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Can AI Replace Actors?

Inside the orb, the world is reduced to a sphere of white light and flashes. Outside the orb’s metallic, skeletal frame is darkness. Imagine you are strapped into a chair inside this contraption. A voice from the darkness suggests expressions: ways to pose your mouth and eyebrows, scenarios to react to, phrases to say and emotions to embody. At irregular intervals, the voice also tells you not to worry and warns that more flashes are coming soon.

“I don’t think I was freaked out, but it was a very overwhelming space,” says an actor who asked Scientific American to withhold his name for privacy reasons. He’s describing his experience with “the orb,” his term for the photogrammetry booth used to capture his likeness during the production of a major video game in 2022. “It felt like being in [a magnetic resonance imaging machine],” he says. “It was really very sci-fi.” This actor’s experience was part of the scanning process that allows media production studios to take photographs of cast members in various positions and create movable, malleable digital avatars that can subsequently be animated to perform virtually any action or motion in a realistic video sequence.

Advances in artificial intelligence are now making it steadily easier to produce digital doubles like this—even without an intense session in the orb. Some actors fear a possible future in which studios will pressure them to sign away their likeness and their digital double will take work away from them. This is one of the factors motivating members of the union SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) to go on strike. “Performers need the protection of our images and performances to prevent replacement of human performances by artificial intelligence technology,” the union said in a statement released a few days after the strike was announced in mid-July. Continue reading from Scientific American

The Fight Over Virtual Actors & Performances

Computer-generated imagery, or CGI, to create virtual actors and extras is somewhat old hat in Hollywood. But just as computers allowed replacing animation artists who used to draw 24 frames of artwork for each second of film, AI allows much easier, and cheaper, use of CGI to generate performances by actors who aren’t there. Thus SAG-AFTRA says the studios want to use AI to eliminate acting jobs.

Using AI to create performances that never took place is not just hypothetical. It is already happening. But AI-generated deepfakes, such as a series of convincing but totally fabricated videos of a Tom Cruise doppelganger, are mostly found on social media, not in movies or shows from the studios.

But the same technology could easily be used to replace the actors in background roles in studio and streaming productions — the ones listed in the credits with titles like “second police officer” or “waiter in the restaurant.” These roles generate a huge number of the jobs that SAG-AFTRA members depend on to pay their bills.

As of now, the two sides don’t even agree on what proposal the studios have on the table about AI use going forward. The Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the studios and streaming services in negotiations, said its proposal provides new AI protections for actors, and that it “protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.”

But the union insists the threat to jobs is very real, and that the studios assurances are not worth nearly as much as management claims. Continue reading from CNN

From Our Collection

link to Simply artificial intelligence in the catalog
Link to HBR Guide to AI Basics for Managers by Harvard Business Review in the catalog
Link to Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre in the catalog
Link to AI 2041 by Kai-fu Lee in the Catalog
Link to Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark in the Catalog
Link to The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger in the Catalog
Link to a Brief History of Artificial Intelligence by Michael Wooldridge in the Catalog
Link to Machines that Think by Don Brown in the Catalog
Link to AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee in the Catalog
Link to Deep Medicine by Eric Topol in the Catalog
Link to the Book of Minds by Philip Ball in the catalog
link to the coming wave by mustafa suleyman in the catalog
Link to chatgpt for dummies in the catalog
link to containing big tech by tom kemp in the catalog
link to the datapreneurs by bob muglia in the catalog

Learn more about Artificial Intelligence, link to AI Explained resource guide series