TV producers wanted AI rights of extras forever, says union
TV producers wanted AI rights of extras forever, says union
Union prez Fran Drescher thinks Hollywood’s digital desires have no style or flair
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Absolutely none of this is new.
I assume most people are too young to remember Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The big deal with that was that the lead actress (voiced by the ever spectacular Ming-Na Wen) was a fully CG actress and would do interviews with magazines and was going to be a real actress in other films and blah blah blah. Then the movie was god awful and everyone forgot about that.
But this has been the goal of "hollywood" for decades. Have actors/actresses that are literally not people. No chance of controversies or cancellations. And you can even use the modern vtuber model except instead of "graduating" to a new company, you push the models to much more degrading shit to cash in on the mrskin crowd.
And this is very much a trap (card). Very few starving extras will be dumb enough to sign their rights away forever. But what about a contract where the studio has the rights to reuse footage made in the next year or so, but no new footage after that? Congratulations, you are now part of a legally owned and curated training data database.
And that is what I expect to be the norm. Because even "real" actors and actresses might agree to that. "Oh, okay, you want to use an AI generated model so I don't have to fly back to Morocco to do reshoots? Cool. And you agree to not generate new footage of me after this shoot and to not use any footage of me that I have not agreed to? Sure, that sounds awesome. Oh, you need me to sign this specific contract to that specific wording? Cool. I'll go film a Batman movie while you figure out how to make it look like I kissed that abusive piece of shit or whatever you are doing"
Same with actors/actresses agreeing to let their rights be used, but only for movies they agree to. Sounds great for them. No risk of selling cyber condoms in forty years, and they get a paytcheck now. But, again, the goal is training data.
Like, it is no shock that we are seeing these "we own the rights to you for all time" stories while a strike is inevitable/occurring. Because this is setting a low bar so that a "compromise" can be reached.
I assume most people are too young to remember Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
I'm certainly not. The problem there was that it didn't live up to the hype. It was in no way photorealistic.
We now have websites that can create photorealistic faces. Photorealistic AI video is only a matter of time.
This was over 20 years ago. The frigging PS2 was "photorealistic" by the standards of the day. And for as shitty as the movie was narratively, it was visually MANY steps beyond that.
Saying it failed because it was not modern technology would be like arguing that early film should have failed because it was filmed at 16 FPS whereas now we can have full 60 FPS hobbit action.
There were plenty of reasons ranging from it being "sci-fi" at a time when that was a death sentence, the movie being a complete flop, and "Mulan" not being a leading lady because she was Asian. But folk lost their mind at how "realistic" whatsherface's model was.
Which, tinfoil hat, is why I suspect Villeneuve and the like keep getting the budget to do those completely spectacular sci-fi films with the top stars of the day.
The PS2 was not photorealistic by any standard. Photorealistic means you would be unable to differentiate the artificial construction from the real thing. I saw it in the theater. I was never for one moment convinced I was watching anything but animation.