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Comment by elif | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find the prospect of doing 1 day of work, and potentially having an impact on hundreds of various artistic works thrilling. It also seems a little bit of a missed argument to say that these workers are often forced into 18 hour days, as it bolsters the studio's potential arguments.

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.

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> 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.

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.

Yes but it would be a 3d model programmed by a team of vfx artists cleaning toilets, not me...

Why would I be upset about having to not clean toilets?

If a studio starts using a scanned image of a background actor in multiple movies, it could become popular like the "Wilhelm Scream" enabling that actor to get frontline jobs.

> Personally, I find the prospect of doing 1 day of work, and potentially having an impact on hundreds of various artistic works thrilling.

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.

Isn't that what we all do? Code I write today is used indefinitely and I get paid once plus some token equity.

No, that analogy is flawed. Programming now is more like the studio recording a scene then being able to edit it however they want. Imagine that you sat down and wrote some code to guide a wheelchair around bumps for one day, then your employer said “thanks, we’re done with you” and re-used your code to guide an autonomous killer drone. You might argue that’s technically possible now, but most developers would go out of their way to avoid it.

I don't think any of these movies are killing people so I think you've stretched the analogy way further

Fair point - my hasty response was over the top. I was thinking of someone whose likeness had been scanned being 'made to appear' as something like an SS soldier in a WW2 movie. Thinking about it a bit more, it's not just that your code can be re-used in ways you haven't anticipated, but that you'll never get to code again - in that one day, all the code you could potentially write had been expressed, and there was no need to ever hire you personally again to code anything.

I also have no problem owning a self driving Tesla with the provision that fully autonomous commercial use shares revenue.

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?

I imagine that the reason car companies don’t want taxi or Uber to use self driving mode is because of liability reasons, not because they want a share of taxi companies profits. Taxi/uber drivers still have to pay for fuel/maintenance costs, and currently most self driving cars still require a driver in the seat (except for companies like Waymo and Cruise, that operate their own fleet).

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.

So what's your daily rate for 1 day of work, ever?

I wouldn't need any compensation to have my image used artistically. It would cost me literally nothing other than a day of novelty experience doing some poses and emotes for a camera array.

I imagine there are enough "scabs" like like me that this grueling 18 hour occupation doesn't need to exist.

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