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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised this is big news right now as I remember reading in the news all the way back in 2003 that for the Matrix sequels, the role of Seraph(the guardian of the Oracle) was supposed to go to the famous Jet Li, but he turned it down as WB had him sign off the rights to his digital image and Kung-Fu moves which he refused as he considered that his proprietary IP, so his role went to a lesser known actor who had less bargaining power.

So even 20 years ago, before the advent of ML driven deep-fakes, the tech existed to capture, digitize and generate photorealistic copies of actors[1], which they used for the Matrix sequels, so the writing was on the wall for at least that long.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz3vbzU1PiE

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Apparently Peter Jackson did not hire over 10,000 orc extras for the battle of Helm's Deep.

And matte paintings have been taking away jobs from set-builders for some time....

Actually I am in favor of real human actors, practical effects — just pointing out that things are going the way they've always gone.

The difference is that those orcs were always CGI, not scans of real humans, the exceptions being the orcs in the foreground with speaking or stunt roles.

And matte paintings were always parts of the sets, not in lieu of them.

Also note how much better the orcs looked in LotR compared to the Hobbit CGI wrecks.

You can kinda see how the actors fight versus their shadows with CGI while in LotR each blow looked heavy.

> The difference is that those orcs were always CGI, not scans of real humans, the exceptions being the orcs in the foreground with speaking or stunt roles.

Not just that, but people are missing the point. It's not about CGIing an extra so they can use them as background characters. What the studios are fighting for is the right to hire a person for a single day's labor, scan them, and use those scans in perpetuity for any purpose.

What that means is, if you suddenly become a big-name movie star, that studio no longer has to pay you to act in their movies, because they have the rights to scans of you from 10 years ago, and they can just use those instead.

> What the studios are fighting for is the right to hire a person for a single day's labor, scan them, and use those scans in perpetuity for any purpose.

The studios have said multiple times that this is not true. Rather this is a fear that the union brought up, not an actual request from the studios.

> The studios have said multiple times that this is not true. Rather this is a fear that the union brought up, not an actual request from the studios.

Incorrect. The current contracts (and relevant laws) arguably[0] allow this already. Actors want to explicitly prohibit it, and the studios have said they want to preserve that option.

Whether or not the studios are claiming they want to exercise that option is irrelevant; their insistence on maintaining that option is one of the core sticking points of the entire strike.

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PROPOSALS.pd...

[0] Actors claim it is already prohibited by the existing contracts, and AMPTP claims it is not.

I read your link, and it does not support what you said.

> I read your link, and it does not support what you said.

I posted a primary source which corroborates everything I explained above. If you'd like to provide a primary source that says differently, go ahead.

>The studios have said multiple times that this is not true.

What is said publicly, or even to internal employees, ir even in the course of negotiations is not what is actually said in the boardroom. If you think any executive is straightforward on intent, the only person you're fooling is yourself.

The matte paintings are taking the jobs away from camel drivers who would otherwise have transported vast amounts of film equipment across the desert for on-site shoots.

The orc union must've been furious!!

Kubrick was going to actually get 10k+ soldiers for his Napoleon though.

Christopher Nolan refused to use CGI to add soldiers to the beach for Dunkirk. The end result looks like more of a beach outing than 100k+ soldiers desperate to evacuate.

Christopher Nolan is a notable hold out who never uses CGI though, so this is a pretty extreme & rare example.

Wait, not even Inception? This is crazy

Months of set work to fold that road. I heard they are still rebuilding parts of Paris to this day.

Famously, Waterloo (1970) used 17,000 Soviet Union soldiers and (Cold War-era) cavalry brigade as extras.

They also drilled, slept, and fought like real 1815 infantrymen and cavalrymen, as it was.

"Camelot!"

"It's only a model."

The fear, as I understand it, is that an actor will get scanned as an extra background mook in whatever movie, then not own the rights to their image when they get famous later.

With how advanced ML deep-fakes have gotten, digital actors could go from background details that nobody really cares about to "the lead actors are all digital homunculi, their visages the result of blending multiple actors together"

> The fear, as I understand it, is that an actor will get scanned as an extra background mook in whatever movie, then not own the rights to their image when they get famous later.

Exactly. People are talking as if this is just about background roles, but that's not the point. Studios already use CGI people for background roles. That's cheap and easy, and there's no need to scan individuals for that.

The whole point of doing these body scans is to generate images that look like that specific actor. They're not doing that because they loved Joe Schmoe's performance as Silent Background Witness #4. They're doing that because Joe Schmoe might become a big star ten years down the line, and if that happens, they want to be able to produce movies with Joe Schmoe without paying him, or without even asking him beforehand at all.

> Joe Schmoe might become a big star ten years down the line

The chances of that happening are indistinguishable from zero.

Not quite because it does happen or there would be no stars. Think of all the actors who played bit parts in TV shows from years ago. For instance, Pedro Pascal was on Buffy. He's a household name now, but then he was nobody waaaay before he was on GoT. The vast majority of famous actors earned their stripes via bit parts. It would behoove a studio to be making these scans just in case they happened to work with the next Brad Pitt at some point.

Would you be as excited to see a hologram of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, as opposed to see the real Tom doing his own stunts?

