Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene | Hacker News Reader

Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene

futurism.com

53 pointsmy12parsecs56 comments

I don't get it.

We've been using CGI for backgrounds for... Decades? And in a direct-to-tv disposable low-budget movie nonetheless.

We also have a whole genre of animated movies with no human actors which are of course bread and butter for Disney.

So while I feel there is outrage to be had, I also feel we are going waaaaaay over any reasonable line which will diminish the impact of our outrage. This seems like a silly distraction away from real systemic issues.

Yeah they are taking a viral clip of bad CGI and conflating it with current AI controversies.

And although it’s Disney, these Disney channel movies have always been made on the cheap.

Nothing to see here folks.

Why would people be outraged about something like this?

vfx were favored when presented as an option over actor/set talent because vfx studios were not union

The next generation won't even know what a fake crowd scene looks like.

Yeah, this is just SAG-AFTRA acting as the union it is, trying to protect jobs for its members. Next it'll be "Studios shouldn't be allowed to use CGI as long as there is a SAG member willing to play that role."

Using likenesses of a person is different than creating CGI extras in the background. They're not using anyone's likeness with background actors.

And where would the NO FAKES Act draw the line? Would the studio be unable to create hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a battle? What if the soldiers were humanoid aliens or robots?

Yeah, just think of how the battle scene at Helm's Deep would look if they weren't able to use CGI. AI generated CGI is just the next step forward.

Write and produce good content and we'll watch, subscribe, and buy.

Yes but if we all approached this sensibly, then someone on Twitter couldn't get offended on behalf of a hypothetical person, in an industry they don't work in our understand, about a topic that's become the flavour of the month for virtue signalling and thus get their own big break as the internet's main character for the week.

And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry? No one thinks of the real victims here /s.

>And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry?

I would love to see it all burn in the dumpster fire of its own making. It would be the ultimate in karmic self-correct. Too bad I don't really believe in that kind of stuff.

They don't want you to buy though. They want you to subscribe/rent. So I'm guessing that before too long, the "buy" button will go the way of the dodo.

Phase I has already been initiated with Best Buy discontinuing sales of shiny round discs: https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-bl...

Should Best Buy insist on selling products most people don’t want?

And IMO it is a mistake to use your own guesses as evidence supporting your guesses.

Yeah I would guess that with the ease of streaming, few consumers want to bother with physical media any more. For me, I usually watch a movie once. I’d much rather pay a few dollars to stream it than pay ten times that to buy a disc that will just sit on a shelf.

Owning used to make more sense when there was less overall product. When you can't find something new to watch, you could fall back on a copy of something solid.

I can't remember the last time I rewatched anything...

It was a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek bit of commentary on today's eternal rent-seeking culture. However, the studios have always been this way, and to doubt that is just planting your head firmly in the sand. From the early days of VHS/Beta tapes, an ordinary citizen could not own them strictly from the high prices. Also, look at the legal writings on any physical media you've purchased. The terms clearly limit what you can do with it. Let's also not forget DRM.

The holy grail for them is a per-viewing fee whether that's ticket sales at a theater, or rental fees from a streamer. Allowing eternal multiple viewings is just leaving money on the table. If you think conversations about how to eliminate that have not occurred in a C-suite at any/all of the studios, you're just not thinking about it enough

The Disney clip may not have any relevance to the AI content issues of the day, but it’s bad. Incredibly bad.

Of course you would use CGI to create thousands of soldiers. But 5 extras in a gymnasium? That saved them what, $500?

The more unnecessary the use of CGI, the more distracting and offensive it is.

I suspect it was trying to avoid a re-shoot. The extras are cheap, but if you find an error in the composition of the scene after you shot it, you'd have to bring everyone back in, setup the set, etc.

This seems like a dumb complaint. Movies have been using painted backgrounds for 100 years. Would that be forbidden?

This is a cheap b movie, so they aren’t going to pay for the extras that a Cleopatra or big production would afford.

The fix for this seems to be better AI (a la Lord of the Rings 20 years ago) rather than employing more extras.

