Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

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do they even need actors for this? they need personalities. they scan the personality of thousands of people, and let AI do the acting.

the skill of an actor is that they can act out different personalities as needed for the film, but if they create a database of whatever personalities you can think of, you only need to find a person to have that personality scan them and add to the database.

so anyone can do this job for a day. acting skills are no longer needed, much less acting experience.

that means anyone needing a bit of money will be game to be exploited like this. basically we can expect that anything but major roles will be replaced if this is allowed to go through.

the actors guild will have to negotiate to somehow disallow or limit the use of AI generated characters. however if you want to create scenes with thousands of people (like the battle scenes in lord of the rings or the hobbit, which were embellished with the help of AI) disallowing AI characters would be too limiting

One of the most fundamental elements of a movie or show is that characters will be thrown into conflict that will challenge them and will come out on the other side (or not) changed in one way or another. That's at the macro level -- at the micro level, you may need to portray a wide range of emotion in a single scene. Nobody is just "one personality" throughout a show. Or a scene.

If they can successfully map a thousand different emotions to the same A.I. model believably, then okay, but we are some distance from that yet, and it will be fought heavily when we get there, because a couple hundred thousand people aren't going to roll over and accept that their jobs don't exist anymore

i certainly hope so. but we are not talking about lead actors here but extras. those are already being generated in scenes where hundreds or thousands of them are needed because such scenes would otherwise not even be possible. what scanning personalities will do is give movie makers a wider variety of extras to choose from without the extra cost. that's what they want and what the actors guild needs to fight.

i am not talking about speaking roles. we don't quite have the technology for those yet, but we are not that far either. we already have animated and computer generated 3d models of people that are getting more realistic by the day. just look at the final fantasy movies. they are still human controlled of course, but there are no more full actors. and the same is happening with voice actors too.

i fear this is where the industry is heading, and it's going to be hard to stop them.

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