Jeff:
We at Miramount, want to... want to scan you. All of you - your body, your face, your emotion, your laughter, your tears, your climaxing, your happiness, your depressions, your... fears, longings. We want to sample you, we want to preserve you, we want... all this, this... this thing, this thing called..."Robin Wright".
Robin Wright:
What will you do with this... thing ? That you call Robin Wright?
Jeff:
We'll do all the things that your Robin Wright wouldn't do.
The title is semi-misleading: there aren't any royalties, but instead there's a upfront cost of one day's pay.
The fact that they actually offered that low of an amount for biometric AI data in perpetuity makes it clear they are operating in bad faith (more than usual)
I think this could be fair for background actors _if_ it was scoped to a single project.
Come in, get scanned, maybe do some mannerism mocap and then get the negotiated day rate. The rate for a single day should be higher than it is currently, but still less than the studio currently pays for multiple days of background work.
This would be closer to a win-win: the background actor gets paid more money for fewer hours of work, and the studio spends less money overall on background actors.
I could literally see a future where films and tv become more like extended video game cut scenes. The studios are already struggling to make the next generation of Hollywood stars. People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars. I could see them doing away with them all together and then just hiring less expensive actors to do motion capture work. The director would then have an application which is a hybrid between an AI and the character creation screen of a video game. They put in a brief description of what they want into the AI and it then creates a photo realistic 3d model which the director can tweak to their liking. The director then applies the skin to the motion capture and boom - movie. The bankable big name actor dies and the cgi character rises in its wake. Even the voice acting work could be handled by AI. Leaves the professional actor with no other choice but to go back to the origins of the profession with theatre work.
> People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars.
Who is the next Tom Cruise? No one in Hollywood or British Film is like him. He is a relic from the early days of film, such as Burt Lancaster or Steve McQueen
We're going to get to a point where ML will just dynamically generate entire movies custom tailored to each person's taste; all you do is pay for the compute time (plus a small fee) to generate the movie.
That's not scary. That's actually fantastic for movies.
"Movie stars" were created as a concept by Hollywood to enable people who otherwise wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief to watch a guy they've seen play 10 characters already play another. This was capitalized on by good actors who knew their worth and made a lot of money. Now you don't go watch a movie and expect a unique person for every role, you actively seek out films with the same face in them.
Imagine every movie you watch is not a recycled face with a cult of personality, it's just a story with people in it. I think movies without celebrities would be much better.
It feels almost like Hollywood is trying very hard to make Timothee Chalomet's career take off and it just... I don't know, I might be out of touch, but it just isn't?
I recently saw the Wonka trailer that he stars in, and I just don't buy him as Wonka. He doesn't pull off the "weird" or "eccentric" correctly for me. Also, the moment when they are flying in the trailer and he meets an Oompa-Loompa, despite the realism and visual detail elsewhere, made the whole thing look tonally confused.
It would become like books: A single author creates the entire work, except it's audiovisual instead of written. You can already do that now with written text, audio (if you have a talent for voices), and animation (if you can draw), why does adding realistic video make it "scary"?
Why is that bad? It seems great to me - way way way more stuff will be available, and it will be open to anyone (the cost is high now, but it will go down of course).
It's because they're nepo babies. Nepo babies are the logical actor extension of sequels churning and critical viewers are tired of recycled content. I think movies are becoming more like packaged goods, not just in stories but also the actors, and studios are fine with becoming more like McDonalds because McD's makes a fuckton of money.
The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen, editor of Empire magazine, goes into the 'why' of the 80's action movie stars. Great book, well worth a summer read.
TL;DR: Unique factors of the stars themselves mostly growing up in poverty, the Cold War, and the film industry coming out of 'funks' in the 70s lead to this hyper-masculine juiced to the gils ur-hero of relatively 'cheap' films. Stalone really isn't like the others but was kinda forced into it by all the money he was making (guy's more of a tender-soul/starving artist in reality). Schwarzenegger is his own beast, as many will attest to. Segal is just woah ... looney tunes. Norris is also a strange duck that was super comfortable doing TV movies for some reason. ETC.
By and large the boomers won't vote for someone younger than them (notice our politicians are the oldest they've ever been and have been getting older since the boomers started voting).
I bet their other preferences have a lot to do with the decrease in new 80s-type movie stars, because the other thing that we've seen is the retention of stars well past their prime. I mean, they brought back Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher for the new Star Wars.
I don't know if "sorry" is what I'd feel for Hollywood stars like Tom Holland. I'm not sure what I will feel, if at all, but it is probably not close to empathy.
BTW, this is not a new issue. Crispin Glover sued Zemeckis for using his likeness in Back to the future II. Glover hated the ending of part I so much that he refused to take part in the sequels (well, he also thought he was underpaid). Back then, they used prosthetics on another actor and used old, unused footage from part I, and he successfully sued the producers for 750k... Since then, the SAG includes a clause in their contracts which explicitly forbids this kind of fakery.
