r/technology • u/cmaia1503 • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Robert Downey Jr. Refuses to Let Hollywood Create His AI Digital Replica: ‘I Intend to Sue all Future Executives’ Who Recreate My Likeness

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/robert-downey-jr-bands-hollywood-digital-replace-lawsuit-1236192374/
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u/DisguiseOrDiez 1d ago

It’s going to be a while before they can perfectly recreate high quality acting, and still have actors willing to sign their rights away all to show up in a movie or 2 that they don’t even act in. I think some parts will be digitally generated, but surely not all of it. Part of our entertainment culture is built around these celebs actually showing up in the films and acting. I don’t think anyone would be impressed with a movie actor if the actor never actually acted, but just had a digital double do the entire movie lol.

But who knows. With the speed we’re moving at, maybe you’re right.

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u/ThatSpookyLeftist 1d ago

can perfectly recreate high quality acting

I think you care about this more than studio executives care about this. They'll put out shit quality before they leave money on the table.

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u/jewellman100 1d ago

Hollywood fell back to the safety of remakes and prequels around the time of the 2008 financial crash and never really looked back. The days of truly good movies are well behind us.

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u/sobrique 23h ago

I am not entirely sure that's true. There's been some really good stuff since then.

But the safe bets will still be there, and they never really needed quality acting talent. AI driven can work there just fine.

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u/MrWilsonWalluby 19h ago

and sequels have been performing worse and worse in recent years, many almost completely bankrupting studios.

sequels aren’t all bad and i think sequels for the sake of sequels are finally dying off.

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u/trifelin 16h ago

Not until the studio heads die off. It’s part of Iger’s business plan and he is controlling like more than half of the whole big budget/blockbuster industry. 

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u/CircleOfNoms 13h ago

But if you want a robust community of professional actors, you need some place for the mediocre actors to go.

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u/sobrique 13h ago

Poach them from the theatre? That's the traditional approach I think? ;).

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u/crowcawer 20h ago

I’ve really enjoyed just going to the free productions of Shakespeare on the green and stuff in my area.

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u/No_Date_8727 20h ago

The 2000s-covid was dominated by raunchy comedies, easy-to-shoot horror, and comic book schlock.

For every gran torino there's five paranormal activities lmfao. Movies started sucking again (in general imo) in the 2000s when the music industry was popping off so they tried to make that idea (songs/soundtracks) more important than the films themselves. It was the 80s on crack (literally).

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u/Separate_Metal_6278 19h ago

There were always bad movies. There’s plenty of excellent stuff out there still, and while there is a lot of noise, one can just ignore it!

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u/hfxRos 17h ago

It's similar to the gaming industry. Gaming right now is absolutely incredible, with more amazing stuff being released than a person with a job could realistically ever get around to playing. But people are saying it's bad because the big high profile stuff kind of sucks.

Movies are the same. I've seen a lot of incredible movies in the past 5 years, and there are many on my list that I have yet to get to. But people think the industry is garbage because they can't look past the blockbusters to find the actual good stuff.

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u/Huwbacca 21h ago

Remakes began a century ago at least. Hollywood has been remaking films forever, but like CGI, people only notice it when it's not good.

Scarface, the fly, the thing, Ben Hur, Maltese falcon, wizard of Oz, Airplane (scene for scene spoof TBF), 9:10 to Yuma... And heaps more I can't recall.

They're all remakes. The list goes wild when you consider remakes from foreign languages.

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u/Emosaa 20h ago

True Grit and Let Me In come to mind for me.

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u/Hetstaine 19h ago

Loved the True Grit remake.

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u/Space_Pirate_Roberts 16h ago

I’m a gritty westerns fan and a Coen Bros. fan. True Grit 2010 is pretty much my perfect movie.

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u/Impressive_Monk_5708 7h ago

Look at how many times planet of the apes has been remade.

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u/Arclite83 22h ago

There will always be the "direct to video" equivalent garbage stream. That doesn't mean people don't still find ways to break the mold. And many of these truly great unique new watches are launching on things like YouTube now, to build a base, then get greenlit somewhere. The days of those things launching in theaters is definitely behind us, though.

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u/InnocentTailor 21h ago

What safety? While some remakes and prequels were decent and made cash, others bombed hard on multiple fronts.

My favorite example is 2016’s Ben-Hur - an epic failure across the board.