Ughhhh

this is not AI generated nor is it “capturing background actor likeness”. The guild needs to stop pushing this stupid argument. It’s not going to help anyone. Background actor likeness DOES NOT MATTER. It is not a valuable asset. This is digging their own grave. Those protections would not have avoided this at all.

Yeah if anything it's a sign of directors making changes in post production vs reshooting the scene. Looks like a "we need more excitement in this scene, add some people", etc tweaking

A few questions since I'm clearly missing some basics here: 1) we've had CGI for a long time, right? What's new here is using AI to automatically generate the CGI so some CGI designer doesn't need to go and generate the whole thing by hand? 2) There has to be better CGI than that second row of "people" in the clip here, no? I mean this is so bad, but there is or will be AI that can do way, way better than this, no? Perhaps not enough to cross the uncanny valley, but what we're seeing in this clip is just comedically awful, obviously.

This is not AI generated. This film is not worth the effort to do good CGI and that’s about the short of it. These characters are probably reused from some other context where they would be much further away. The thing that makes them look so awful here isn’t the rendering (which is bad) but the fact that they’re animated in a way that clearly uses an awkwardly small amount of bones. E.g. their fingers don’t move. And their faces.

We can surely do better CGI. But it might not be worth the cost here. To be clear, a background actor probably is worth the cost here because they are incredibly cheap.

AI could bridge this gap in both quality and cost though. Just need better tooling

Think of the untold money that will be saved as the need for human involvement is increasingly liberated from the film production process. (Or should it now be called "generation process"?)

All that money can now go directly to the studios, thank God.

Even better, the studios won't have a monopoly anymore on creating blockbuster movies. Some kids in a garage with a cloud service subscription can do the same with their lawn-moving earnings.

Exactly, contrary to doom sayers beliefs, ML models will enable a huge new segment of creators. It is already happening with people creating games/movies/books/music etc. that are of much better quality than those churned out by AAA.

Can you give me a single example of people creating games/movies/books/music etc. bia ML that are of much better quality than those churned out by AAA?

Yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIDADjJ_jy4

It's not "much better quality" so much as "the quality is good enough that you concentrate on the generated content, and the generated content is more fun to watch than anything put out by Disney Star Wars lately".

Granted that's a low bar, but it's early days.

What lawn mowing earnings? Robots will be doing that soon enough

One would hope that more studios and more independent film makers with more interesting plots will emerge.

In fact, I think we're probably already seeing this... YouTube gets more viewing hours and more revenue than Hollywood.

The website claims cookies for 890 different adtech vendors as covered by the "legitimate interest" clause. Eighthundred-and-ninety.

off topic, but if I view using incognito then just click YES or REJECT ALL->confirm is that a way to escape this madness? Or should I just nope out of pages like this, seems like the content was pointless anyway

The tech for this will obviously get better (is the example shown even recent?). The complaints in the Twitter thread are ridiculous imo. Disney is right to be experimenting with this stuff, it’s clearly going to be super relevant in the future.

There’s nothing wrong with calling out a company for putting out shoddy work during a contentious labor strike.

Disney can play with this stuff all they want, but society is going to start asking these big questions in louder and more forceful ways, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. You can’t take away an entire industry’s livelihood and expect them to accept it lying down.

I think the comment is in reference to the comments focusing on quality instead of the jobs impact. The whole debate around quality seems like a red herring in the first place, who is surprised or did not expect a direct to streaming high school romcom to have have the highest quality everything - even for the second row bleachers in a 1 second cut shot? Who is actually bothered by that problem vs the jobs debate you've highlighted?

The movie was released in March, well before the strikes.

The tech for this is already better. "Massive" software has been doing CGI characters with AI behaviors for 20 years, including in famous films like Lord of the Rings. The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game.

> The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game.

NHL 2000. Those animations look exactly like the awkward crowds from NHL 2000.

It really disturbed me that I could not distinguish between CGI and YouTube compression artifacts during a stream of one of the key moments of SpaceX's technology demonstrations, some years ago. The scene composition seemed artificial but that could also have been over-eager production.

