Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
The leader of the actor's guild in 1960 who signed off on that strike? Ronald Reagan.
Check out his stump speech for Truman[1]. Quick highlight quote:
“Remember that promise: a real increase in income for everybody. But what actually happened? The profits of corporations have doubled, while workers wages have increased by only one-quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as much as wages, and the small increase workers did receive was was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings” - Somehow Ronald Reagan
come-on man, at least try to shill more effectively. this is almost insulting.
> On August 5, following the PATCO workers' refusal to return to work, the Reagan administration fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
Air traffic controllers weren’t even allowed to strike given how critical their jobs are and could have paralyzed the entire country. Comparing that to actors is nonsensical.
His administration actually made some pretty generous offers in the negotiations. Part of the reason the negotiations broke down is because PATCO's radical wing, which believed that getting the best deal required striking first, ended up in control by the time the Reagan administration came to power. That soured Reagan's position since he felt, despite the generous offers, that the negotiations were being handled in bad faith.
He called their bluff and brought in replacements. Hollywood can do the same.
This was the exact same paradox that essential healthcare workers faced during the pandemic. Too important to give time off, but not important enough to properly compensate.
Presumably if actors pick this as a hill to die on, well, suddenly there'll be even more surplus supply of actors to demand because the easy roles are VFX, and at that point Hollywood can just break the unions with scabs.
― Ronald Reagan
― Ronald Reagan
Yeah, soothing words from the head of the government...
This is playing out in Hollywood right now, but it's coming soon to a theater near you.
Maybe a limit of training these systems on internet text and images, but it seems to me that we’d need something trained on the human experience itself to get expression that doesn’t read hopelessly derivative. Now and likely for a long time, all these tools need a puppet master.
And, of course, celebrity culture requires a celebrity in the flesh. At which point an AI analogue would be so sufficiently similar to us that they might be afforded a SAG membership themselves.
My impression of the appetite for derivativeness is that it’s waning, no? The authority on the craft of content milling seems to think so. [0]
0. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bob-iger-says-disney-cut-1157...
the single largest selling category of books is romance novels, and if you've ever spent time in that space -- I used to worked in a book store, and would read anything to kill time, including romance -- is often painfully derivative and repetitive. Amazon was flooded with e-book romance novels long before ChatGPT, and it's only going to get worse.
Photographers still exist, but there is no longer a market for "basic" photography. Similar with the horse industry: at one point it was the only way to move things overland. Now it still exists, mostly as a luxury, and supports a tiny industry.
I very much sympathise with the people affected by this. But also I guess a lot of what Hollywood produces isn't high class art. It's the horse plodding from A to B, painter drawing a boring suburban family equivalent. Reading a synopsis of the "fast and furious" film series, for example, an AI could probably happily do all of it, better, and with less brain damage to the poor humans involved in the creation (the first 3 films I enjoyed).
Either way, if AI chips away at jobs, we need to figure out how to take care of the people left behind.
We might think we can be mature about it but one will be one shot away from losing the other job as well. We cant have a bus driver who..... woah!
The term is "documentary family photography" I believe.
Game engines with generated art seem like a plausible future for entertainment. AI writers generate concepts, do drafts, revisions, and maybe in a few years just do the whole thing.
This seems inevitable to me. Bad for actors, good for consumers as it will mean much more content. I also think this system will eat Hollywood in the end too. The technology will reduce the cost for developing high quality films and will commoditize the film industry deleting any most Hollywood has.
I don't think the movie/tv industries will disappear, but they will be lessened when people can generate at least reasonable looking entertainment from home.
I think movies and tv will basically become like books already are. People might have read some best sellers, but there won't really be anything that is super widespread or you can count on most people having seen like Seinfeld or The X-Files.
It is my personal belief consumers could benefit from reducing their medium consumption, and many of us myself included could touch a little more grass
They tried to do the same thing to Crispin Glover back in the 80s. There are many ways to reproduce someone's likeness, and diffusion models are just the latest. Hanging a body double upside down accomplishes the same thing.
