Movie extras worry they'll be replaced by AI. Hollywood is doing body scans

As someone who has done background work many times in Vancouver, I’m left wondering why society needs to ensure that background actors continue to work other than the optics of it all. It’s not a great job, you spend 14 hours just waiting to walk past a window that’s so far in the background and out of focus that it’s completely unrecognizable as a human, you get less respect on set than the physical prop objects, and you get overpaid for hr amount of actual labour involved, considering most of it is sitting around stuffing your face with free food.

Human actors are one thing but background acting provides little value outside of the immediate camera vicinity in the scene.

I suspect that we are going to have a lot of low value jobs start to disappear and the rallying call will be the same about how AI is bad, etc etc. but everyone is assuming the amount of work is finite.

I don't see much of a difference between trying to keep replaceable jobs and making up useless jobs all together. In the future, government might need to provide jobs for people who cannot get one on the market, but should be something more useful than walking around on a set.

The ongoing actor's strike in Hollywood should raise this point too, I think. That is the only chance the extras have.