Actors in Hollywood Clash Over Artificial Intelligence Replicas’ Core Values
Actors are currently striving to secure a comparable agreement for the protection of their own artificial intelligence rights, a month after the conclusion of the Hollywood writers’ strike, which resulted in a significant deal with studios to regulate the utilization of AI in their projects.
“The principle that operators must have informed consent to the creation and use of a digital replica and fair compensation is non-negotiable,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-Aftra’s chief negotiator in the latest episode. Bloomberg Originals series AI IRL. “These are the basic principles that need to be established.”
SAG, which represents about 160,000 performers, made progress on this issue “during the first part of negotiations,” Crabtree-Ireland said earlier this month, but “at the end of our negotiation period there were proposals that were really inconsistent with the idea of informed consent and fair compensation.”
Hollywood came to a standstill this year due to twin strikes by writers and actors, something that hadn’t happened in 40 years. The Writers’ Union officially ended the strike that started in May. But the walkout from the actors’ union that began in July continues — and it’s having significant implications for blockbusters. Paramount Pictures said this week that the release date of Tom Cruise’s final Mission: Impossible film has been pushed back almost a year, one of several strikes in the crossfire.
Earlier this month, the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, which represents the studios, said it offers several AI protections, including “requiring the prior consent of the performer and supporting cast to create and use digital reproductions” and prohibiting the use of a replica. later, unless the performer “specifically consents to that new use and is paid for it.”
Even those in Hollywood who are excited about incorporating artificial intelligence into filmmaking have been concerned that there are no clear safeguards for actors whose livelihoods will be affected.
“There were seemingly true reports of studios literally scanning add-ons and then saying, ‘We now have the right to scan forever,’ which is absolutely disgusting and insane,” said Edward Saatchi, CEO of AI studio Fable. create automatic episodes of the animated series South Park. (Representatives of the studios have later downplayed the usability of the replica.)
But in an interview with AI IRL, Saatchi said these AI-generated programs helped illustrate an important point. “Every year, except this year, we’ve always felt that AI just isn’t good enough to be funny, to really make a piece of art,” he said. “And this year, that really changed.”
Tim Webber, Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor and creative director at Framestore, said the interest in generative AI this year worries him.
“We all thought our jobs were going away,” he said. “But pretty quickly we looked at it and found that there were lots and lots of limitations.”
One of them is the creation of concept artwork, which is used in many industries to sketch out visual ideas and themes during the creation phase of a project. “AI in that space brings us closer, but still far from what concept artists can do,” Webber said.
He was reminded of Pixar’s original Toy Story, the world’s first feature-length CGI film. “One of the amazing things about Toy Story: they took a technology that was still quite nascent and created a new kind of film, computer-animated films,” he said. “There’s no Toy Story equivalent of artificial intelligence right now. And I think it might take a while.”
“If we can get a generative video where you can do voice prompts and control the video and it looks good enough, it might be something new,” he added. “But I think it’s a long way off.”
