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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I'd count that as "respecting the art" more than "ensuring I have continued employment".

The day will come where movie actors and celebs become CGI intellectual property, without unions, dressing rooms, personal problems off-set, etc. He's right to have this concern, it's happening now.

I don't see how that is a problem. If a computer can do an equal or better job then it makes little sense to keep such a heap of actors around. "real" actors in movies should then just become a curiosity just like still see horse carriages around as curiosity.

It's a problem if you are an actor.

Then they have to find something else to do. Just like the myriad of other jobs that are redundant because of innovation.

horse carriages are seldom the protagonist of any movie, you realize...

I don't understand what you are getting at. If you mean horse carriages are not people. You are right. But the "drivers" of horse carriages were.

It the computer can do a better job, but can only do that by exploiting your work as training data, then it’s not the same thing.

Why? The actors were paid for that training data.

I would negotiate a different contract, depending on how my work would be used. Being paid is only half the story. Like software licenses: you can use this for free if you release your own code as GPL, but we’ll come to a different agreement if you want to use it differently. Different terms for different use cases.

I agree. But afaik most contracts in the acting industry make the footage of the actor completely owned by the employer.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change at some point. There was no reason to exclude impossible uses in the contracts, but as those uses become possible, people will probably want to have provisions that they share in the fruits of their own labor.

Since a lot of these new uses seem to be ‘fair use,’ it might require changes to IP law.

You need physical actors because you need someone relatable for the audience. Despite experiments like Tamagoshi, showing that computers can provide occupation of mind, I believe love can still only be provided by humans, no matter how faulty they are.

Pixar doesn’t show physical actors.

Whether they show their faces or not is by the by. The parts are played by actors (and animators).

Do you know the animator or animators of, say, Frozen? Would you even notice if they switched that to another animator?

Compare this to an actor. People often decide to view or not view a movie based on the actors on it.

Sofia and Hatsune Miku have shown that you can have a relatable, non-human persona. Combined with the K-pop model/marketing machinery and performance capture by replaceable gig-work session actors/contractors, I can easily see a host of virtual performers who are celebrities in their own right, but with Jet Li's martial art prowess as part of their library, and fully owned by corporations.

What's not to like, no ever-increasing salary demands, multiple scenes with the same "actors" can be filmed simultaneously, the celebrity never ages, and the non-celebrity human performers behind the scenes are easily replaceable cogs: there will be huge cost savings.

Why would Jet Li worry about something like “continued employment”, when he is already worth $250 million?

Because he might be one of those people where life didn’t hand him shit. In other words, he fought against competition at every step of the game, so he seriously considers the nature of competition and the implications.

It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience. All Jet Li might know is competition (just off the top of my head, he is under the shadow of Bruce Lee, similar to Jackie Chan, and the whole Hong Kong scene is second to America).

He respects his experience.

> It’s like a rich person that grew up poor, they are constantly saving money. Of course they don’t really have to at this point, but that was their experience.

Is the implication that people don't learn new things from new situations/environments and are forever stuck modeling the world the way they did when they were young teenagers/adults?

People certainly learn new things, but habits are a real thing. It's a natural tendency to keep doing what you are already doing, sometimes even if there are terrible consequences. See cigarette addicts for an example.

> but habits are a real thing

I wouldn’t disagree, but I would question how widely applicable this is across cultures and socio-economic strata.

In particular it would be interesting to compare the commonly accepted folk wisdom (e.g. “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”) with a more objective analysis (if such a thing exists).

Depends on how strong the systemic models were from the past. Thorough experience dealing with, say, people and how they interact competitively, will have a outsized reverberation later in life. You never ever want to be wrong about people.

A soda drinking habit you can’t kick? You’ll mostly kick it once you get serious. The other stuff is probably going to take life changing events to alter.

There are a ton of stories about incredibly successful people in the entertainment industry who end up bankrupt. Sure, that comes along with stories of wasting money. But it seems like the ones who make the most money are both lucky and really care about IP. I don't think Jet Li should ignore concerns about IP just because he's rich.

Recreating Wushu using low-detail-ragdoll CGI is an offense against Wushu.

I think "respecting the art" is a fine way to describe his decision.

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