The beginning of the new Indiana Jones movie has an extended sequence of Harrison Ford de-aged, he basically looks like how he did in The Last Crusade.
It really weirded me out. It looked fine on the surface, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by what it represents for film as an art form.
It’s very possible that we’ll be watching some version of Harrison Ford in movies for hundreds of years, and that is an unsettling thought.
Modern technology has a way dehumanizing people, extracting just what is valuable and discarding the rest. Maybe the luddites were on to something when they rebelled against the shoe-making machines.
Only if people want to be watching Harrison Ford movies for that long.
You forget how much power people have as consumers. Studios keep making unoriginal movies with old actors because people keep going to see them. If Star Wars sequels didn't make billions of dollars, Disney wouldn't keep making them.
> It’s very possible that we’ll be watching some version of Harrison Ford in movies for hundreds of years, and that is an unsettling thought.
Well, it's really weirder than that. Think about having a Harrison Ford that can actually act. That would be super weird.
I suspect that the the end state of all of this is that it uses technology to split performing into "acting well" and "being attractive" as separate things. And the "being attractive" will get scanned, archived and used over and over and over and ...
Yeah, Hollywood actors should definitely fear this.
You’re not watching Harrison Ford, you’re watching Indiana Jones in a purer form than today’s Harrison Ford is able to play him. In a universe without digital trickery they would have recast the character and rebooted the series. For an actor being asked to be the face of a character for all time should be the high mark of their career, and what a way to honor them after they pass away.
Within a five years it will be possible to create realistic AI virtual actors and sets that generate the entire video sequence including the performance. We can already do simplistic and less realistic versions of this.
So basically we’re inventing the holodeck, and people are freaking out as if it is the end of acting. The holodeck does characters better than humans, but they still go to plays on the enterprise.
There will always be humans willing to act and humans willing to watch them. Maybe there won’t be 10 million dollar wages for a single role, but so what?
It's not class warfare. The endgame here isn't "Hollywood execs fire all the actors and make billions for themselves", it's "an app on your phone makes whatever movie you want for free, and the Hollywood execs don't get anything either".
I find it interesting that the Director's Guild agreement (which was agreed to by the studios in about five minutes) included the acknowledgement that A.I. is not a person and cannot/will not be used in place of humans for any jobs covered by the DGA (directors, production managers, stage managers, etc.).
The studios had no trouble agreeing to that very quickly, yet seem determined to negotiate the ability to replace actors as they see fit, using human actors to do it. They acknowledge that some jobs are too important for A.I. to be allowed anywhere near, just that acting is not among them.
Honestly it’s easy because a directors job is harder to replace than an actors job. The studios weren’t losing much.
So far, in the last couple of years we’ve already seen what are basically CGI actors - current actors de-aged in three major movies - Samuel Jackson in Captain Marvel, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones.
Not to mention Mark Hamil in the Mandalorian.
How are you going to replace Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, etc?
AI actors seems like a good thing. Generative AI will allow small groups of creatives to stick to their vision and create truly unique art. The massive staff required for movies today seems like a major cause of the blockbusterfication of hollywood where every movie is trying as hard as possible to play it safe.
Of course they do, but does it really matter when AI ownership is contingent on data ownership? Ideally people would own their own data and image, but we actually have the opposite situation. The data is too freely available, they couldnt monopolize it if they tried. There's already plenty of open source deep fake voice and image models. Fighting this fire is just a proxy for the deeper issue of universal individual rights to data ownership.
Such a large amount of scenes in many big movies are CGI now, I don't see what the difference is. I'm convinced that the Avengers movies, the actors weren't even filming on the same set. They all did their parts green screened individually.
Good on the actors for not being pushovers on this issue. One way or another, we'll look back in twenty years and now that the arrangements made now were very consequential.
[+] [-] LispSporks22|2 years ago|reply
Robin Wright: What will you do with this... thing ? That you call Robin Wright?
Jeff: We'll do all the things that your Robin Wright wouldn't do.
The Congress https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/
[+] [-] milesward|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pentagrama|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|2 years ago|reply
The fact that they actually offered that low of an amount for biometric AI data in perpetuity makes it clear they are operating in bad faith (more than usual)
[+] [-] ladon86|2 years ago|reply
I think this could be fair for background actors _if_ it was scoped to a single project.
Come in, get scanned, maybe do some mannerism mocap and then get the negotiated day rate. The rate for a single day should be higher than it is currently, but still less than the studio currently pays for multiple days of background work.
This would be closer to a win-win: the background actor gets paid more money for fewer hours of work, and the studio spends less money overall on background actors.
[+] [-] squokko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarr|2 years ago|reply
Scary stuff if true.
