Actors decry 'existential crisis' over AI-generated ‘synthetic’ actors | Hacker News Reader

Actors decry 'existential crisis' over AI-generated ‘synthetic’ actors

reuters.com

42 pointsmfiguiere57 comments

Movie studios don't want the tech to be a button that spits out a movie. Because if a movie studio can do it, then Netflix can do it better in-house. If Netflix can do it, then a group of dedicated fans can do it for the fun of it.

Imagine a bunch of Marvel fans mad over the last few Thor movies making a gritty, comics accurate version. Imagine fans making the DC vs Marvel move that literally couldn't exist because of the studios would never allow it? Star Trek/Starwars crossover?

In a world where entertaining media becomes easy to produce, the only thing about the studio system worth anything is the distribution. Netflix would eat them alive.

The end state is something like media becomes so easy to create that most of it is only watched by the person who created it and even then probably not even that.

How many stable diffusion images are glanced at out of the 4 that pop up in MidJourney and are never looked at again but, just sit on MidJouney's servers forever? Eventually movies and video games will be this disposable.

Out of that might come gems that would have never otherwise been made but, most of it will be garbage.

This would be like Japanese manga industry in contrast to marvel/dc. U have so many one man armies who are working on so many different topics. The endless creativities are just unmatched. You could have a single person to create the media empire like one piece.

The manga space is much more interesting than typical comics. I'd love to see the same thing in the other media

Yeah, I think it'll be a lot like how Vocaloid hasn't destroyed the market for real vocalists. If anything it's the exact opposite, where people get into the medium via it and end up as actual vocalists, like Reol with No Title-/No Title+. Besides just vocalists, the lower barrier to entry has produced a lot of producers, many of whom also eventually migrate to working with real vocalists.

>The end state is something like media becomes so easy to create that most of it is only watched by the person who created it and even then probably not even that.

Sounds like how Trek envisioned holodeck programs. Though I guess a lot of those were "what if I could chill with a book character"

And with the better ones shared, iirc DS9 right.

this is explained well by Mark Fisher and Capital Realism, although it is a bit more grim than your take, essentially all pop culture becomes too commoditized and meaningless as a direct consequence of late stage capitalism

> Imagine a bunch of Marvel fans mad over the last few Thor movies

I'd imagine a more likely scenario would be a bunch of fans of a cancelled Netflix show generate another season. There's already been a bunch of scripts for The OA Season 3 generated by ChatGPT.

YouTube wants it.

Imagine all the grassroots movies. Already some of the Star Wars fan shorts are getting pretty good and the writing is already better than some of the movies that hit the theaters.

YouTube wins when content is created by everyone. They win Big.

In developing economies, YouTube has better reach than broadcast TV. I can get a good chunk of old and new content from non Anglo countries overseas right through a YouTube search.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOsU5OHZq7Q-m6spy7ukBpsJ-...

It does not invalidate the point of this comment, but in the context of this article -- the contract dispute between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP -- Netflix is a "Hollywood studio". Netflix joined the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in 2021.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...

I’m certainly not less guilty than them, but this makes me think

“First they came for the spinners and the weavers. The actors didn’t complain.

Then, they came for the farmhands. The actors didn’t complain.

Then, they came for the bank tellers. The actors didn’t complain.

Then, they came for the shop assistants. The actors didn’t complain.

Then, they came for the actors.”

I can’t think of any argument for claiming there should be some fraction of the populations or number of people who can make a living acting.

The problem, of course, is that all the above move the ability to earn money from people to capital, making those who have capital ever richer and those who have not poorer, if not in absolute terms at least relatively, and that’s enough to make people feel poorer.

> The problem, of course, is that all the above move the ability to earn money from people to capital, making those who have capital ever richer and those who have not poorer, if not in absolute terms at least relatively, and that’s enough to make people feel poorer.

That’s the dystopia AGI promises to bring. Once AGI becomes a thing, it would be able to do all jobs. Trading human labour for money would cease to be a thing. The only ones who would still be able to make money are those who own the means of production.