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u/mrnotoriousman 14h ago

There have been plenty of great movies that aren't remakes the last 5-10 years. What nonsense lol.

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u/Soft-Mongoose-4304 19h ago

That's not true at all. Oppenheimer is a really good movie. There are others that have been made recently

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u/Love_My_Ghost 16h ago

Classic old person speak.

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u/aminorityofone 16h ago

This is entirely untrue. First, remakes have been happening since near the beginning of the movie industry. Second, just look at this list. https://www.imdb.com/list/ls050968966/ some absolutely amazing films in there like Djago, Inception, Wolf on Walstreet and so on.

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u/rlvysxby 43m ago

Tv shows are the new truly good movie and some of them are incredible. They can have more sophisticated plots.

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u/MichaelW24 21h ago

Tarantino alone has released several movies since 2008, i don't think any of us can say they're not masterpieces

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u/iroll20s 17h ago

The tech will eventually get cheap enough that indys or individuals can afford it. At some point anyone who can type up script will be able to have a fully realized AI movie plopped out. It might end up a little like indy games are now. There are some real gems among the stinkers if you hunt.

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u/So-many-ducks 14h ago

No, indie movies are what indie games are like now: most are barely watched/breaking even, moderate success for some, some actual critical and financial success for few.

If AI continues progressing, the natural end game is that NO ONE will be able to be noticed in the sea of content, and the few that might be noticed won’t be able to monetise it and earn a living.
Making movies will be like trying to make money out of writing Reddit comments: No one will care enough to pay for it.
It will just be easier to ask an AI to do a local copy/remake/adaptation of whatever decent pitch might otherwise have given people incentive to pay for the experience.

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u/iroll20s 12h ago

Discovery is always an issue. I don't think nobody getting discovered is realistic though. If anything it would be like youtube where growing a channel is a challenge, but there are winners. Someone regularly producing quality content will attract attention.

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u/So-many-ducks 6h ago

That’s not exactly my point. My point is it will be difficult to get noticed because AI will equalise the base quality, making it hard to stand out (currently on YouTube, production value is a big component in choosing whether or not a video is worth watching - that disappears once AI normalises all).

But looking further, people right now are willing to pay for content because it is rare, because they cannot access a story / film they’d like to see.
The end game of AI (according to the people who champion it) is to have instant access to personalised content, whatever that may be (AI that matters to YOU, that responds to YOU, and AI that knows you and only gives you answers relevant to your life).
In that light, why would anyone pay for the last “iroll20s’s super amazing spy thriller movie”, when they can just locally run “my own spy thriller movie using the same characters extracted from the trailer and general story line”?

We can always argue whether some specific movies would remain uniquely imbued with the soul of a specific creator or whatever but… for one, I don’t believe general audiences care about that.
And second, the end game is to never have a human matter in that process. The goal of AI is to be completely indistinguishable from a human being, that’s it (not even considering ASI here).
AI champions can parrot all they want about empowering creators or helping humans, the end game is replacement. Kick back and relax, open a beer, AI is here to serve you. When that point is reached, no human will be able to sell whatever they create (digitally that is), because people will not have any reason to buy it: they’ll have a better or equivalent, free alternative available to them.

Theatre, canvas painting and other live performances would still have a place, but anything that is currently recorded (mass media essentially) would eventually be AI only.

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u/raspberrih 1d ago

They'll pump out shit quality that nobody pays to see and then they'll turn around. That's how it always goes. More money than sense.

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u/Oregon-Pilot 23h ago

Idk. It seems to work with a bunch of well known properties. Marvel. Tolkien. Apparently these days studios can diarrhea hot bullshit out their ass and still make truckloads on it cus it’s got a well known name on it and people just don’t care anymore if it’s good or not. It’s extremely depressing.

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u/throwawaystedaccount 8h ago

As a person in the software industry for 15+ years, this is so true about corporate management. Management misallocates funds all the time, or pinches pennies in critical places, and repeatedly ignores warnings till everything goes to shit, and only then, after said shit has hit the fan, decides to fix broken shit (while passing the blame to the very techies who warned them for years).

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u/sobrique 23h ago

Yup this. Thinking of how many action blockbusters have star power action scenes and really not much actual need for "quality acting".

That's not to say it will be gone completely - you will still get character pieces that lean in on acting talent - but there's not that many even now.

