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
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
How A.I. is Reshaping the Way Movies are Made (Fortune)
Voice Actors Are Bracing to Compete With Talking AI (Wired)
Movie Extras Worry They'll Be Replaced by Artificial Intelligence (NPR)
How AI is Bringing Film Stars Back from the Dead (BBC)
Why Artificial Intelligence is a Central Dispute in the Hollywood Strikes (PBS)
SAG-AFTRA Releases Agreement, Details AI Protections (The Hill)
SAG-AFTRA Board Members Explain ‘No’ Votes: ‘There Should Be No AI’ (Variety)
Fran Drescher, SAG-AFTRA leaders unpack tentative deal with Hollywood studios (CBS News YouTube)