[+] [-] rs999gti|2 years ago|reply
Who is the next Tom Cruise? No one in Hollywood or British Film is like him. He is a relic from the early days of film, such as Burt Lancaster or Steve McQueen
[+] [-] Salgat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|2 years ago|reply
"Movie stars" were created as a concept by Hollywood to enable people who otherwise wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief to watch a guy they've seen play 10 characters already play another. This was capitalized on by good actors who knew their worth and made a lot of money. Now you don't go watch a movie and expect a unique person for every role, you actively seek out films with the same face in them.
Imagine every movie you watch is not a recycled face with a cult of personality, it's just a story with people in it. I think movies without celebrities would be much better.
[+] [-] gjsman-1000|2 years ago|reply
I recently saw the Wonka trailer that he stars in, and I just don't buy him as Wonka. He doesn't pull off the "weird" or "eccentric" correctly for me. Also, the moment when they are flying in the trailer and he meets an Oompa-Loompa, despite the realism and visual detail elsewhere, made the whole thing look tonally confused.
[+] [-] ars|2 years ago|reply
It would become like books: A single author creates the entire work, except it's audiovisual instead of written. You can already do that now with written text, audio (if you have a talent for voices), and animation (if you can draw), why does adding realistic video make it "scary"?
Why is that bad? It seems great to me - way way way more stuff will be available, and it will be open to anyone (the cost is high now, but it will go down of course).
[+] [-] carabiner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|2 years ago|reply
TL;DR: Unique factors of the stars themselves mostly growing up in poverty, the Cold War, and the film industry coming out of 'funks' in the 70s lead to this hyper-masculine juiced to the gils ur-hero of relatively 'cheap' films. Stalone really isn't like the others but was kinda forced into it by all the money he was making (guy's more of a tender-soul/starving artist in reality). Schwarzenegger is his own beast, as many will attest to. Segal is just woah ... looney tunes. Norris is also a strange duck that was super comfortable doing TV movies for some reason. ETC.
Again, great book, well worth the read!
[+] [-] AbrahamParangi|2 years ago|reply
I bet their other preferences have a lot to do with the decrease in new 80s-type movie stars, because the other thing that we've seen is the retention of stars well past their prime. I mean, they brought back Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher for the new Star Wars.
[+] [-] throwaway14356|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sahbak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deng|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haunter|2 years ago|reply
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/
[+] [-] LapsangGuzzler|2 years ago|reply
It really weirded me out. It looked fine on the surface, but I couldn’t help but be distracted by what it represents for film as an art form.
It’s very possible that we’ll be watching some version of Harrison Ford in movies for hundreds of years, and that is an unsettling thought.
Modern technology has a way dehumanizing people, extracting just what is valuable and discarding the rest. Maybe the luddites were on to something when they rebelled against the shoe-making machines.
[+] [-] Legend2440|2 years ago|reply
You forget how much power people have as consumers. Studios keep making unoriginal movies with old actors because people keep going to see them. If Star Wars sequels didn't make billions of dollars, Disney wouldn't keep making them.
[+] [-] bsder|2 years ago|reply
Well, it's really weirder than that. Think about having a Harrison Ford that can actually act. That would be super weird.
I suspect that the the end state of all of this is that it uses technology to split performing into "acting well" and "being attractive" as separate things. And the "being attractive" will get scanned, archived and used over and over and over and ...
Yeah, Hollywood actors should definitely fear this.
[+] [-] Joeri|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|2 years ago|reply
Within a five years it will be possible to create realistic AI virtual actors and sets that generate the entire video sequence including the performance. We can already do simplistic and less realistic versions of this.
[+] [-] Joeri|2 years ago|reply
There will always be humans willing to act and humans willing to watch them. Maybe there won’t be 10 million dollar wages for a single role, but so what?
[+] [-] duped|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cogman10|2 years ago|reply
Sure, you can ask it to draw a beach, but can you ask it to draw the SAME beach with a character interacting with items on that beach?
The current simplistic versions of this have very tightly bound environments for the characters to interact (I'm thinking endless Seinfeld).
[+] [-] Legend2440|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dkh|2 years ago|reply
The studios had no trouble agreeing to that very quickly, yet seem determined to negotiate the ability to replace actors as they see fit, using human actors to do it. They acknowledge that some jobs are too important for A.I. to be allowed anywhere near, just that acting is not among them.
[+] [-] scarface_74|2 years ago|reply
So far, in the last couple of years we’ve already seen what are basically CGI actors - current actors de-aged in three major movies - Samuel Jackson in Captain Marvel, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones.
Not to mention Mark Hamil in the Mandalorian.
How are you going to replace Steven Spielberg, Kevin Feige, etc?
[+] [-] centro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HDThoreaun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|2 years ago|reply
Why?
[+] [-] spants|2 years ago|reply
Welcome to the real world's job market right now.
[+] [-] disambiguation|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxftw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babyshake|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Legend2440|2 years ago|reply
Anything that stops technology from replacing human workers is a bad thing.
[+] [-] LightBug1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36715052
[+] [-] greenimpala|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasmer|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lee101|2 years ago|reply
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