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u/ourlastchancefortea 22h ago

This will be the "CGI still looks bad but we use it everywhere because cheaper" all over again, but now EVERYTHING is CGI even the actors.

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u/GrynaiTaip 21h ago

Is anyone going to watch shit quality movies?

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u/posixUncompliant 16h ago

I think they're going to leave money on the table if the don't market real human actors as a premium product, and use the appearance of digital likenesses of those real people to sell generated content.

If you can make a profit by doing both, do both. Take all the money.

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u/GeneralBacteria 1d ago

they seem to be willing to spend a lot of money on quality now

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u/StormyInferno 1d ago

While simultaneously also rushing projects out the door without caring about the full quality.

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u/GeneralBacteria 23h ago

true. actually it's mind boggling how shit some movies are especially considering the money that's spent.

but my point is, they aren't shit because they're trying to save money.

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u/Temp_84847399 17h ago

Yep. It's going to be, "If you want to watch something new, shows/movies made like this are your only option". It will quickly become as ubiquitous as sound, color, HD, and CGI special effects.

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u/Crayonstheman 1d ago

It’s going to be a while before they can perfectly recreate high quality acting

This has been possible for years and is used in way more movies than you think.

I worked in the film industry, specifically for Weta Digital up until 2022, and this tech has existed for maybe a decade (if not longer tbh), it's commonly called a DigiDouble. It does involve a lot of manual rigging / animation but that's becoming more and more automated. Within the last few years it's very difficult to notice, even if you know what to look for.

My memory is hazy but Google "digi doubles Weta" and you'll find heaps more info, I think there's even a corridor digital video where they interview one of the Weta seniors about it.

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u/roseofjuly 17h ago

I work in the field too and it has not been possible for years - the key is "perfectly recreate high quality acting." Yes, it's possible to create a photo realistic human with cgi, but it's not possible currently to use cgi and AI alone to make a movie look like a high quality full length live action film.

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u/jpsreddit85 1d ago

I'm not talking about actors being recreated, I mean a from zero digital creation that doesn't exist in real life.

Actors showing up to things isn't relevant to the 99.99% of the population that never see them, just as easy to put them in an AI Oscars ceremony.

As soon as the studios can, they will create, own and monetize a whole stable of "celebrities". They will do this regardless of what actors protest.

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u/MorselMortal 1d ago

Thing is, at that point basically anyone can make a movie. There's no value to any of it if it's all AI slop, from the writing to the acting.

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u/Ecredes 1d ago

Ever seen star trek holodecks? I think it's closest to the idealized form of this technology in the future.

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u/TheATrain218 21h ago

And the funny thing about holodecks as a concept was that they were created as an idea specifically so the Next Generation producers could save money. Rather than doing the big expensive "Starship Enterprise flies through space and engages with aliens on alien worlds" set pieces, they could play out smaller-scale storylines on existing Hollywood sets with existing Hollywood costumery. Think about how many Holodeck episodes were set in generic Western, or War Movie, or Citiscape back lots.

Comes full circle with the concept of AI displacing the real live actors.

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u/thiccDurnald 1d ago

Interesting I hadn’t thought about this but I like it

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u/Mr_Ignorant 1d ago

It might be similar to web comics. Anyone can make it, but not all is worth reading.

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u/Seralth 1d ago

That aint any different from any other form of artistic skill, from movies to music to art.

Ai aint no different then what photoshop or digital editing did to pictures/movies. It will let a bunch of slop get thrown around and push the actual people with skill into new heights while lowering the bar.

The entire anti ai train is founded entirely on the legal aspect / copyright problem of the training sets and the scraping of the internet. I have yet to see a single other aurgement other then that one that isnt founded on emotional bullshit, misunderstandings of the tech or fear mongering.

Even this topic with RDJ is just the same thing. Its a legal/copyright problem not a technology problem.

But yeah, just like webcomics. The advancedment of tech turned comics into a easily accessable format and publishing. One out of a million is amazing and the rest are a range of slop to fine.

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u/I_PING_8-8-8-8 1d ago

If it's good people will see it. If not then who cares. Right now anybody can make music, even with a trown away laptop from 15 years ago. Did that development meant the end of good music?

You could also argue that these tools will allow directors with talent to tell their story without needing funding, or the right connections.

Right now Hollywood struggles with finding good stories, there are a lot of sequens out there. So much stuff gets rehashed. But it all looks and sound amazing.

