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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible. The tech will soon arrive that such things are easily generated at an extent and quality that it’s cheaper to do it with an all digital pipeline without models that are trained on these people or are perhaps trained on them in countries where any hard won battles here are ignored. You won’t have 30 background actors. You’ll have one digital artist with tools. You might have 30x as many movies if you’re lucky.

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> The AI debate is pretty dumb imo. It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible.

That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard. Almost all of those earning many millions of dollars now started as small scale actors or writers themselves, and while there are a few who got completely fucked over from affluenza, most still remember their roots and know who and what was responsible for them being able to rise where they are.

This is something that the IT industry could finally learn... for example, if the AWS Cloud engineers, support staff and all the other high paid employees went on strike in solidarity with their delivery workers who have to piss in bottles, guess how fast Amazon would clean up its act?

There's a reason why so many of the richest people in the world made their riches in tech: because tech workers couldn't be arsed to engage in collective organization, instead preferring hyper-competition with everyone fighting for himself and only himself - while not realizing that they could have enjoyed far more of a share of the profits, had they collaborated!

>That is the power of solidarity

Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail. Moreover, if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net, then it stands to reason that studios that use that technology will outcompete studios that don't. The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.

> Anything that relies on the generosity of others is bound to fail.

Which is why it is backed and enforced by contracts. Unions in moviemaking, mining or construction have a long (and bloody) tradition... there's a reason why inane-seeming rules such as only members of a specific trade union being allowed to even touch something as a lighting rig, it's to prevent greedy studios from using staff with lower-paying jobs to undercut collective agreements.

Think outside of the box and now you'll realize that as inane as it sounds, what it guarantees is that money ends up as wages in the pockets of the workers instead of profit for the bosses.

> The SAG might be able to force all american studios to not use it, but unless they can secure some sort of global agreement, that just means american studios will get out-competed by non-american studio that don't abide by the ban.

Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is. Many have tried to outcompete American studios and they all failed - it's either survival off of "national production quotas" for TV networks for them or domestic focused/otherwise niche content ("Bollywood", anime).

This relatively simple power balance is what gives the SAG the leverage it has.

>niche content ("Bollywood", anime).

Anime are huge, Japan has been winning on all fronts with entertainment.

Yeah but it's still niche in comparison. Out of the top 20 movies in 2022 [1], 18 were from Western studios, the two others were Chinese of which one was a domestic-only propaganda movie.

[1] https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2022/

Anime are way cheaper than anything on this list to produce and many of them are available on streaming platforms runned by ads, looking at the top 20 movies 2022 do not show how actually impactful anime are in the western world. Nowadays it's even sometimes hard to find an illustrator on Twitter that was not heavily influenced by anime.

Edit: and of course the vast majority of anime are animated series, not movies.

> Western audiences generally want Western actors and stories, Hollywood is where the money, connections and expertise is.

IMO, it feels like hubris to draw linear projections near technological and sociological event horizons.

I am amazed how "television" is rapidly becoming interactive. We now more or less have "ractors" from Stephenson's Diamond Age, and series are being refined by fan feedback as they are being produced.

I feel confident that any pre-covid forms of entertainment are going to become as esoteric as radio plays and news reels are today.

I'm not sure what you mean specifically by esoteric.

Youtube videos today (basically post 2015ish) are mosty radio plays and news reels. The time where innovation happened on that platform has passed, too many youtubers just sit down and read a script to still images or borrowed video.

> if AI generated background/voice actors are actually better than non-AI ones on net

For now there's certainly no risk at all of that, unless you've seen something I haven't?

I disagree with your OP, a union's power isn't derived by its most powerful members, it's derived by solidarity against a large amount of people. If it's strong enough you can force the industry into union only contracts which makes even the powerful members of your profession need to maintain solidarity - SAG-AFTRA is the perfect example.

