Look, in the not-too-distant future, creatives are just screwed. I don't think there's any possibility of halting the advance of this technology. The only reasonable play is for government to intervene to capture the prosperity that it generates and distribute it to the population instead of letting the shareholders keep all of it. It's that or we eat the rich.
This is playing out in Hollywood right now, but it's coming soon to a theater near you.
If your timeline for “not-too-distant” is measured in decades at the earliest and centuries otherwise, maybe. It doesn’t look like authentically enjoyable creative output is making nearly as many strides as summarization and code completion. GPT-MidJourney autopoiesis similarly degenerates into novel-but-unremarkable prompts & images.
Maybe a limit of training these systems on internet text and images, but it seems to me that we’d need something trained on the human experience itself to get expression that doesn’t read hopelessly derivative. Now and likely for a long time, all these tools need a puppet master.
And, of course, celebrity culture requires a celebrity in the flesh. At which point an AI analogue would be so sufficiently similar to us that they might be afforded a SAG membership themselves.
Before photography, if you wanted any likeness, for a book or a desk family picture, you needed a painter to paint it by hand. Then you needed a photographer. Then you needed an expensive camera and a photo shop. Now you just need a smartphone.
Photographers still exist, but there is no longer a market for "basic" photography. Similar with the horse industry: at one point it was the only way to move things overland. Now it still exists, mostly as a luxury, and supports a tiny industry.
I very much sympathise with the people affected by this. But also I guess a lot of what Hollywood produces isn't high class art. It's the horse plodding from A to B, painter drawing a boring suburban family equivalent. Reading a synopsis of the "fast and furious" film series, for example, an AI could probably happily do all of it, better, and with less brain damage to the poor humans involved in the creation (the first 3 films I enjoyed).
Either way, if AI chips away at jobs, we need to figure out how to take care of the people left behind.
I think we are entering new territory with owning peoples appearance and using them as puppets on a string to do and say whatever you desire. Your clone can quite easily be more famous than the original you.
We might think we can be mature about it but one will be one shot away from losing the other job as well. We cant have a bus driver who..... woah!
Some time relatively soon I expect the studios won't even need to scan extras but will instead be able to generate 3D models. This is probably why the studios don't really care about maintaining the ecosystem of hairdressers and makeup people - they don't see it lasting that long any way.
Game engines with generated art seem like a plausible future for entertainment. AI writers generate concepts, do drafts, revisions, and maybe in a few years just do the whole thing.
This seems inevitable to me. Bad for actors, good for consumers as it will mean much more content. I also think this system will eat Hollywood in the end too. The technology will reduce the cost for developing high quality films and will commoditize the film industry deleting any most Hollywood has.
I think the same way. The demos from Unreal Engine 5 are incredible. Combine it with LLMs and we really are not too far from being able to as the computer to generate a story and giving it some details, and having it be rendered and look pretty damn lifelike. That 5, maybe 10 years away at most.
I don't think the movie/tv industries will disappear, but they will be lessened when people can generate at least reasonable looking entertainment from home.
I think movies and tv will basically become like books already are. People might have read some best sellers, but there won't really be anything that is super widespread or you can count on most people having seen like Seinfeld or The X-Files.
> good for consumers as it will mean much more content
It is my personal belief consumers could benefit from reducing their medium consumption, and many of us myself included could touch a little more grass
Yeah I came to say this. The striking actors maybe have another 5 years max before studios can just generate AI actors and won't need to scan humans anyway.
There's still room for face capture mocap for actors to deliver credible human performances. I see tech getting more accessible so you don't need studio level resources to produce content. More amateur talent can work together on sustainable niche productions to cater to specific tastes. Actual golden era of non market research content, but also a lot of shit fanfics.
Why is this the fault of AI researchers? Hollywood executives are trying to own everyone's likeness for free. That has nothing to do with AI; it's run of the mill greed.
They tried to do the same thing to Crispin Glover back in the 80s. There are many ways to reproduce someone's likeness, and diffusion models are just the latest. Hanging a body double upside down accomplishes the same thing.
I suppose, if we ever get to the point where humans don't have to work, this is how the start of it looks like. Also the start of terrible dystopias...
But first we'll see AI chip away at jobs. More and more revenues will flow into AI and their owners and less into the hands of everyone else. Eventually AI would be the only game in town, plus an army of unemployed people. The only thing to do then would be to tax or socialise the profits of the AI and feed the masses with the proceeds.
Or see enormous inequality and a repeat of the French revolution. How apt to write this on Bastille day!
In fact, I think there is little difference between the AI hegemony and the landowner one on 18th century. Back then you had a tiny slither of population own all the land, most of everyone else was doing menial underpaid jobs.