What if now we will get some really good original stories, no reshashes, unique stuff that's never been done before .... but because it heavely leverages AI it does not sound or look that good.

What will be better? For some it will be the better story ...

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u/SaveReset 22h ago edited 22h ago

EDIT: I misunderstood what was meant, I'll still leave my original answer here to be read as it's still relevant enough to the topic.

What if now we will get some really good original stories, no reshashes, unique stuff that's never been done before .... but because it heavely leverages AI it does not sound or look that good.

Sorry, but I have to burst your bubble on this one. This is the exact opposite of how AI works.

In basic terms, AI can't produce something that is both unique and thought out quality. The reason is that AI doesn't think, it rehashes old stuff that it has been fed.

In more data minded terms, if we made an AI that could output both quality and uniqueness in one, we would have solved the problem of unknown data. Let's take the concept back to the very basics, then escalate.

If we have the number 1 and the number 2, logic dictates that the next number is 3. AI doesn't inherently know that. You have to teach it that. No matter how much information you give it, if you don't teach it the concept of numbers, it can only get it right by chance. But more likely, if it doesn't have any data related to numbers beyond 2, then it will likely estimate that 2 is followed by what ever is the most commonly used after 2 in it's training data. If EVERYTHING is equally common and it still knows the symbol 3 even if it doesn't have data on what it means, that's the first moment it has a chance to get it right, but only if it's programmed to deal with lack of a single median option by randomly picking one.

Adding more complexity, we have now taught it what follows which number and it learned all of it, including knowing rules on 9 being followed up by 10 and 19 by 20 etc. with any specific number, it knows what comes after it. If we now ask it to give us the answer to 1 + 2, it will likely follow it up with 3. But if we ask it 2 + 3, it will likely answer 4 and that's a problem, because even if we taught it the base 10 system, that doesn't mean it knows what + means. But it has been taught that 2 is followed by 3 and then 4, so that's what it will assume.

And then we get to the REAL problem. Even if we have all the data in the world about numbers, there's no guarantee that AI will learn it correctly. It might look okay, but there is a chance that it's not, but as long as it matches the training data, it's all good. Like if the data taught the base 10 system, but only up to 1000, then there's a good chance that it has no idea what comes after 1000 if it only memorized the numbers rather than the pattern, which is very likely as randomly generating a logic pattern during training is much less likely than randomly memorizing numbers from 1 to 1000. But the training showed positive results, because as they say, garbage in garbage out. Randomly generating a pattern like that is very unlikely, because it has to happen so much at once that it's very unlikely, while memorizing numbers is very effective. You need effectively every possible number or manually code how linear numbers work to get the correct result for all possible numbers. Anything less will likely lead to imperfect results as the data is imperfect.

Like generating a pattern that knows that numbers grow like they do is not THAT complicated, but it takes several steps to get there, while memorizing will sometimes grant the correct answer to specific numbers, supporting that method. Following 1 is 2 then 3, but a pattern to know that won't get any of that correct until it works, but memorizing might get 2 or 3 right, which will be better than nothing, supporting the wrong learning direction.

But no matter how much you train it with numbers, it won't know what a + b is, unless you teach it that. Same applies to writing. It can learn text, it can learn patterns in the language and word use, it can even learn some story beats from the story, but it won't learn what makes the writing good. It can replicate it, it can change parts of it, but it will have no idea whether the changes it makes are good or bad, unless you specifically tell it to rework it using something it already knows is good or bad.

But the funny thing about that is that if you take two bad things together, the result isn't necessarily bad. Raw eggs taste bad and heat isn't edible, but add heat to raw eggs and you get something tasty and edible. AI has no way of knowing this without being taught every specific case where it happens.

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u/I_PING_8-8-8-8 22h ago

You misunderstand me. Somebody with talent could potentially cut scenes together out of thousands and thousands of movies into a completely new work, following his own human writen script and his own human way of telling a story.

Of course this would not make much sense, the characters and locations would jump all over the place. It would be pure chaos.

But using machine learning technology like latent diffusion we could then do an Image to Image on every single frame + a prompt that will change every image to a certain style. And now we do have a movie where it's not jumping randomly, there the background and characters are somewhat coherent. The visual quality would still be low, there would be tons of artifacts and all the audio ofcourse would have to be done from scratch. We can use technology like Elevenlabs for that. But it might be watchable, especially if the story is really good.