As for American studios outcompeted, I think that's an oversimplification of the videogame market. People buy terrible games all the time such as all the buggy AAA crap that's been coming out of certain American studios. Not to mention the awful mobile games industry which is worth billions... Quality of voice acting alone doesn't seem like something that could make or break an entire nation's game industry.

> I disagree with your OP, a union's power isn't derived by its most powerful members, it's derived by solidarity against a large amount of people.

Large amounts of people yes, but it needs the high-skilled (or in case of the movie studios, the high-demand) people in the boat, those that a company can't replace on a whim. Walmart, Starbucks and the likes - corporate doesn't care even about closing down an entire location just because there's unionization talks. People dishing out coffees or stocking shelves can be replaced in an instant, corporate doesn't (need to) care.

But the high-skilled labor? Finance, HR, admin in the corporate office... if they were to strike in solidarity with the peasants, corporate would have a much more difficult time to replace them.

> But the high-skilled labor? Finance, HR, admin in the corporate office... if they were to strike in solidarity with the peasants, corporate would have a much more difficult time to replace them.

And they should, while their skills are “high-skilled”.

Every chance there’s the generic executive looking to cut costs, and the hard to quantify losses like reputation; security; maintenance; and longevity get pushed aside.

> And they should, while their skills are “high-skilled”.

They won't however, as anti-union propaganda (and in IT, ungodly amounts of venture capital) has convinced them that they'd have a better chance at salary raises if they could have individual negotiations based on something they can control (i.e. work performance metrics) than if they were to collectively negotiate.

Young generations thankfully don't drink the koolaid any more, as they see how they live and how their parents lived at the same age.

> Young generations thankfully don't drink the koolaid any more, as they see how they live and how their parents lived at the same age.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

> For now there's certainly no risk at all of that, unless you've seen something I haven't?

Most background "actors" are now all CGI. Imagine how it'll change in the next ten years. I imagine all actors will end up being CGI'd / AI generated.

Unions don't rely on the generosity of others, they rely on shared economic interest.

In any supply chain whoever is able to consolidate and monopolize has economic power over their suppliers and customers. This sets off a chain reaction of consolidation as everyone else has to get bigger in order to protect their margins from being eaten by Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Unions are no different. If your industry is two or three companies you can't leave for a better job. So you have to either collectively negotiate or not negotiate at all.

While I disagree that AI is presently capable of replacing voice actors, I don't think it matters. We already have a global agreement that impacts AI, which is the copyright on the training data used in the models[0]. While you probably can't stop someone from training on public data entirely[1], you definitely can prohibit the use of derived models to generate work that competes in the same market using copyright.

US businesses were able to break the backs of working-class unions like UAW using free trade agreements with countries that don't respect organized labor. Mexico and China[2] are hideously anti-union in ways that would be patently illegal in the US. I'm not entirely sure this process would work for creative talent. It would require Hollywood to completely undermine their cultural hegemony and shut down their own productions in favor of foreign cinema from Japan and the EU - countries that have explicitly been in favor of ML training on public data.

[0] Unless you're worried about the North Korean film industry adopting AI, in which case...

[1] There are some lawsuits attacking generative AI on this basis but I expect fair use to block those cases

[2] Yes, communist China, ironically enough

You don’t really have a point though. If mega stars rallied to give you a cut of profits for some reason I’m sure they could win.

My point is that actors with no value to their name or face are acting like their name and face are valuable assets.

Being COPIED is a meaningless threat. Being REPLACED is the threat they face.

The thing is, when "background actors" get replaced by AI, how will acting get new actors? Or what protects even large actors from studios using their face metrics and voice data which they have from CGI work to just use these datasets to "recreate" the actors without their consent?

> The thing is, when "background actors" get replaced by AI, how will acting get new actors?

Actors don’t break out by virtue of their stellar background acting work.

> Or what protects even large actors from studios using their face metrics and voice data which they have from CGI work to just use these datasets to "recreate" the actors without their consent?

