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Comment by finnh | Hacker News Reader

I can't be the only one who has thought that deep fakes + Cameo = moneymaker! Pitch the celebs "hey you can have 70% of the cameo money, but you don't have to lower yourself to _actually doing the cameo_". We'll just take the other 30% to pay actors to do it for you.

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Thought about it? There was a movie made along those lines:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/

The Prior-Units theorem states that if you can put an idea into words, there exists prior units in proportion to the utility of the idea (so there's an infinity of novel but useless ideas).

Is there a variant of this along those lines but in regards to "someone made a movie about this"?

'Simpsons did it' is as close as I've got.

Haha I was thinking that too. Maybe that's the best we have.

If you like bad movies, this one manages to be bad on a number of interesting dimensions at the same time. Highly recommended!

Having read the book, I'm just amazed anyone could have read it and go "we should make a movie out of this!" And I love all of Lem's writing.

I watched the movie and had to read the wiki page about the novel to follow it. And I'm a) no longer smoking weed, b) used to teach a history of film class in a lit department at a university, b) also enjoyed Lem when I was reading those works.

I enjoyed the film, but it's very difficult to read without at least a glance at a synopsis of the source material.

The movie 'Cam' is actually pretty good, but its concept is that the AI takes 100% and pays the actor 0%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_(film)

More interesting is the book it's loosely based on, where protagonist is split between delusional and real mental states. Stanislav Lem's The Futurological Congress, excellent read.

The thing is, you need to find an actor who can do a perfect impression of your rhythms and mannerisms -- facial, bodily, and vocal.

Which is actually incredibly hard. It's easy to do jokingly and exaggeratedly for SNL. But getting it down enough to be believable is a ton of work.

Also, celebs LOVE doing cameos. They're not lowering themselves. It's a blast to do. Except in very rare circumstances, celebs aren't doing cameos for the money.

I imagine when processing power doubles a few more times that we'll be able to do that in real time. Pick your movie, then pick which actors you want, use your Mii as the next James Bond, etc..

It would be in Cameo's interest to ban deepfakes preemptively (since devaluing actors, their primary content creators, would not be wise even moreso if they are unionized), and I'm honestly surprised they haven't already.

https://mashable.com/article/damian-lillard-hulu-deepfake-co...

I see the next wave of copyright suits coming already:

> 30-odd geek sued for Billions for infringing on the "Brad Pitt" brand.

Interesting times...

So if I happen to look like Brad Pitt (I don't), then I can't have a role in a movie because of his "brand"?

You can't try to imitate him to trick audiences into thinking it's him, no. That's already been a lawsuit (well, not Brad Pitt), and resulted in SAG rules against it.

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/revealed_the_real_life_dr

I don't think this would take off. Part of the fun of cameo is having celebrities take the time to recognize you.

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