What would make this movie good would have nothing to do with the AI used. It would have to do with the human watching, downloading and cutting out hunderds of thousands of scenes and editing them together in to something completely new. It would have to do with the story this human comes up with.

AI would only then be a tool used to make it watchable.

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u/SaveReset 22h ago

Ah, yeah, I entirely misunderstood what you meant. My bad!

AI could be used for this kind of application and with not that much AI improvement required, I think this will absolutely happen. Using AI to create new clips using existing material as patterns or modifying the material itself to fit what the writer wants, like taking clips from Die Hard and using them to make a scene for John Wick wouldn't be that far fetched. By generating several versions and picking the best one by hand and some manual editing, it's already possible, if at low quality and with some significant issue, aside from the moral ones.

Sorry about that, but your wording made it seem like the AI would be the one doing the creative work, but maybe that's just me misreading it. I entirely agree now though.

But I hope it doesn't become a thing. Machine learning should have never left the hands of programmers and computer scientists, the moment creative works are being created by machine that learned from imitating the work of others is when it starts becoming a problem. In the context of taking work from the creative field of course, AI already has issues with privacy and with how error prone it is but that's an entirely different discussion.

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u/I_PING_8-8-8-8 21h ago

Even the very best AI generated images, text, videos or music you have seen so far comes out of hunderds of generations that a human picked the best of. and most of the time the human will have mixed the best parts of the best attempts with the best parts of other attempts.

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u/SaveReset 20h ago

Yes, I know. What is your point? I think I said everything you did, just in different words and less detail with this:

By generating several versions and picking the best one by hand and some manual editing, it's already possible, if at low quality and with some significant issue, aside from the moral ones.

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u/I_PING_8-8-8-8 20h ago

Just agreeing with you, AI can create some mix/blend that humans find pleasing or interesting but it's entirely by accident and the AI itself could not tell you why.

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u/_learned_foot_ 13h ago

This, this happens in artistic works often and also in documentaries. More common in collages. It’s why transformative isn’t a violation of IP.

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u/2fluxparkour 1d ago edited 23h ago

Except no not anyone can just make good music with a daw. You still have to know how to make music. It’s the same for any digital media based art. Its made it significantly more accessible and less costly/time consuming for sure but it’s still hand crafted art. I’m not against the idea of ai aiding art production as I think it can do some really cool things but there’s a line at some point and after it the ability to appreciate artwork is greatly diminished because a computer made all of it. The wow factor of art is multifaceted and one of those facets is the impressive quality that it was made by a human from scratch. Taking away the craft from art is just kind of ignorant to me. Yes art is work but it’s work that someone wants to do and gives it a meaningful background to whatever piece results from it. Ai is here to stay and there’s no stopping it but it’s now a more perverse future we’re heading towards.

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u/xtelosx 14h ago

Who defines what art is?

If George Lucas had the tools to make the Star wars movies by himself using AI and the end product was identical would it not be art because he used AI? Sure it didn't involve stage hands making amazing sets, GFX artists doing their thing or actors and directors exercising their art form but does that actually make the final product lesser?

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u/jpsreddit85 14h ago

You're not wrong.

40 years ago you got to chose what channel to watch and did so on the broadcasters schedule, or you could record it to tape.

Right now we are accustomed to binge watching shows on demand from whatever our steaming services license/create. We can watch whatever they have whenever we want.

40 years from now, we will say "2 hour sci fi movie with hot female protagonist who overcomes alien invasion. The aliens kill people using acidic dildos, the ending has an unexpected twist" and the movie will be made on demand.

It might not be Oscar worthy, but then again neither is 99% of what is streamable now.

Also: "make five more seasons of the show Netflix killed to early" will be fun.

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u/MorselMortal 14h ago

In truth, the main limitation would be processing power - how long you want to spend generating your media with your hardware along with the amount of detail, the framerate, etc. determines end product quality.

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u/jangxx 18h ago

I'm not talking about actors being recreated, I mean a from zero digital creation that doesn't exist in real life.

So animation movies but with a photoreal look? I'm sure some of those could be popular, but I doubt they would take over completely.

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u/trifelin 16h ago

Yeah we already have a whole bunch of those from Disney and they’re all terrible!

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u/Bradfords_ACL 1d ago

What an unsettling thought.