Why would you bother recreating someone when you could generate someone better fit for the role?

>Actors don’t break out by virtue of their stellar background acting work.

Indeed. But it's a paying job that gives one the opportunity to learn how a film set works, and gain skills that will be useful later. Think of it as an internship, if you like. That, you'll surely agree, has some value?

>Why would you bother recreating someone when you could generate someone better fit for the role?

But, they're not doing that! They're taking background actors' images, and copy-pasting them into other scenes, and other works. That seems... Unjust? I mean, that's me, isn't it? Fair enough (I suppose), if they create an entirety synthetic person (that's totally been a thing for decades, for massive, anonymous crowds), but if you make something that's based on me, looks like me, moves like me, sounds like me, isn't that partly my creation, and shouldn't I get some credit, and some compensation?

I mean, maybe someday they may create entirely synthetic background actors, and then the point will be moot, but for now they're not quite there, and they're trying to get away with using actual peoples' work in ways that weren't ancicipated, and for which they were not compensated.

> Think of it as an internship, if you like. That, you'll surely agree, has some value?

Sure. I generally agree that the loss of background actors would be harmful to actors, most of whom are poor.

> But, they're not doing that! They're taking background actors' images, and copy-pasting them into other scenes, and other works.

This is not clear. I think what you are saying and what SAG are saying is incorrect because frankly it doesn’t make sense to me. The studios have said those narratives are grossly incorrect, and I am inclined to agree simply because they do not make economic sense. Background actors are cheap and better than trying to “paste” them into future scenes. But I don’t really care because the actual thing we should care about is the near term future where background actors are simply generated entirely, which is the primary threat and completely unchallenged by the current debate being had.

That’s the problem. The argument is the problem. Not the general plight of the small actors. Any belief that they are solving their current problems or future proofing themselves is painfully naive.

> That is the power of solidarity: when the high profile actors say they'll go on strike to get AI banned, their voice will be heard

If you think there is a world possible where there is a working AI generating technology that can produce good results, but it's banned because some high profile actors wanted it so, you are delusional. It's like saying cars would be banned because most prominent stable owners and horse breeders would object to that. It just not something that can happen. If that technology would exist and would be feasible financially, that's what would happen. If that'd require moving production to Mexico or Shanghai or Nauru, that's what would happen. No amount of striking would change that. It may delay it a tiny bit and give some (mostly very rich) people a tiny bit of a longer run, since some big movies rely on star power and need big names to push the marketing, but you can't just pretend the technology doesn't exist if it does.

I think you're misunderstanding the debate.

This isn't mostly about background actors -- digital extras are already widely used for things like large crowd scenes. And it's far cheaper currently to hire an extra to be a bartender who hands the main character a drink, than to 3D render that -- so it's not about that either.

It's about studios wanting to own the likenesses and voices of every actor they hire for a project, so they can hire someone with a really unique look for a single episode, then be able to produce the rest of the season with a cheaper actor and use AI to do a face swap and voice swap.

And that's unacceptable. Actors should be able to retain the rights to their likenesses, end of story. A standard contract shouldn't require that an actor signs over all rights to their likeness for an entire series just in order to be paid for a single episode. That's not right.

This.

This is exactly what the studios tried to demand in their original offer, and it's the reason why SAGAFTRA went on strike instead of negotiating.

But the other extreme of saying no AI ever is also untenable. If SAG-AFTRA get that demand, it then means productions like Rogue One (AI Leia and Moff Tarkin), The Mandalorian (AI Luke), and de-aged Professor Xavier and Magnito in the X-Men are not possible.

It also prevents an aspiring writer from using AI tools to help with the writing process -- not do it all for them, but work co-operatively like copilot and other auto-complete tools do for programming.