It made me think deeply about the Moon landing conspiracy theory, and mankind's transition from mythos to logos.

With all that is terrible with Disney entertainment (and the rest of the last 2 decades of studio output), I do not think 'background crowd did not look real enough' would make my top 100 of things wrong with film/tv.

That’s not what’s criticized despite the headline

The discussion focuses on AI generation, but shitty CG humans have been possible for a very long time. This seems to just be a lousy and maybe less expensive effort for CGI actors, but not AI generated actors?

It does indeed seem like a bad idea overall, especially given the current climate. I just don't have any reason to assume generative AI was involved.

Looks like the crowd from a console video game

Seems like an improvement - nobody argues that a career as "bleacher actor #847" is something to aspire to. It's something we should AI away.

But you know that the bleacher actor #847 of today is the single line actor of tomorrow and potentially one day a leading role.

How do you expect actors to get a start if there's no where to start?

They will start where the next starting line is

The next starting line has significantly fewer spaces available.

Yes. That’s what’s being criticized!

Does "bleacher actor 847" actually lend credible experience to getting bigger roles? If I'm putting someone in front of a scene, I don't really think I'm going to care that they've had more or less experience in the background amongst a sea of a thousand other people.

> I don't really think I'm going to care that they've had more or less experience in the background amongst a sea of a thousand other people.

You might! Having extra credits at least indicates familiarity with the film environment. It suggests you can:

1) Arrive punctually.

2) Handle extensive downtime.

3) Repeatedly execute identical actions for many takes.

4) Take basic film direction instructions

and so on.

For smaller speaking roles (which are generally a prerequisite for larger speaking roles), where consistent delivery on strenuous and fast-paced sets might be far more crucial than pure acting talent, this background can be a beneficial indicator.

So union protectionism. What next, "Studios forbidden from using CGI extras if a SAG member is available and willing"?

Nobody aspires to peak as a junior software engineer even though they mostly just do small, easily automated tasks. Is that a valid reason to completely gut a set opportunities that provide a foot in the door to something bigger?

Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds (or find some alternative) instead of roundabout reasoning which requires us to be inefficient to hide the real reason it's valuable.

Anyone not expecting job roles, opportunities, or pathways to change in their career is going to have a very rough time, even more so than the hard time people from the last 50 years had.

> Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds

There’s no guarantee of this happening whatsoever. We’ve already seen private companies gut internal training programs in favor of increased hiring of experienced people and this is only going to continue.

Economies have to provide work in order to facilitate consumption. If there are a handful of people making all of the money and gutting pay and job security to the core (i.e. improving efficiency), people are going to start rejecting the system wholesale and it’s not going to be pretty.

The French Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum, once people lost all hope of having a semblance of a decent standard of living, they didn’t just let rich keep on living, did they?

I think this is a great argument on the future role and place of loosely-controlled capitalism as these kinds of advances continue to come but, at the same time, a sorely lacking argument for why we should avoid technological advances which replace existing jobs for the sake of keeping the same jobs we have now. After all, the aforementioned French Revolution happened prior to the 1st (for the French), 2nd, and 3rd industrial revolutions but you don't see the French rallying to disown all technology and go back to the jobs of the time as a way to increase their standard of living - because it wouldn't, even if everyone were 100% employed and worked twice as much in doing so.

As a further point, by this logic the very tasks of the Junior Developer role itself would never have been available - hell, society wouldn't even be investing in teaching everyone how to type in school because computers take jobs and people need work to do! It follows that societies are quite capable of A) finding new meaningful sources of work to be done B) having people do more than one course of work throughout their lives C) changing the ways they educate and train beyond the way they did it before D) ensuring fairer distribution of wealth by means other than artificially keeping previously useful jobs around (which is not what the e.g. French Revolution aimed to do).

This isn’t even AI. This is just low budget VFX. Something that has been done since the 90s.

Perhaps they embedded a deep commentary into the piece on how the crowd members operate on a level of simple automatons.

The meta-commentary is they consider the movie audience as part of the crowd.

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