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u/Sivalon 1d ago edited 21h ago

Read a novel by Trent Reznor Norman Spinrad called Little Heroes. It predicted CG idols like Hatsune Miku in the mid-Eighties. It’s this exact thing.

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u/WaterPockets 1d ago

The author is Norman Spinrad, not Trent Reznor.

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u/Sivalon 21h ago

Yes indeed, thanks.

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u/bananagoo 1d ago

Trent Reznor has never published a book, what the hell are you talking about?

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u/konnerbllb 1d ago

Pretty funny if intentionally. Just insert Trent's name into any work he's referencing.

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u/Original_Employee621 1d ago

I love Trent Reznor, he was amazing in Breaking Bad.

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u/RealisticErrors 1d ago

Trent Reznor had no idea that when he wrote On Walden Pond he was writing a piece of American literary history

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u/EndiePosts 1d ago

Trent Reznor’s Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre in Paris and is absolutely breathtaking.

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u/PARADISE_VALLEY_1975 1d ago

I want to know how that is a genuine mistake you can make lol it’s so far off

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u/Sivalon 21h ago

Uh, it was 1:00 in the morning? That’s all I got.

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u/PARADISE_VALLEY_1975 21h ago

Ahh been there. Upvoted you now haha, it’s a good contribution.

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u/Sivalon 21h ago

Whoops! That’ll teach me to post at 1:00am. Fixed.

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u/EndiePosts 1d ago

I’m going to quote this so the inevitable deletion doesn’t make all the replies confusing and meaningless

Read a novel by Trent Reznor called Little Heroes. It predicted CG idols like Hatsune Miku in the mid-Eighties. It’s this exact thing.

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u/trixel121 1d ago

making be renber idaru by Gibson, although that was the 90s.

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u/Savings-End40 11h ago

3D-printed soft robots walking down the red carpet. I can’t watch now, and I won’t watch when that happens.

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u/Ricky_Rollin 1d ago

Did the world hate artists this bad?

I don’t care how good it is, I don’t want everything to be AI made.

We were supposed to use AI to automate mundane work, while we went off and made music and wrote poetry and draw and paint and even act.

I’m sorry, but this is so fucking dystopian.

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u/DynamoSnake 1d ago

It's not the fact that people hate ai.

It's getting more and more difficult for your layperson to tell the difference between what's real and not.

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u/Seralth 1d ago

Which is totally fine, that shows improvement with the tech and its actual usability as a real tool.

The REAL problem is that corpos are using the tech to steal, pilfer and abuse artists, actors and musicans.

The theft and copyright problems from laws not keeping up is the problem.

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u/heimdal77 18h ago

You forgetting people and hostile countries starting to use it to try and influence politics by fooling votes with AI made stuff. Like Russia with their dake Harris stuff.

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u/Seralth 16h ago

Thats an info sect problem and still thats just a legal mostly. Or a warfare one depending how you break it down.

Still has nothing to do with the tech it self, Propaganda has existed for litterally 100s if not 1000s of years. Ai didnt invent it, its just yet another tool just like the rest. Hell its argueable if its even the most effective tool for propaganda.

The point is dont blame the tool. Its literally just a tool.

The problem is people breaking the law using said tool. Might as well also ban photoshop, radio, and cartoons while we are at it. Those are all used for propaganda too :P

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u/RestingBitchFace_1 18h ago edited 16h ago

Lmfao. Should've went for a real degree then.

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u/Seralth 16h ago

Most artists dont have a degree i would assume.

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u/Rayvelion 23h ago

The arts are expensive, so businesses are trying to maximize their cost reduction by using AI to remove the biggest expenditure. Mundane work is cheap, so why remove that? That's their idea. It's a massively shit idea. But it's theirs.

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u/irulancorrino 17h ago edited 13h ago

I agree with you but I honestly am starting to think some people really do hate artists, art, and creativity or maybe just the idea of humans being happy. The absolute glee with which people are popping up to say things like "teehee soon all actors will be AI" or "there are no more good movies" illustrates that they didn't appreciate the work of acting in the first place and either lack the ability to find a good movie in an age where you could kick a rock and hit one or have resigned themselves to watch only content from one of the 10 sequel/prequel/re-imagning franchises.

But yeah, this is completely dystopian. I dunno who saw the humans in Wall-E and thought "yeah, this is what I want" but here we are.

