia and random celebrity status, having an attractive or interesting face etc., but part of it is also the raw knowledge of when to apply certain microexpressions, how to gesture etc. i.e. how to do the acting itself. To be a convincing, charismatic etc. actor it's not enough to wear a digital mask of a celebrity, the underlying actor still needs to act well. That may not be so important for certain types of shallow movies, but it certainly is for deeper drama films etc.

It's similar to today's text generation where you may be able to generate sports game reports, user's manuals or travel brochures etc. but not really those where you need high level decisions, like applying the appropriate expressions to a real-world event, taking into account all the context, like writing a poem about your feelings reflecting on some recent real-world event.

I'm not saying humans have a magical power that can't be implemented in silicon.

What I'm saying is that deepfakes as they are today are not sufficient to replace actors. You'd need a higher level puppeteering AI that would take the whole storyline and script into account to come up with the right ways to express the appropriate emotions at that moment in the film and could take the director's instructions regarding his vision of how the drama should unfold etc.

One example where it shows that the actor doesn't just provide a face, but, well,the acting, is back to the Future. Originally they had wanted to cast Michael J Fox, but he wasn't available. So they picked a different actor. And that actor didn't get that the movie was supposed to be fun. They shot several weeks with this actor who was turning the movie into something very serious, being terrified by being transplanted into the past, and finding it tragic to come back to a present where everything is different.

Theres a good documentary about this [1], that talks about replacing that actor, and when Fox comes on set and delivers the first line filmed ("You put a time machine... In a DeLorean?!"), it's hilarious, night and day difference.

[1] season 2, episode 1 of movies that made us www.netflix.com/us/title/80990849

I think all the stuff you describe about charisma is absolutely true in the creative mode of generating value, but there is also an extractive mode of generating value for which I absolutely think deepfakes could be very effective. Once an actor establishes an audience (generally through the creative mode you describe), there is still an opportunity to extract as much value as possible from the remaining good will of the fan base. This already happens with famous actors producing cheap and unpopular movies that seem to only exist to put that actor’s name and face on the poster.

> Do actors even act anymore? Do companies just pay actors for their likeness and do the rest?

I assume that would eventually get to generating a totally new person, rather than modeling after a specific actor who costs money.

Even better! Imagine - every showing at every theatre in the world has slightly different actors A/B tested for the moviegoers.

Pixar and the like can theoretically do this already, but don't, maybe due to cost reasons.

That's already happening. Look into "digital influencers".

There is a company doing this for video game voices. The voice actors who provide training data get royalties. I hope that becomes a standard for deep fakes and the ML in general, as opposed to how copilot (and the rest of the industry) generally just takes whatever they get their hands on as free train training data.

I doubt Hollywood would want this, but I'd love to be entertained by choosing some base story, then be able to pick the lead actors and perhaps setting and mood. Deep fakes get a ways toward this. This is basically what remakes are.

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