Artists are on alert now, but after spending a few weeks rewriting a project using a new-to-me framework and language with our current "Model T" generative AI as my pair programmer, I'm reasonably confident that software and hardware engineers are going to be in the middle of their own existential crisis soon.
Perhaps the problem is people needing to be employed to justify their existence or as a proxy measure to their ongoing contribution to society and its degree?
Harbinger of things to come. AI will come for us all eventually.
It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment.
We are almost at the stage(are we already?) where a fully synthetic actor can be created with no known actor's face at all, who will perform a fully synthetic script, with some directors fiddling to make it move/fit/lips etc.
Will it be watchable? Barely, but it will get better fast.
This is the analog of a carpenter with a hand drill versus a high speed punch press - what did the furniture makers do - grew old, and the customers went to Ikea.
Skip to the end game - what will actors/writers do? WIll the stage return? or will correctly shaped MIT robot dogs be used? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgoYGL9m_xE
I am not sure how this will unfold or how quickly it will happen or how we will adapt, but it will proceed apace.
It is an extension of the machine evolution of the last 100 years, from Henry Ford to all manner of personal function, actor, dentist, surgeon, you name it.
I am not sure how soon dentists will be replaced, it will be easy to automate certain fixed stages of function - much like robotic prostatectomy is now being done. https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Prostatectomy
On the other hand, making a movie is terrifyingly expensive. Substantially reducing the cost will mean more movies get made, which means more demand for front line actors.
After all, what happened when the printing press replaced the monks copying books by hand, letter by letter, in ink?
A less dystopian avenue would be if the background actor to license his avatar per use. That is, the actor retains choice, just licenses his likeness for one movie only, and only for the movies the actor wants to be in.
I can't imagine a worse situation than when a studio could use likenesses in movies that the actors would be horrified to appear in.
Commercialization of someone else’s likeness sounds like the type of thing that should be heavily regulated, and skewed in favor of the person whose likeness is being exploited.
While I agree, there's another part of me that thinks, that's just going to siphon money into the already established and rich celebrities. Its all the non celebrity people that will be left out, and at the end of the day, that's what matters more. As a result, although I agree w/ you, I actually don't know how concerned I am about it.
Back in the 60s in my youth time, I expect creative works to be immune to AI. Mundane repeatitive things like ad, copywriters, announcer, API programmers, call centre, spams replace by AI first. Heck doctors wpuld be the first few to get affected as no human can store huge chunks of medical text and pattern matching better than machines (just like what happen to letter postal sorting). Instead, creative works now being likely sacrifice first over all my earlier expectation.
The studio talking about AI for actors at this exact moment might have an element of truth, but more likely it sounds like a negotiation tactic to devalue those striking actors.
In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.
> In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.
You may not have read far enough into TFA, which specifically notes: The reported proposal hinged on the ability for background actors to be “scanned, get paid for one day’s pay” and for that company to “own that scan of their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”
To continue with the video game analogy, studios are proposing to own your likeness, expressions, mannerisms, gait, and whatever else they can capture/model, for use as background NPCs in whatever projects they like, forever, for free.
These fights are often about what will come in the future. Remember, the initial fight over streaming residuals for writers went on during the last WGA strike in '07. The tech might be there now, but how about in 15 years?
The reported proposal hinged on the ability for background actors to be “scanned, get paid for one day’s pay” and for that company to “own that scan of their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”
…
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” Deadline reported one studio executive saying.
i worked as an extra for almost 10 years. averaged less than $20k/yr, but at least it was enough to scrape by while i got an education. ironically i now make $200k/yr working in ai for a pharma co. the studios want to pay a person only once to use their image forever. late stage capitalism at its finest. i’m sipping the last of anchor steam. what’s capitalism’s endgame? elon or jeff get all the money and head to mars while everyone else starves in streets lined with benioff’s empty houses?
Well don’t be silly, we’ll be post-employment and we’ll just pass life recreating and eating grapes all day.
In all seriousness, your opinion doesn’t seem to be popular here, but I was hoping to see some debate. I personally think you’re closer to the truth than a lot of the rose tinted opinions on how this’ll bring us closer to god.
The endgame - as advocated for by several people on this very page - is that AI takes all the creative and interesting jobs while us displaced humans exist on UBI funded by taxes on excess AI-sourced profits.
Which is fucking bullshit. What the hell are we doing trying to build a future where we transfer all the benefits of a sense of purpose and meaningful contribution to non-sentient AIs? It's insanity.
We wanted flying cars; we're getting Tom Cruise forever.
I'm kidding though - it'll be cool to have entirely personalized movies played by AI lookalikes. It'll probably make the human actor more money too, if they own a corporation that licenses their likeness.