Even using tools like Photoshop, Blender, Unreal Engine (as used in shows like The Mandalorian) could be dicey as they incorporate AI models and techniques. -- Would things like NVidia's AI upscaling tech count for raytraced CGI? (I ask as it looks like SAG-AFTRA are after a blanket AI ban, not just around actor voice/image or writer text.)

Another thing that the production companies could do is to use public domain audio, video, and scripts as SAG-AFTRA cannot ban the use if AI on those.

Nobody's saying no AI ever.

The union is just saying that if you want the rights to use an actor's likeness without actually employing the actor to act, you have to pay separately for that, and pay what it's worth.

Which makes perfect sense. In your example of a de-aged Luke Hammill in the Mandalorian, Luke Hammill was paid $$$ for that. They didn't get to cast him for free just because he was in previous Star Wars movies. Nor should they.

That's all this is about. Go ahead and use AI, but pay the actors for their likeness. Don't force them to give it away for free as a condition of doing a single episode.

That’s just insane though. People don’t care about continuity in background actors or what they look like. Many background actors will be reused in different contexts as different people.

If studios can apply their likeness to a cheaper actor, they can also apply a made up likeness to a cheaper actor. Or the likeness of a model. Or the likeness of a volunteer who thinks it’d be cool.

The only case where this applies, maybe, is for characters with speaking roles that have enough positive reception that they have negotiating power for their cost to return for future works. But that’s a tiny segment far removed from the majority of this guild. And if it’s actually sensible to do this over hiring the actor then they could probably just do this from the beginning.

Why are you bringing up background actors?

This isn't primarily about background actors (who usually aren't even members of SAG-AFTRA to begin with, because they usually don't even have acting training/experience or anything).

This is primarily about working actors with lines but who aren't big stars able to negotiate their contracts -- we're talking non-lead series regulars, guest stars, recurring guest stars, and the like. Because most actors are working for union minimums unless they're a series lead.

In other words, the actors who make up 95% of the union.

Background actors are explicitly a main focus point of this. Read up on it more.

No, that’s stupid. Nobody cares about the likeness of nobody actors. They are completely fungible. And if the actors guild thinks this is the hill to die on then they may win the battle and lose the war by an enormous margin.

the obvious near term future is that they don’t even get the single episode.

Your example is silly. Hire someone who is funny looking to be a bartender and then have someone cheaper do them later on? My dude, the funny looking bartender is already going to be as cheap as it gets because they’re a nobody actor. And the barrier to face swapping a generated face that is just as good as the funny looking dude’s onto a different nobody from the beginning is very small.

If studios don't want to do it, then they should have no problem signing a contract saying they won't do it.

I doubt this would be a major issue if this were the only demand. There are other demands that cost more money though.

Glancing through them, these seem reasonable, but it is a difficult Union battle nonetheless.

Perhaps, but it’s still wild to me how many people approach these topics with complete apathy and surrender, as if the AI takeover is inevitable and therefore we shouldn’t try to fight it.

Regardless of how you see the future playing out, it’s pretty gross to characterize a people’s fight for their livelihood as “dumb”. Maybe it’s dumb to you, but they’ve given their lives to their work so we can enjoy the content they have a hand in making.

Imagine the day that your skills are completely replaceable with AI and your attempts to fight it are met with “that’s dumb.” What an impersonal and apathetic attitude to have.

so your main problem is that they were able to reach a conclusion fast?

is there an empathic approach that also accepts reality?

We could start talking about what we should do in general when the value of human labor has dropped to pennies across multiple industries.

Or we could talk about how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing their working hours, improving their working conditions, and giving them a large cut of the new profits the new technology unlocks.

Buuuut those conversations under this system have been DOA since the luddites. It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.

> It seems profits and benefits for workers must be extracted at the gunpoint of government regulation and unionization. I agree that it'd be great if that wasn't necessary.

Yep. Those of us who’ve lived in the west have never seen massive worker uprisings, although they’re present throughout history. A society that becomes so unequal that it can’t provide opportunity for its people faces a reckoning.