The economy would consist entirely of “owners” who would trade the output of their enterprises among themselves. Everyone else would just be left out of the economy because they have nothing to trade with.

do you envision this going into full "sky city / earth city" divide, or will 'owners' realize they are dependant on something 'non-owners' can only provide?

I think history tells us that capitalists/aristocracy/owners don't voluntarily share their gains with the rest. They are perfectly fine living in splendor while the populace lives in poverty. And they tell themselves stories why they deserve it. The cycle usually gets disrupted by war or revolution.

And then their heads fall off

would the guillotines reach them if they had armies of killbots guarding them?

But how many security flaws will the killbots have? Who's programming them?

> Who's programming them?

They can frankly use the same AI robots that do other work.

> something 'non-owners' can only provide?

Commerce/consumption. What's the point of all the production if no one can buy it?

Surely AGI would also replace the owners because it would also be better at owning the means of production?

There’s basically two routes then, in science fiction: the AI decides humans are wasteful (men of iron / thinking machines), or the AI goes turbo-communism because it sees humans as pets and you take care of and provide for your pets.

Perhaps I'm wrong but all intelligences are basically goal seeking machines no?

People who create/own the AGI will program them with goals compatible to their own: AI's only goal is to of service to the owner and be an extension of the owner's will. Thus the AI will never overthrow them.

AI will run their empires for their owners while said owners sit back and enjoy their lives.

only if they can program perfectly

what do you think the odds of that are?

If it's reliable enough to take over professional work, it can take over executive work as well.

That assumes anyone understands the agi, especially after having put the agi through a few rounds of self improvement.

But afaik we already can’t explain the specific behaviour of LLM, only their general B-road strokes.

"all intelligences are basically goal seeking machines no?"

No, not really. They can just exist along you, think Da vinci or Einstein. They don't really tried to change their worlds, even having that capability.

So humans could be just living along "a giant", or several of them, at any historical moment, even right now.

And not really be aware of them at all. Artificial or not.

Why would the actors complain about farmhands? The base assumption of organized labor and unions are that you need to fight for yourself, but that we (as fellow laborers) will support you. We can't fight for each other (what would actors even do to protest farmhand wages?) but we can support each other in the shared fight for a fair share of the excess value.

I don't understand this modern idea of a dystopia as society's end goal, and every struggle against that as some unjust act. People need to fucking eat. Actors need to fucking eat. If what they do to eat now is under threat, they have every right, moral and logical, to fight for their right to eat.

Famous actors have huge PR capabilities, they definitely can support labor efforts in other industries or help suppress it. Call for boycotts of union-busting companies, help elect pro-union politicians and so on. Or be Ronald Regan and get elected and bust unions.

There's a danger in that sort of activism, and direct intervention often results in backlash. It's very hard to protest capitalism on the consumer side. It rarely works for protests that directly affect the consumer and I've never seen it work for proxy fights.

I'm sure most actors do think they are making a positive difference through the films they choose to act in. I'm sure they believe in and push for messaging they think help people. I don't think they believe (rightly or not, i don't know) that they have the direct influence to "simply" help elect certain politicians.

> if not in absolute terms at least relatively, and that’s enough to make people feel poorer.

Feelings aren't really the problem. The government is controlled by relative wealth, not absolute wealth. When the winners control the rules of the game, the outcomes are obvious.

It's funny, having recently watched the Boba Fett series on Disney.

At one point, there's Luke Skywalker. But it's the young Luke Skywalker, not the current Mark Hamill. It was a synthetic Luke we were seeing on screen. Mark Hamill did not participate in the filming, it was someone else with a CGI Luke head.

Mark Hamill gets a credit in casting, but as I understand it, much of the dialog was synthetically generated based on his original voice in the original trilogy. Now, maybe he did voice the lines and they just used the training to process them and change the sounds and such.

But in the end, what were were seeing and hearing on screen was not Mark Hamill, it was Something Else.

Similarly, but perhaps more mundane, there were episodes with the original Mandalorian character. As I understand it, what we see on screen is not the Mandalorian actor, but a double in the suit. The original actor, Pedro Pascal, was not available during the shoot.

