Hollywood wants to replace actors with digital clones 🤖

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Artificial Intelligence is making its way into our lives. While many professions are under threat, there is one that at first sight seems to be spared: acting. However, Hollywood producers have other plans that are not to actors’ liking.

A situation worthy of a Black Mirror episode ☠️

If you’re not familiar with Black Mirror, it’s a TV series whose subjects revolve around a dystopian technological future. Each episode plunges us into a future where technological advances have perverse effects on human society. A number of events in recent years seem to have come straight out of this series, the latest coming from Hollywood.

Hollywood actors are on strike for an indefinite period, following negotiations with Hollywood studios. The latter have made an AI-related proposal that has angered the actors. The proposal was revealed by Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), which represents thousands of actors and entertainment industry professionals.

This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.

To put it simply, Hollywood wants to be able to replace actors with digital doubles, which they can use as they please. Scary, isn’t it? Although the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents producers, has since sought to qualify its words, the situation is no less alarming.

In fact, the current AMPTP proposal only permits a company to use the digital replica of a background actor in the motion picture for which the background actor is employed. Any other use requires the background actor’s consent and bargaining for the use, subject to a minimum payment.

Screenwriters are not spared 😥

Before the actors went on strike, Hollywood screenwriters began theirs in May. Once again, it’s AI that’s being called into question. Indeed, they fear being replaced by AIs for the completion and complete writing of scripts. As scriptwriters are already affected by the streaming boom, which reduces their income, the use of AI would enable producers to pay them even less.

As generative AIs become more and more integrated into all fields, we may well wonder whether, in a few years’ time, all the content we find on the web, but also on TV and in the cinema, will not be generated by AIs. Are we at the dawn of humanity’s creativity? Only time will tell.

Sources : The Verge, 01Net