The results can be considered inevitable in the sense that reflects very capable people incrementally advancing the status quo as part of their research jobs. We need to build the necessary frameworks for dealing with this, and other advancements, because they will come irrespective of our wishes.
It's a branch of ethics, surely worthy of a bit of square footage in an ivory tower.
But tech-adjacent people seem bored and dismissive by questions of ethics as a general rule. If you were in STEM in college, you may recall the groans and avoidance of the (likely mandatory) ethics courses among your cohort.
Bioethics is the most prominent example of such a study because of the possibility of immediate and direct harm on organisms. I agree it would be worthwhile to formalize an ethics framework for tech in general, we don't seem to have a proper title for such a field of study so you're right that we are blind to it as a society.
AI is certainly a nice cover for a policy Hollywood executives have been salivating over for decades. You clearly fell for it.
If your argument is invalidated by the most transparent and effortless of satire, it's not a good argument.
By that logic we shouldn't have nuclear energy at all. It's a ridiculous premise.
But first we'll see AI chip away at jobs. More and more revenues will flow into AI and their owners and less into the hands of everyone else. Eventually AI would be the only game in town, plus an army of unemployed people. The only thing to do then would be to tax or socialise the profits of the AI and feed the masses with the proceeds.
Or see enormous inequality and a repeat of the French revolution. How apt to write this on Bastille day!
In fact, I think there is little difference between the AI hegemony and the landowner one on 18th century. Back then you had a tiny slither of population own all the land, most of everyone else was doing menial underpaid jobs.
This is the future that hardcore anti-communists wanted. It's come true.
Even if we didn't need to justify our existence, a lot of actors would probably still like to & want to act.
Harbinger of things to come. AI will come for us all eventually.
It’s unnerving that everyone is so enthusiastic about advancing AI but put zero effort into figuring how society is going to function with significant unemployment.
We know exactly what happens next. It was laid out in Soylent Green and Day After Tomorrow
We speak of the Luddites against spinning machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It is a direct analog.
I am not sure how this will unfold or how quickly it will happen or how we will adapt, but it will proceed apace.
It is an extension of the machine evolution of the last 100 years, from Henry Ford to all manner of personal function, actor, dentist, surgeon, you name it.
I am not sure how soon dentists will be replaced, it will be easy to automate certain fixed stages of function - much like robotic prostatectomy is now being done. https://www.wikidoc.org/index.php/Prostatectomy
After all, what happened when the printing press replaced the monks copying books by hand, letter by letter, in ink?
At least there'll be no more complaints about "not following the book!"
However, perhaps instead of trying to make movies from books, they should make miniseries (3-10 hour-long episodes).
I think Book --> Movie Script is probably going to arrive before generated actors.
The reasons franchises, especially superheroes, have been thriving in the last two decades is because of the excessive choice of movies. The general public struggles to pick which one to watch, so they pick franchises with expected plots. This market trend is partly why Disney's Bob Iger bet on franchises, acquiring Marvel and Lucasfilms.
The paradox of choice is best illustrated in Sheena Iyengar's "The Art of Choosing." An experiment showed that when supermarket shoppers were presented with more choices for a category (e.g. jam), they stuck to the choices they were already familiar with.
I don’t think this is true. Consolidation of film properties was largely caused by the death of the tape/dvd market, which represented a significant revenue stream for movies, so the studios focused on properties that would have huge box office numbers. Matt Damon talked about this in an interview recently, saying that so many of his movies, like Good Will Hunting, would not be made today because they tended to have long tail VHS sales.
We'll still see mainstream franchises though, because IMHO it serves as a form of social glue, i.e. gives people common things to talk about and experiences to share.
Probably, but quality movies aren't the gumption behind cost cutting at Hollywood studios. If indie movie producers want to use new technologies, they should go for it, but they won't have access to background actors who are tied up behind large studio contracts, unless they just open source themselves – which seems slightly dystopian.
I've read a fair bit of fantasy fiction (think Lord of the Rings derivatives), and after roughly 25-30 books, it just becomes a slog to read through, there are very few original ideas.
I can't imagine a worse situation than when a studio could use likenesses in movies that the actors would be horrified to appear in.
Really only matters who's paying lobbyists the most money to legally bribe politicians.
