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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

Once this is more accessible for smaller studios, with smaller budgets, then actors will be obsolete.

10y from now, we will be able to simulate any human action or sound or gesture on screen with commodity hardware. I can have a 75m USD cast for my film, for the price of a couple GPUs spun for a few days. Crazy.

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I can have a 75m USD cast for my film

Only if you want the people you've copied to sue you for breaching their personality rights (image rights in other countries). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...

When it comes, the pirates will win that one too.

You still need people who can act. Someone has to make the characters act, and you don't want it to suck, so somebody needs to be skilled at acting, even if they don't end up doing the physical acting.

But more to the point, there is no need for constant deepfakes. You can just get regular people to act in your movie. Some movies might need deepfakes for the same reason that animes are really popular. But there's plenty of movies that would not benefit from deepfakes at all.

I suspect that acting itself will be reduced to algorithms. Expression of different emotions could be digitized. This could open further avenues of automation - authors could configure various different permutations (e.g. sincerity/sarcasm, surprise), the combination of expressions could be derived from context / sentiment analysis for the character, or perhaps each character could have a preset pack of opinions/values that informs their response. Given the constantly expanding capabilities of synthesis, these seem like natural areas that people will explore.

I agree that there is no need for any of this, but that's never stopped technological / artistic progress.

That seems to largely be taking the character out of characters. I think this maybe another case of "computer geeks think that {industry name} is easy and can be solved with computers".

Yes it feels a bit reductionist... "Love is merely a series of chemical reactions, therefore I should be able to compute text that elicits these reactions in a person and makes them fall in love with me."

Similarly we still have accountants even though Excel and TurboTax can do all the calculations.

I can't help but think this effects the demand for models more than actors. Why spend money on hiring a model who has spent enormous amounts of time looking good shirtless or in a bikini when an average looking person can have a filter applied?

We have a lot fewer accountants than we did before however (per company)

Fully animated actors can play just as effective and convincing as flesh-and-blood actors, as shown by Disney or Pixar. But is also requires immense amounts ow works and talent - neither which is cheap.

Star Wars certainly didn't use deepfakes because they though it was cheaper or easier.

I agree that it won't obsolete actors as GP says, but it will absolutely be cheaper and easier. The expense of acting doesn't come from the craft being expensive or rare. It comes from the market power that results when the strongest connection we feel to a performance is inseparable from the performer (ie their face). There's a reason that editors and cinematographers don't have fans outside of film nerds,and it's not that because their craft is trivial or that they don't contribute to the film. Technology costs can be reduced, but market power is what allows them to collect tens (or hundreds!) of millions of dollars. Commoditization via deepfakes turns them into just another employee.

You can look at voice acting as an example. Before Robin Williams' performance in Aladdin started the trend of recognizable celebrities as voice actors, there was a thriving community of voice-only actors in big-budget movies, hired for their craft instead of their brand. And yet, you probably can't name a single one, despite being able to name plenty of actors from non-animated films of the era. They were also inherently replaceable, as memorably parodied by the simpsons: https://youtu.be/g5ffaTv4ajg

It's notable that the studios switched to celebrity actors precisely for the brand that they brought from their non-voice roles.

Deepfakes are pretty much identical to this animated case, allowing it to be extended to physical movies. The recognizable portion of a performance becomes a few model files instead of an actor's face, and the job of a (replaceable) human actor is to play the role of the performer, not just the character.

You mean you will hire a cheap unknown actor and then add Tom Cruise's face via deepfake, and then market the movie as a Tom Cruise movie? Even if that was legal (which of course it isn't), surely the marketing value of the actors name would disappear if every low-budget movie could use deepfakes of the actor.

No, I'm suggesting that the tentpole performer will have an entirely synthetic identity.

They aren't cheap now, but that's only because the automation and AI pipelines aren't ready yet.

You still need someone to - you know - act.

Saying deepfakes makes actors superfluous is like saying synthesizers makes musicians superfluous.

there's the deepfake visual representation that we're discussing, but what's to say there isn't work being done on the acting side of things? I think there are broad horizons to what can be automated - especially in the world of pure media.

You mean some kind of AI which can read and understand a script and then develop a persona with physical appearance, voice, mannerisms, interpretation of emotional state and interactions with other characters etc.?

I guess such an AI would also be able to write and direct the movie.

Realistically there would be a pipeline with various companies and AIs involved, each specializing in a specific aspect of virtualizion (the way effects houses work today,) not a single AI doing everything.

But yes, everything you mention up to and including writing and directing can and will be automated to the fullest degree possible in time.

Deepfake tech isn't going to get you AI actors. It's just not the same thing at all.

It's a piece of the puzzle that will.

this doesn't address the talent behind the images, both cast and crew. Why would optimizing the production workflow make either of those cheaper? In more general software development payroll costs are higher than the rest of costs combined, seems the same scenario in more animation as well.

And even now Pixar and Disney are really just melding real life and animation - they are working off real performances and choreography to generate those images. Still need to have people in the pipeline somewhere to have things look right.

Very doubtful. That 75m USD cast has more acting talent than your GPUs and gets people in theaters.

It really won't. That would just be a cartoon with a realistic art style. You still need almost every other part of a film. You still need an original performance to deep fake. This isn't an AI actor or a simulation, it's a post effect.

Thank you for a perspective which isn’t rooted in fear. What impact can we expect this to have on the quality of movies?

Regurgitated leftovers from popular franchises/actors in an uncanny valley forever.

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