This is the type of thing that requires government action. Without it this story will repeat many times, it’s Hollywood now, tomorrow it’ll be music artists, video game sound artists etc.
Better to pass a law to make it illegal or opt in worst case.
> This is the type of thing that requires government action. Without it this story will repeat many times, it’s Hollywood now, tomorrow it’ll be music artists, video game sound artists etc.
I don't think this is a thing that government can solve. The technology is world wide now, passing a law doesn't stop it. If you can hire an amazing acrobat from anywhere in the world and morph any actor from anywhere in the world as input, nothing stops you. Same with music.
I do think that there's some kind of "celebrity brain" in people that does want to be a part of a fan base, whether it's a musician or an actor there's a part of us that likes watching other people, and celebrities are very good at being those "other people" professionally. That's never going away.
Acting is a real skill! It's not standing around being yourself and getting paid for nothing. Maybe being a celebrity is not acting unless you are a celebrity hired to be an actor or an actor hired to be a celebrity being an actor being a celebrity or...
So maybe if there is some upside to all this, it's that actors may come up ahead of celebrities. The manufacturing of a top 10 list of celebrities in a cut throat competition is probably more efficient for a business than funding 1000 community theaters to generate a bunch of actors, because 10 people are easier to manage than 10000. I'm not optimistic about this strike ending in favor of the celebrities, they're expensive and annoying and possibly un-necessary? That's not a good bargaining position.
But as long as we are all human, art will never die.
This is the type of thing I don’t trust the government to act on. The people that would write the legislation have been bought and sold by the same people trying to make movies from cloned AI actors.
[+] [-] blamazon|2 years ago|reply
The leader of the actor's guild in 1960 who signed off on that strike? Ronald Reagan.
[+] [-] coolandsmartrr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgingahead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jredwards|2 years ago|reply
This is playing out in Hollywood right now, but it's coming soon to a theater near you.
[+] [-] StockHuman|2 years ago|reply
Maybe a limit of training these systems on internet text and images, but it seems to me that we’d need something trained on the human experience itself to get expression that doesn’t read hopelessly derivative. Now and likely for a long time, all these tools need a puppet master.
And, of course, celebrity culture requires a celebrity in the flesh. At which point an AI analogue would be so sufficiently similar to us that they might be afforded a SAG membership themselves.
[+] [-] rich_sasha|2 years ago|reply
Photographers still exist, but there is no longer a market for "basic" photography. Similar with the horse industry: at one point it was the only way to move things overland. Now it still exists, mostly as a luxury, and supports a tiny industry.
I very much sympathise with the people affected by this. But also I guess a lot of what Hollywood produces isn't high class art. It's the horse plodding from A to B, painter drawing a boring suburban family equivalent. Reading a synopsis of the "fast and furious" film series, for example, an AI could probably happily do all of it, better, and with less brain damage to the poor humans involved in the creation (the first 3 films I enjoyed).
Either way, if AI chips away at jobs, we need to figure out how to take care of the people left behind.
[+] [-] 6510|2 years ago|reply
We might think we can be mature about it but one will be one shot away from losing the other job as well. We cant have a bus driver who..... woah!
[+] [-] 28304283409234|2 years ago|reply
The term is "documentary family photography" I believe.
[+] [-] ALittleLight|2 years ago|reply
Game engines with generated art seem like a plausible future for entertainment. AI writers generate concepts, do drafts, revisions, and maybe in a few years just do the whole thing.
This seems inevitable to me. Bad for actors, good for consumers as it will mean much more content. I also think this system will eat Hollywood in the end too. The technology will reduce the cost for developing high quality films and will commoditize the film industry deleting any most Hollywood has.
[+] [-] PrimeMcFly|2 years ago|reply
I don't think the movie/tv industries will disappear, but they will be lessened when people can generate at least reasonable looking entertainment from home.
I think movies and tv will basically become like books already are. People might have read some best sellers, but there won't really be anything that is super widespread or you can count on most people having seen like Seinfeld or The X-Files.
[+] [-] xkqd|2 years ago|reply
It is my personal belief consumers could benefit from reducing their medium consumption, and many of us myself included could touch a little more grass
[+] [-] nprateem|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtyid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrumper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valine|2 years ago|reply
They tried to do the same thing to Crispin Glover back in the 80s. There are many ways to reproduce someone's likeness, and diffusion models are just the latest. Hanging a body double upside down accomplishes the same thing.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rich_sasha|2 years ago|reply
But first we'll see AI chip away at jobs. More and more revenues will flow into AI and their owners and less into the hands of everyone else. Eventually AI would be the only game in town, plus an army of unemployed people. The only thing to do then would be to tax or socialise the profits of the AI and feed the masses with the proceeds.