Besides, if technology could create a CGI actor as good as a real actor, the screen actors' guild is finished anyway, one way or another.

People pay a lot of money to go see Avatar.

the odds that any individual extra will become huge are slim to none. the odds that a huge actor started their career with a role as an extra is pretty high.

>The chances of that happening are indistinguishable from zero

Yeah, no. John Krasinski was waiting tables and struggling to make ends meet before getting his part as Jim in The Office that made him a household name today.

The casts of Friends and The Big Bang Theory were mostly nobodys before getting their parts which made them multi-millionaries that everyone recognizes today.

It's survivorship bias, but some of those "nobodys" actually do end up becoming very big "somebodys" later on, and the movie studios want to own their digital likeness for cheap early on, just in case, so that if they do become somebodys, they can pump out and monetize valuable ML generated content based on their likeness without having to pay them.

> The chances of that happening are indistinguishable from zero

The chances that it is what happened, given a big star, is near unity.

The chances of it happening for any given extra are near zero.

But that means capturing the data (EDIT: and, more importantly, rights; the data on its own is mostly harmless) on every extra means destroying the negotiating power of basically everyone who might become a star with any negotiating power, even though each capture is unlikely to have long term value of that kind.

But if this is the fear, why should we care? If John Doe, who is currently a bartender, wants to concede to Warner his appearance in perpetuity in exchange for $1000, that's his business.

If John Doe, who is currently a bartender, wants to concede to Warner his appearance in perpetuity in exchange for $1000, that's his business.

Aside from the whole question of consent to the "in perpetuity" side of the issue, the law does actually care about fairness when it comes to contracts.

You can always turn fame into cash in other ways.

For example, Carrie Fisher (I'm reading her biography) lived off of her fame from Star Wars for the rest of her life (and she got the role in Star Wars because her mother was famous). Her movie roles after SW were not particularly memorable. But, like the Kardashians, she made a lot of money by being famous. Even her novels were autobiographical. Her show (Wishful Drinking) was about herself. When she needed money, she'd go to a SW convention and sign autographs.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Your example is just survivorship bias.

99% of people starring in movies don't have nowhere near the fame and bargaining power to demand royalties from past work the way stars like Carrie Fisher does.

Yes, some unknown actors got super lucky and struck big the first time, which gave him/her leverage to negociate deals to live off the royalties off one single great movie/franchise for the rest of their lives because they became invaluable to the franchise, but the vast majority don't, and need to bounce around begging for parts in mediocre movies to make a living.

It's why unions and regulations are important otherwise unscrupulous movie studios will just screw everyone entering the industry into signing off the rights to their visual likeness for pennies just so they can monetize them down the line.

For every Tom Cruise there are thousands of talented people whose careers didn't go anywhere.

I don't know what royalties Carrie got from Star Wars, but (according to her biography) she did run out of money at times and used her fame to get money. Carrie would have been wealthy even if she'd worked for Lucas for free. Would she have been famous without Lucas? Unlikely.

Do you think anyone would pay to have a hologram of Carrie sign your t-shirt? Would anyone watch Larry King interview a hologram of Carrie? Would anyone pay to hire a hologram of Carrie to sing at their wedding? Would you pay to see a broadway show starring Carrie the Hologram?

Well, would this hologram be smuggled cross-country and delivered by a robot?

I mean, I thank the GP for choosing the most interesting example possible, because Fisher is literally famous for being a hologram.

The Matrix Reloaded credits include 550+ VFX artists. Yes it was possible to fully render people 20 years ago, but it took a well paid army. We are quickly approaching the point where a team of 3 can procedurally generate crowds in minutes. It's a whole different beast.

>We are quickly approaching the point where a team of 3 can procedurally generate crowds in minutes

Have you checked the VFX in recent movies? Most look worse than 20 years ago precisely because clueless directors have been tricked to believe that one guy with a computer can do the work of 100 VFX artists used to do by hand in the past, so VFX get rushed and end up looking like dogshit.

Yes, modern tech can get you 80% there of what used to be long painful manual labor, but you're still in uncanny valley so you still need the careful eye of experienced artists to do the rest to make it actually believable.

At least amateur hour(ie. Youtube) is about to go up a major notch.

Yes. But people who acted in that movie were told ahead of time their bodies were going to be digitized and manipulated and their agents were able to negotiate terms surrounding the use of those 3D models.

Imagine you were an extra in a Star Trek : Next Generation episode where the editor didn't notice you were caught on camera picking your nose. In the modern era, decades later, someone notices it on blue-ray and the scene goes viral. Should Paramont have the rights to generate a collection of NFTs based on your image? [Forget for the moment that NFTs are stupid.]

The law in this case leans towards "no" because it recognizes that as an actor, your image is a valuable asset actors usually control. Also, the idea of an NFT didn't exist in a form made manifest or even predictable in 1987 when you were an extra. Who owns the rights to your image applied to new technology? That question has been a little harder to answer recently.

And that's sort of what's going on. It's not that CGI and AI exist, it's that they're being applied in a non-traditional way without an explicit agreement ahead of time to divvy up the cash.

This debate should have started in earnest even before the Matrix sequels - digital crowds were used extensively throughout the 90s (Digital Domain's work on Strange Days and Titanic being the big examples) and the guilds have at least had some knowledge of these processes.

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