But he did come in later and dub the lines.

So, it just seems to me that in some cases, we are already "there", and the AIs don't even need to come into play at all.

If you watched "The Jungle Book" remake, it was astonishing that there was only 1 actor (the boy who played Mowgli), and everything else was generated. I ripped that movie and while putting in my KODI collection, I couldn't decide whether to put it in Movies or Animated Movies. I think soon everything will go into the Animated Movies folder.

The problem with AI generated actors isnt in the fact that they disenfranchise real actors, but in the purely capitalist direction studios have chosen to move. new characters, new actors, new stories and new roles all incur significant and unproven investment over time. building a hit --no matter how easy pixar makes it appear-- is nontrivially difficult.

so conversely studios have decided that ever more barrel-scraping is not only a more consistent effort, but a safer one as well. Hence there have been twelve star-wars films, five indiana jones films, Fifteen batman movies, and enough marvel flicks to rend dull groans from home movie collectors cabinets just pondering them. This is a downward spiral because people change over time but a franchise without end has nothing new to offer. panic buttons like gender swaps and race swaps come across as hastily constructed, hamfisted attempts to peddle relevance to an increasingly disinterested audience of gen Z while alienating older fans of a series. Scripts become more predictable, plots become more dependable, and all the while profit --while safe and quantifiable-- dwindles lower.

So AI is here to take that last bit of capital preventing realization of a purely and endlessly profit-driven effort by armies of disconnected studio executives clamoring for ever less pie. faces names places and likenesses in perpetuity, and in exchange, the customer can consume another dozen Star Wars movies just as flavourless as the packaging theyre shipped in. content will be created, until the last skywalker picks up the last light saber and delivers his 45th speech in which the dark side and the force are forever memorialized in a 90 minute recitation of the owners manual for some executives old porsche. traditional "hollywood" film will have died by its own pocked withered hand.

The new currency will become the ability to generate new content; ideas themselves. Fewer films but with greater quality and less reliance on enchanting special effects will command the attention of the consumer after these goliaths of the post-vaudeville cinema are gone. real actors and cinema will still exist to some degree but gone will be the days where actors championed themselves as stuntmen, pandemics arrested production, and studios could crank out endless rehashes of old properties until the last star falls from heaven.

Yes, but something like that costs productions a boat load of capital to pull off. They can't really half-ass it either because then you run up against Uncanny Valley and people end up rejecting the movie or show, wasting your investment. So the bar is high.

Second, I'm not yet worried about this for credited actors, as audiences right now go see movies because they actually have the real actor of their choice in it. It asks a lot of your audience to be fine with a movie that "stars" someone who wasn't actually in it, and it's too early to see how well an AI credited actor would bring people to the theaters. My current guess is that it would cost a lot to make, not really bring anything new to the screen and turn off a sizable chunk of the audience.

HOWEVER, the actors strike is calling out that background actors who have only a line or two of dialog are getting paid for 1 day of work so that their likeness could be scanned in and they are used in perpetuity. You're diluted if you think this benefits college film projects, or your favorite YouTube channel. This stuff is expensive and time consuming to adopt. I mean, it is super cool that scenes like in House of Dragon, where they need to fill stadiums of citizens, can use this to make worlds seem much richer and larger than life. Still, it's not about compensation from what I understand, it's that actors worry this is gating off new actors from getting experience and exposure since many of them started out as background characters.

This seems like an Innovator's Dilemma (adjacent) trap. The actors will prevent hollywood or the mainstream studios from using synthetic actors, writers, etc. so it will be left up to some completely new entity to create that infrastructure. It will happen anyway because it is so compelling, and there are tens of thousands of actors who never make a living who would happily become digital.

* The Innovator's Dilemma - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

If the results are very similar but the method is much cheaper, it will certainly be applied. At least with extras.

It seems that the plot of Stanislaw Lem’s “The Futurological Congress”, adapted into the film linked below, is fast becoming reality. The convergence between virtual reality and intellectual property here is a fascinating one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

Not a perfect movie, but quite a trip!

