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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

Another 10 years of progress, better facial expression control and voice synthesis, I suspect highly paid actors will be a thing of the past.

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If anything, it's the low-paid actors that would go instead.

Highly-paid actors are celebrities. They are engaging in a way that is incredibly hard to describe but nonetheless seems to be widely recognized. They aren't necessarily "good actors" (a term that is itself hard to define), but people enjoy looking at them. People go to a film just because some well-known actor is in it, and that's what makes them so valuable.

Every film set is chock full of talented people. Plenty of people could have done great work as, say, Tony Stark. Hollywood is full of beautiful and talented women who just never manage to get that "it factor". To displace highly-paid actors they'll have to replicate that, and that'll open up a whole new set of questions.

The ones who go first will be the low-paid actors who surround them. They are the ones doing sitcom pilots that get shelved, or commercials for dog food and allergy medicine, or being saved from having a bus dropped on them. Such actors are actually reasonably well paid on the days the work (over $1,000 a day for big-budget films or TV; $9,064 for a week as a guest star), though most of them work only a tiny fraction of the time. There are more people making a living at that than being a star, though the odds still suck.

You're probably right but we already have the example of Hatsune Miku. Sure she's an exception but the software isn't there yet. At someone point someone will make a truly hit movie or TV show with 1 or more main synthetic characters.

I'm sure when Tron came out lots people said "practical effects will never disappear". And yet with few exceptions they mostly have.

We will definitely have digitally-created stars as a separate medium. We have for a long time had animated characters who don't speak. They still involve intensive human direction to create them, but they don't have human form or human voice. They're still plenty entertaining.

They get to do things that humans can't do. They can entertain in entirely novel ways. Using them as a substitute for human actors is kinda the faster-horses-not-cars of movies.

We use CGI characters for inhuman effects, but I think it's often not very effective. I don't care for most superhero movies because I don't really care about watching CGIs punch CGIs harder than human actors could do. There aren't any stakes; there's no dramatic risk. I'd rather watch a martial arts movie, which is limited by what humans are capable of.

That's still something we're learning. Part of what made the Lord of the Rings films more interesting than the Hobbit follow-ons was that the latter used more practical effects. New Zealand was a big star in LotR; Hobbit used more CGI backgrounds. Audiences felt the sense of place.

We'll improve the tech so that it seems even more realistic. The new technology used in The Mandalorian is really exciting (though I'd be curious to see how it played on a big screen). But it was at its best when it made up very real-world seeming worlds, while animation uses digital worlds in totally unrealistic and even more exciting ways.

So I'm expecting that we'll continue to have practical effects in the best movies starring humans, and continue to have human stars. But we're still waiting for the first mega-hit CGI star who can do whatever magic it is Robert Downey Jr. does. When they can catch that, RDJ may well be out of a job -- not replaced, but the entire enterprise gone.

What happens when the highly-paid actors age? There won't be any young celebrity actors, because without the low-paid jobs there is nowhere to gain that sort or celebrity. Instead, you will see younger versions of older, highly-paid actors. And eventually just versions of deceased actors. Stage actors will remain stage actors, with side gigs as puppeteers of virtual actors. And reality TV. Maybe this is the dystopian future, where our movie stars are all former reality TV participants (or digital representations of them that can actually act).

This has been prophesised before (last in the early 2000s) and didn't come to pass.

I wouldn't expect that to change given this technology either. There's a market that would benefit greatly from this, though: marketing and training videos as well as stock-footage.

Some companies (Samsung comes to mind) already use synthetic avatars to represent their products. Artificial influencers and the like will also take the place of real humans.

Film actors, though, not so much. There's more to a successful actor than just appearing in film (who'd sit at meet & greets, autograph signings or attend shows?) so there's little reason to replace living actors. Deceased ones, though...

The tendency is even reverse with highly paid actors being hired for only the voice acting featuring in computer-animated movies (where great voice-only performers would be cheaper)

Humans basically want to belong to a tribe, which is why there’s always a certain equilibrium with relatively few “famous” people on one side. If AI and the Internet made everyone exceptional, nobody would be exceptional, and we’d just find random idols to gather around anyway (sort of what we already do).