Or see enormous inequality and a repeat of the French revolution. How apt to write this on Bastille day!
In fact, I think there is little difference between the AI hegemony and the landowner one on 18th century. Back then you had a tiny slither of population own all the land, most of everyone else was doing menial underpaid jobs.
[+] [-] Pxtl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinjlynn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worrycue|2 years ago|reply
Harbinger of things to come. AI will come for us all eventually.
It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment.
[+] [-] aurizon|2 years ago|reply
We speak of the Luddites against spinning machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It is a direct analog.
I am not sure how this will unfold or how quickly it will happen or how we will adapt, but it will proceed apace.
It is an extension of the machine evolution of the last 100 years, from Henry Ford to all manner of personal function, actor, dentist, surgeon, you name it.
I am not sure how soon dentists will be replaced, it will be easy to automate certain fixed stages of function - much like robotic prostatectomy is now being done. https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Prostatectomy
[+] [-] WalterBright|2 years ago|reply
After all, what happened when the printing press replaced the monks copying books by hand, letter by letter, in ink?
[+] [-] cheese_van|2 years ago|reply
I can't imagine a worse situation than when a studio could use likenesses in movies that the actors would be horrified to appear in.
[+] [-] wefarrell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cloverich|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
Really only matters who's paying lobbyists the most money to legally bribe politicians.
[+] [-] oneTbrain23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|2 years ago|reply
In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.
[+] [-] CharlesW|2 years ago|reply
You may not have read far enough into TFA, which specifically notes: The reported proposal hinged on the ability for background actors to be “scanned, get paid for one day’s pay” and for that company to “own that scan of their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”
To continue with the video game analogy, studios are proposing to own your likeness, expressions, mannerisms, gait, and whatever else they can capture/model, for use as background NPCs in whatever projects they like, forever, for free.
[+] [-] cool_dude85|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|2 years ago|reply
For now.
Not too long ago the photos generated all had wonky fingers.
It's all happening too fast.
[+] [-] foota|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PixyMisa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moneycantbuy|2 years ago|reply
…
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” Deadline reported one studio executive saying.
i worked as an extra for almost 10 years. averaged less than $20k/yr, but at least it was enough to scrape by while i got an education. ironically i now make $200k/yr working in ai for a pharma co. the studios want to pay a person only once to use their image forever. late stage capitalism at its finest. i’m sipping the last of anchor steam. what’s capitalism’s endgame? elon or jeff get all the money and head to mars while everyone else starves in streets lined with benioff’s empty houses?
[+] [-] xkqd|2 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, your opinion doesn’t seem to be popular here, but I was hoping to see some debate. I personally think you’re closer to the truth than a lot of the rose tinted opinions on how this’ll bring us closer to god.
[+] [-] scrumper|2 years ago|reply
Which is fucking bullshit. What the hell are we doing trying to build a future where we transfer all the benefits of a sense of purpose and meaningful contribution to non-sentient AIs? It's insanity.
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinewurst|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FredPret|2 years ago|reply
I'm kidding though - it'll be cool to have entirely personalized movies played by AI lookalikes. It'll probably make the human actor more money too, if they own a corporation that licenses their likeness.
[+] [-] jredwards|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an_actual_chasm|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m3kw9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seatac76|2 years ago|reply
Better to pass a law to make it illegal or opt in worst case.
[+] [-] owyn|2 years ago|reply
I don't think this is a thing that government can solve. The technology is world wide now, passing a law doesn't stop it. If you can hire an amazing acrobat from anywhere in the world and morph any actor from anywhere in the world as input, nothing stops you. Same with music.
I do think that there's some kind of "celebrity brain" in people that does want to be a part of a fan base, whether it's a musician or an actor there's a part of us that likes watching other people, and celebrities are very good at being those "other people" professionally. That's never going away.
Acting is a real skill! It's not standing around being yourself and getting paid for nothing. Maybe being a celebrity is not acting unless you are a celebrity hired to be an actor or an actor hired to be a celebrity being an actor being a celebrity or...
So maybe if there is some upside to all this, it's that actors may come up ahead of celebrities. The manufacturing of a top 10 list of celebrities in a cut throat competition is probably more efficient for a business than funding 1000 community theaters to generate a bunch of actors, because 10 people are easier to manage than 10000. I'm not optimistic about this strike ending in favor of the celebrities, they're expensive and annoying and possibly un-necessary? That's not a good bargaining position.
But as long as we are all human, art will never die.
[+] [-] bleuchase|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheeze|2 years ago|reply