Jul 14, 2023

Actors are afraid that the studio will want to replace it with AI digital doubles.

As we delve deeper into the details of the actor's strike, it appears that one of the contentious issues between the actor and the studio is the use of synthetic actors and performance.

Both sides have used the buzzword du jour "artificial intelligence" to confuse the water, but what they are discussing publicly suggests that they are focused on the use of animation in vfx, not just AI.

The Alliance of Film and television Producers (AMPTP), which represents studios and streamers, said they have submitted to the Actors' Union SAG-AFTRA a "groundbreaking AI proposal" that protects the digital likeness of performers, including requirements for the creation and use of digital replicas, or the consent of performers to digital changes in their performances." It claims to have provided them."

SAG-AFTRA had a completely different interpretation of the proposal. Duncan Crabtree Ireland President of the Union said that AMPTP proposed that "our background performers should be able to scan, be paid for a day's salary, and [the film] companies should own their scans, their images, their likeness, and their images." And so that they can use it for the eternal rest in any project they want without consent and without compensation.

As @sagaftra announced their historic strike today, union chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland has revealed that Hollywood studios has offered to own an AI replica of the actor. - Forever, without paying them another cent. pic.twitter.com/Awt7RgyJf7

-More Perfect Union(@MorePerfectUS)2023.7.13

Since the actual content of the proposal is known only to the negotiators, it is impossible for outsiders to comment further on the content of the proposal, but here are some important things worth considering.

Scanning the body and face of an actor in a capture volume has been a standard part of film, television and video game production for much of the past decade, and Cartoon Brew has covered many times synthetic performances created by vfx animators, including Gemini Man, Rogue One and Logan.

There is certainly a possibility that this same data will be used for AI in the future, but these scanning techniques are already commonly used across the vfx industry. According to the tweet, movie studios are expanding their scanning activities to include background actors.

AI could lead to an expansion of this practice, as it facilitates the retargeting of performance from one actor to another. The issue came to the forefront recently when Bruce Willis was digitally inserted into a commercial of a Russian mobile operator without physical participation in the shooting. A useful overview of the legal issues surrounding this kind of work was published in Wired.

The bottom line here is that SAG-AFTRA is already focused on negotiating something that is common industry practice, which makes them weak negotiators obviously, better than never slow, but actors may soon notice that they are late in the fight. Disney, for example, runs a high-tech science division called Disney Research, and the main focus for the past 10 years has been on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The fact that both sides are currently fusing VFX and AI makes it difficult to reach all sorts of compromises in favor of workers.

The existential fear among Hollywood actors that they will be replaced by animated replicas is nothing new – 2007's Under 30 Rock Cris, but when the acting community finally noticed advances in digital doubles and synthetic performance in Hollywood, they were not. It receives a big shock.