Sure, you could use AI to act, or you could follow your most basic gut instinct and slap a famous-for-being-famous person on it and call it a day. Because it’s going to work.

This is nonsense.

First, actors are not famous for being famous, they are famous because people recognize them and eventually learn their names.

Second, the name recognition is why they get cast as voices. Their name can then be used to promote the movie and the actors themselves can go out and promote the movie.

At first you get famous for being above average. Then you become more famous for being famous. Why are they paid in the several millions when most jobs are not? Are they that much better at their job, than you are at yours? Probably not. But now the ball is rolling.

I'm sure that is what it might look like with a vague awareness of entertainment, but it is not only not reality it doesn't even make sense. It also has nothing to do with the thread.

When people talk about replacing artists with virtual artists, I think an important missing piece is that people are into performance because a human with a story is doing the performing, not just the aesthetics of the end result. For the most part, great art isn't hermetic. It's situated within the context of the artist's personal story and career arc, an the relationship of those to the audience / fanbase.

We probably will see greater uptake of virtual art and artists, but it hasn't been and won't be a revolution that sweeps away human performance.

My mind went towards stuntmen. Now, studios can record natural actions for a large database of actions, and pick and choose. Instead of the Wilhelm Scream, you could see "Flip #564" and "Crash #827". If it doesn't even matter what shape the stuntman is, it seems to me like the industry might be looking to fill that occupation less and less.

There have already been CG stunts for multiple decades. You still have to match the lighting of the photography to integrate the CG even if you have something like this captured with flat texture maps.

The fidelity is also a big issue, flat textures and rough normals are not going to hold up to much scrutiny.

> You still have to match the lighting of the photography to integrate the CG

True but dynamic relighting is rapidly improving, though it's not quite there yet for full frame hero shots.

What do you mean by "dynamic relighting"? I'm saying that even a flat texture captured mesh+video texture like this has to be lit to each shot it is placed in. That means it is being 're-lit' and any process that does that would be usable for regular CG.

Also again, the BRDF/normals of a capture like this are going to be very course. Cloth, skin, hair, eyes, metallic bits etc aren't going to look right if they have too much screen space over time. Quick motion blurred action might be applicable and I could see similar techniques being useful for crowds.

I think this technology is in its infancy and we might be looking at far more than 10 years to even get the functionality to make this possible regardless of whether it could actually replace highly paid actors. Occlusion and multi-agent are typically hard problems in image spaces, so once you add objects and other agents to a scene it becomes a great deal more challenging to make the motions life-like and realistic. Admittedly if you're mapping onto an actor in the scene with other objects and just changing their appearance it might be doable but you might run into substantial challenges if your target is 5ft8 and your source is 6ft2 (or Vice Versa). If you're not using a source-target mapping at all you have the challenge of generating realistic movements given all the obstacles and interactions, which is much harder than the current one-agent zero-object space.

I dunno, when I first saw a Vocaloid on stage, my jaw dropped as I realized that in 10 years highly paid pop stars will be a thing of the past. Yet, it doesn't seem like music industry is switching to synthetic avatars.

The move to virtual characters is already happening on Twitch / YouTube, check out CodeMiko:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQjxEd-gsw

It's also makes business sense to use virtual characters.

If you are a streamer whose sole income is based on sites like twitch/youtube, getting banned could mean the end of your career and social life. Many streamers live together and collaborate with one another and sites like twitch have rules where you can't stream with banned streamers. So getting banned doesn't just mean getting banned from the site, it also means getting banned from your friend group because interactions with you could get them banned too.

With virtual avatars you could evade a ban by changing your model and also use a voice changer. I haven't personally heard of any cases where streamers use virtual characters to evade bans but I'm sure its at least happened.

It also becomes easier to become a marketing tool. Since Code Miko isn't a physical entity, she could easily be used in video ads just by sending ad agencies her model. No more flights to video shoots, all you need is a 3d animator.

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