What’s so damning about this is that the ultra wealthy know this and are planning for it.

> how we could leverage this new technology to the benefit of the voice actors, by reducing

everyone discussion has someone that’s always like "it'll only assist existing people of that profession"

and here I am training on voices I have the rights to (by simply asking, and with a release form), adding it to media including games with no prior experience, either in some wav output, or rendering dynamically pretty quickly (not quick enough but its coming)

I just don't see the basic economics that support the person with the voice for getting paid for that work at any analog to today's arrangements, and definitely not more. 4 year olds are going to be able to do what I'm doing. the supply will completely outstrip the demand.

I can see studios with prior obligations being committed to giving some kind of royalty, but the history doesn't suggest that those studios will be the one that taps into the market. All of Hollywood exists because it routed around entrenched interests in New York City by going to the other side of the continent and ignoring the contracts, unions and industry cartels. What exactly suggests the same thing won't happen again? That's what I'm missing here. Where is the discussion that puts the feelings aside and doesn't act like they're ignoring that just for the sake of not feeling like they're surrendering.

If I successfully offered something to the market and scaled it up, which I don't have ambitions to do but open to, but if I did and then it fulfills the entertainment register in people's minds and all of this stuff with SAG-AFTRA is moot. If it was procedurally generated trash, the same people that say "I just leave this on in the background" or "its a guilty pleasure" are going to be the same consumers. I just don't see the other outcome, the market is going to get filled with this stuff, and human only content is going to be a novelty for enthusiasts.

> Perhaps, but it’s still wild to me how many people approach these topics with complete apathy and surrender, as if the AI takeover is inevitable and therefore we shouldn’t try to fight it.

Hey, we do need *a lot* of people for the piles of skulls the Terminators crush with their metal feet in our inevitable future.

The dumb part is their argument.

Imagine factory workers being replaced by replica androids, and the workers are upset because the androids are using their individual “likeness” rather than that the androids are taking their jobs.

They are fighting the wrong fight. The vast majority of actors represented here do not lose anything more than the factory workers under the particular thing they’re fighting against.

This is a rerun of photographers complaining about digital photography and stock photo websites. Despite their worries, there's still plenty of work in shooting weddings and corporate events. Outside of folks like Roger Deakins, the person behind the lens has always has been fungible, so any argument that AI removes the humanity is dishonest.

In terms of acting, casting is a flexible talent sourcing process that has always cared less about the lowest rungs of talent: guest stars and co-stars. The production companies are struggling to adapt to less-lucrative streaming revenue models and dealing with the impact of covid on moviegoing. The industry is being forced to change and consolidate all at once. As much as I sympathize with the actors, they're arguing from a position of weakness, not strength. Their industry is struggling.

AI is going to bring the costs of production down 100x or more, and we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served.

The task has always been storytelling, not location scouting, set decorating, lighting, electrical, blocking, capturing grids of photos, then splicing them together.

Folks that couldn't dream of starting their own film studio will now realistically be able to power than endeavor from home, and that includes these actors and writers that are complaining. The YouTube-ization effect where small creators monetize will lead to Hollywood capital outflows and more money being spent to prop up individual and small team creators.

Those at the bottom rungs are complaining about technology that will give them a bigger platform with more autonomy than they've ever had before. They won't need studio capital to execute on their dreams.

One way to parse “Content will be faster and cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and it will tailor to an increasingly long tail of interests that have never before been served,” is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage.

If a person now alive pictures the state of “content” getting far worse, that’s something profound to consider.

> is that we will be adrift on a sea of garbage.

Do you value content on YouTube?

Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value?

If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem.

---

edit: because of downvotes, I can't respond anymore. (Dang: you really need to fix this.)

Here's my response to a child comment:

> No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity.

The domestic market supports roughly 1,000 productions a year. Most of which you won't be the target demographic for. Most of it will suck. That's a very small pipeline for "quality" to fit through.