See also the Michael Crichton movie Looker https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/ which is about this topic

At the rate AI is progressing, LLMs combined with embodied diffusion models and rendering software could create better movies than any human has, ever. But I would assume that that tech will precede the technological singularity by a short window of time (6 months at most).

All this feels like if Native Americans, in the years after contact with the Europeans, were to complain that trading for guns is putting spear craftsmen out of a job. There are far greater, perhaps more catastrophic changes coming that all this low hanging fruit SaaS stuff with AI is only a canary for.

Funny how CGI employs more people than real actors do. Artists, compositors, digital effects, data wranglers, on an on. For a big movie that section is like a telephone book.

They're trying to replace all those people with AI too.

Eventually the audience will be AI as well.

For tweets it already is. Plenty of companies already pretend to have users that are fake

If you really want to start minimizing the contributions of people, only the writers matter? Without a story you'd just have shiny demos and people running around.

There's a long-running arms race around presentation of storytelling, and to date it's resulted in more jobs. But make no mistake: the people holding the production wallets are interested in stripping down all those jobs: writing, acting, CGI, etc.

Hopefully it ends up looking more like "better tools enabling people to do more and more visually-compelling things while remaining a thriving industry" than "suit in an office reviews a million AI-generated story concepts and then pushes buttons to turn them into videos cloning today's styles."

Those are not union jobs.

Do they share in residuals? I expect not.

The only reason actors and Hollywood exists is it's very expensive to make films. If it's not very expensive then it's democratised.

So the only question is: Are your skills something a computer/robot can't do yet? And will people pay for them?

Wheat picker? No. Fruit picker? Yes for now, but no one's paying much for them.

If you can't act better than a computer, why are you an actor?

it's neigh impossible to read the content on a mobile device on that godforsaken website with all the ads and jumping UI... seriously annoying.

That is why I redirect Reuters links to neuters.

https://neuters.de/technology/actors-decry-existential-crisi...

Neuters is a privacy respecting fronted for Reuters, like nitter (for twitter), libreddit (for reddit) or invidious (for YouTube).

According to the about page https://neuters.de/about it loads less than 10KiB compared to around 50 MiB that the original page loads.

A PiHole running the default blocklist makes reuters appear as just white background with black text (no ads, none).

Just a recommendation, and it's supereasy and I can never go back to unguarded DNS since.

I'm not sure this future is avoidable. Sure, they're trying to use real actors' likenesses right now because they want to use people we know.

But if the actor were created from scratch to start with...

Could SAG start their own studio, backed by members and community at large?

In the context of visual effects, AI isn't really significantly different. You could just hire ILM or whatever to make a fake actor before with "traditional" CGI.

Except that traditionally took a wild amount of work, from a very large team. Think of it as if the virtual "actor" is a puppet, which requires careful design and construction from a team of highly skilled craftspeople, and then another separate team of craftspeople to make it move in a natural way. And then another team for all the little finishing touches - lighting, clothing, skin textures, reflections, etc.

These teams are all full of wildly skilled people, with huge amounts of experience with digital tools (obviously), biomechanics, physics, cinematography, etc.

As AI tools get better, you start lowering the barrier to entry and shrinking the size of those teams until you get to the point where someone can film something with a smartphone and AI does the rest to make it cinema quality. Or just hallucinates something from a prompt.

Its a whole different ball game.

I don't see it as any larger of a jump than moving from hand-drawn to computer animation. Just look at that industry and how incredibly labor intensive traditional animation was. This is already commodified now as animation work is usually outsourced to some cheap studio for almost any new Netflix show. (often with mediocre results). Just compare the new Ghost in the Shell show they did to the old one.

If someone wants to put out something that has genuine artistic merit they'll still employ people who can leverage new tools to make something that stands out, but visual art production is being automated for a long time now.

But it is a jump. And each jump means fewer people working in the industry, and more of the work that exists going to less experienced workers.

Ai cgi will inevitably be better than any actor. It was good while it lasted

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