In reality, AI actors still look like game cutscenes and human acting will continue to be the premium service.
You may not have read far enough into TFA, which specifically notes: The reported proposal hinged on the ability for background actors to be “scanned, get paid for one day’s pay” and for that company to “own that scan of their image, their likeness, and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”
To continue with the video game analogy, studios are proposing to own your likeness, expressions, mannerisms, gait, and whatever else they can capture/model, for use as background NPCs in whatever projects they like, forever, for free.
For now.
Not too long ago the photos generated all had wonky fingers.
It's all happening too fast.
…
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” Deadline reported one studio executive saying.
i worked as an extra for almost 10 years. averaged less than $20k/yr, but at least it was enough to scrape by while i got an education. ironically i now make $200k/yr working in ai for a pharma co. the studios want to pay a person only once to use their image forever. late stage capitalism at its finest. i’m sipping the last of anchor steam. what’s capitalism’s endgame? elon or jeff get all the money and head to mars while everyone else starves in streets lined with benioff’s empty houses?
In all seriousness, your opinion doesn’t seem to be popular here, but I was hoping to see some debate. I personally think you’re closer to the truth than a lot of the rose tinted opinions on how this’ll bring us closer to god.
Which is fucking bullshit. What the hell are we doing trying to build a future where we transfer all the benefits of a sense of purpose and meaningful contribution to non-sentient AIs? It's insanity.
I'm kidding though - it'll be cool to have entirely personalized movies played by AI lookalikes. It'll probably make the human actor more money too, if they own a corporation that licenses their likeness.
Better to pass a law to make it illegal or opt in worst case.
I don't think this is a thing that government can solve. The technology is world wide now, passing a law doesn't stop it. If you can hire an amazing acrobat from anywhere in the world and morph any actor from anywhere in the world as input, nothing stops you. Same with music.
I do think that there's some kind of "celebrity brain" in people that does want to be a part of a fan base, whether it's a musician or an actor there's a part of us that likes watching other people, and celebrities are very good at being those "other people" professionally. That's never going away.
Acting is a real skill! It's not standing around being yourself and getting paid for nothing. Maybe being a celebrity is not acting unless you are a celebrity hired to be an actor or an actor hired to be a celebrity being an actor being a celebrity or...
So maybe if there is some upside to all this, it's that actors may come up ahead of celebrities. The manufacturing of a top 10 list of celebrities in a cut throat competition is probably more efficient for a business than funding 1000 community theaters to generate a bunch of actors, because 10 people are easier to manage than 10000. I'm not optimistic about this strike ending in favor of the celebrities, they're expensive and annoying and possibly un-necessary? That's not a good bargaining position.
But as long as we are all human, art will never die.
Maybe it's because of radical self-acceptance, (or low standards according to some social lens), but honestly I can't imagine a single role in any movie I would be offended to have. I consider it an honor to be attached to any piece of art, as it only increases the breadth of my identity's perseverance. If it's a piece of shit film, it is either never seen or hilarious in my mind.
Not to mention that these are background actors, hardly any uses will be problematic anyway.
As for losing the "stepping stone" into the industry, I think that is just a hyperfocused perspective on a broader societal problem transitioning to the postcapitalist AI singularity.
This is always relative. There are millions of people who would do anything to live in America and have a job cleaning bathrooms, just as there are many young people that want to write software professionally and would take any software job. But if you’re an experienced dev, you wouldn’t just take any old job, you’d look for something that fits your career goals.
Why would I be upset about having to not clean toilets?
At issue is compensation. The studios don't want to share the income they gain from your "impact". They want all the benefits of this new technology to accrue to themselves. Reminds me of self-driving cars coming with EULAs that forbid commercial/taxi use of self-driving.
Just like studios paying gfx artists to incorporate my visage, the Tesla engineers are doing all the work. I literally do nothing in both scenarios. Why would I be entitled to compensation?
So even if taxi companies were allowed to use self-driving mode in a car like a Tesla, they’d still need to pay a person to be in the drivers seat.
I imagine there are enough "scabs" like like me that this grueling 18 hour occupation doesn't need to exist.