Frankly, I don't like being limited to 1-2 "amazing" and 5-10 "good" things a year. We're not here for long, and we deserve so much more. Humanity has the capacity to do better than this.

The creativity of youths on TikTok and other platforms is absolutely inspiring, and we have barely begun to tap into it.

I've always seen more amazing content from indie creators and foreign markets than most big studios produce. Independent animation and web comics have been labors of love, and these new tools are going to empower those folks to do more than they've ever done before.

The pipeline of creators is going to widen as people see how fun and accessible it is.

There might be more noise, but there will be orders of magnitude more interesting content that fits the curvature of your interests like a fine glove. If you have a thing for space noir vampires, I'm sure someone will deliver it and do the concept justice.

If we can suck people out of busywork jobs and put them into satisfying careers delighting the human spirit, that's a great and worthwhile thing to do.

> If the answer is yes, then this is just a filtering problem.

Which we have spectacularly won so far /s

No thanks. I'd really rather take quality over quantity.

*Especially* considering how immensely hard the spam problem is.

“Do you value content on YouTube? Has the internet brought you any kind of content of value?”

Maybe the diametric opposite of this? No, I do not value “content” and the Internet has brought us Hell, more or less.

> No, I do not value “content” and the Internet has brought us Hell, more or less.

That's your opinion. Sounds like it really sucks for you.

I fucking love the internet. Outside of freedom, steak, and whiskey, it's the single best thing on the planet.

It's an unlimited frontier with boundless possibility. I'm sorry you don't see it that way.

Asking me for my opinion, getting my opinion, and then telling me it’s my opinion, and then judging my opinion is not a great conversation. I’m left wondering why you asked the original questions (I.e., do I value content and does the internet provide me valuable content) when you had already imagined my answer and drawn an illogical conclusion from my imaginary answers.

Edit: having perused your user page, I think I get it. You’re really passionate about the one man studio thing. I don’t think you’re wrong to do this at all, but it might be worth considering how Leo Strauss would interpret a nation of auteur content producers each producing for an audience of one. Everyone might get exactly what they want, but the coherent unified society does not get what it needs.

I find that take absurd. Niche long tail interest stuff is the best. Would you really claim that the plethora of smaller groups on Spotify that can make it work are inferior to the mainstream radio acts that got almost all the attention previously?

They're not automatically generated.

That is irrelevant to the discussion that tools which enable cheaper production will allow for more individually directed art for smaller niche interests.

Niche, long-tail interest stuff is, by definition, garbage to the vast majority of people, though. I understand that you may be interested in collecting chicken bones, but no matter how cheaply you can make a chicken bone documentary, I will not watch it.

Meanwhile, we delve deeper into the audience-of-one dystopia that has unfurled around us. I believe we took great value from having cultural lodestars to set and recalibrate our society’s vision, and we appear to be on the cusp of replacing that entirely with autogenerated nonsense.

I mostly agree, but the actors and all are worried that they will lose their bargaining power completely, and the studios are gonna do really crappy things like use their faces / bodies /voices with little to no compensation. It's not just about replacement, it's about wholesale theft of their persons.

Reminds me of the Streamberry episode of Black Mirror https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Streamberry_Corporation

Anyone know how Netflix agreed to air (and create a likeness to itsself) such an episode. I enjoyed the episode, and was impressed with Netflix's liberal stance on allowing this, and impressed with the cautionary tale it tells -- i'm surprised because it seems against Netflix's interests.

The stupid part is the insistence that “their” faces are meaningful.

Did any actors or writers complain when a huge chunk of the studio and streaming tech work went overseas, native workers in the US lost jobs, and tech work got limited to a small sliver of connected individuals in south bay?

Even today, if you are a white or black American it is very difficult to get jobs in the entertainment technology industry. You are told it is because the jobs are uber competitive and the workers are the best of the best...but then you see the workers that actually work there and they can barely speak articulate sentences.

I mean, did the tech workers even complain when those jobs went overseas? Perhaps tech workers should try to unionize then. The only reason we are even talking about this is because the actor’s and writer’s unions give them a loud enough voice for the rest of the country to hear their complaints. Kind of disingenuous to put the blame on writer’s and actor’s not putting up a fuss when tech work got shipped overseas, when tech workers themselves didn’t even bother to put up a fuss (or unionize).

> It’s not a winnable fight. Background actors and stunt people and minor voice actors are ultimately fungible.

Guessing the future is hard, but I’ll try to change your mind by comparing future change to past change.

AI came for chess. When it became superhuman, did chess professionals go out of a job? Not really; people come to the tournament for the story, for the human achievement. VAs are under the same scope: people want to see stars form, even when they are microcelebrities. I don’t doubt that there will be an increase in AI-generated content and a paying public, just like there are people right now that pay to watch AIs play chess against each other. But it doesn’t remove the genuine article.

(Contrary to what many believe will happen, they weren’t replaced by people that use AI either.)

As a cherry on top, while the game AIs are policy-based RL and can become superhuman with no human data to bootstrap it, LLMs currently are effectively SL and need to feed off human data. If the production of the latter dropped, the results would decline.

I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language. They might even be able to take limited actions based on the outcome of the conversation.

I 100% support bleeding whatever you can out of the megacorps, but I don't know if I'd rely on VA careers long term

You'll probably die before that happens...

It's hard enough for humans to understand natural language spoken by other humans, and we have the biology for it.

Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there; these methods (especially LLMs) are incapable of the understanding needed for natural language processing or actual AI.

> You'll probably die before that happens...

Why?

“I can't wait for the games that let you talk to NPCs in natural language, and have them respond in natural language.”

That is as simple as popping together a speech-to-text model with an LLM and pipe the output to a text-to-speech module.

We can have a demo by tomorrow, and something actually enjoyable in a week. The challenges are purely of engineering (to for example reduce the latency so the conversation flows, and to fit the models on the average consumer’s hardware) and art direction (what do you want the npc to say?).

To make the npc act on the conversation is a bit harder, but stil within weeks.

> Current methods of "AI" or machine "learning" are not going to get us there

Get us where? :) I think you are way overthinking it. What do you think is so unachiavable about what the commenter wrote?

The existence of masters and stars are irrelevant to the minor voice actors and stunt actors and background actors I was referring to in the quote you responded to

I'd say it's an obvious negotiation tactic.

I just watched Oppenheimer, and I remember thinking how this would be much better as an HBO style multi season drama. But there's no way they'd be able to sign actors consistently for the many seasons it would take to cover all the material... using AI actors however, they would be able to keep consistent characters even as the actors switch out. Of course it's a race to the bottom, but think of all the talented actors who can't work because they don't have the right "look" and didn't get a lucky break.

It's uncanny how much nuance and craftsmanship there is to Oppenheimer you need to just... discard in order to make it into an example of a property that would benefit from AI.

If ever there was a movie that could only have been made by one person. If ever there was a movie that if it had been made by anyone else would have fallen along so much more standard and predictable lines.

Ask an AI to create a talky 3 hour biopic with as few explosions as Oppenheimer, and people would flock to it at blockbuster levels. Go ahead. Keep clicking the generate button. Use the Nolan preset.

There are so many movies you could argue wouldn't lose anything for being AI. I wouldn't even trade those for AI, but I acknowledge they exist. Marvel has about 30 alone.

And if ever there was a technology more analogous to the bomb in terms of the need for their creators to have been more humble and prepared and less naive about their effect on the world before rather than after the invention, it's generative AI.

Even if Murphy was a nepo baby, you're right there's unfairness in Hollywood, still we can't overlook how much we still need people and we can't be so naive as to think the same unfairness in human nature would just go away rather than simply start to benefit a different set of privileged people.

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