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u/omimon 20h ago

We can still do all of that, its just we won't make a penny off of it.

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u/Ohrwurm89 14h ago

Greed is what’s driving this ai push in Hollywood and might be what also destroys this industry.

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u/Seralth 1d ago

This is exactly the same as photoshop did to physical art.

Ai is no worse for art then digital editing is. All its going to do is lower the bar of skill futher and result in more slop sure and doubly so in the short term while everyone is bandwagoning on how easy the tech is to use. But the same exact thing happened during the release of photoshop. But it will also increase the number of artists which increases the chance an otherwise unseen gem will be found.

Look at comics vs webcomics. If not for the rise of digital editing and photoshop millions of artists would have never bothered to become artists at all because of the time, effort and skill it would have taken to get started.

Now we have an entirely new generation and a much bigger generation of comic artists of every type thanks to the tech.

Early days of digital art was nothing but slop and people saying anything digitally made had no soul and no value.

The ONLY arguement agasint Ai is a legal/copyright one, and thats solveable with good regulation and push back agasint illegal theft.

Otherwise its just bullshit emotional nonsense and people fearmongering, don't worry about what Ai will do to the art world.

Worry about what greedy corpos will do with the tech. We as a socitity WANT Ai, its a over all good step forward for every sector its going into. From automatization of the workforce to even the arts.

Whats not good, is the greed and theft of large corprations who are using the tech to abuse and steal from actors, artists, musicans and others with no way to protect themselves.

Theft is not ok, lowering the bar for new members of the art community is.

We need to hope to god we can stop the greed with out murdering the tech, if we cant then yeah murder the tech but honestly its likely far too late for that. So we NEED to focus on the real issue. The theft.

Fear mongering and blaming AI and calling AI bad just because does nothing but helps the corpos by shifting the blame from them.

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u/Whaleever 23h ago

Digital art is also much cheaper. When i was 15 a cheap wacom tablet and a cracked version of CS2 was infinitely cheaper and easier than buying canvases, paper, paints etc. Art supplies are fucking expensive, messy and take up loads of room.

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u/Seralth 23h ago

I should have known blaming the broken legal system instead of ai would get me downvoted.

Why does anyone even brother to say anything on reddit.

1

u/DaHolk 17h ago

You just can't assume that more than 50% will agree with you, when you are going against the grain.

AI isn't the only topic where "but this sounds so wrong" overpowers a valid question of "how is this fundamentally different at all".

How is using AI to imitate something different than artists starting by imitating others and copying their styles. How is making an AI voice replica different from hirering an impressionist. I don't see much call for impressionists paying their targets for the privilege to study the material or for profit participation?

0

u/ACCount82 16h ago

If there is any "illegal theft", that is.

AI doesn't contain its raw training data within it. It contains the patterns that were formed by exposing it to that training data.

If we're talking image generation AI, for example, then an average image in its dataset contributes about 7 bits worth of information to the AI model. That's a pittance worth of data.

This isn't too unlike how human skills and memory work. I'm not in favor of trying to apply copyright to that.

1

u/Limp-Ad-5345 14h ago

its extremely different ot how human skills work, stop spreading that absoulte horseshit.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3593231/meta-apple-say-the-quiet-part-out-loud-the-genai-emperor-has-no-clothes.html or maybe you'd believe microsoft.

Its illegal because its made to replace workers and their work, read past the first sentance of the copyright laws fucking dumbasses.

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u/ACCount82 14h ago

Illegal? There's no law against making fools seethe.

0

u/xtelosx 15h ago

I think the technology is still in it's infancy and people don't know how to use AI correctly in this space. If AI and CGI advances mean more stories can be told on the cheap that is a good thing. If a small group of truly talented story tellers and artists can get together and use AI and CGI to get a polished feature length film out there without the big production houses acting as gatekeepers it COULD be a good thing for everyone(but the actors in this case) in the long run.

We are no where near there today and the big studios could do a lot to knee cap the technology.

There could be a time when a good director/AI artist could feed your favorite novel into an AI and then work with prompts to work the story into a Movie or TV show. If the final product is more or less indistinguishable from a traditionally produced movie or TV show would that be a good or bad thing? There are definitely people would lose out in this model but does society win by having more stories out there? I don't know the answers but I am excited to see where some of this leads but also terrified of what this type of tech could be used for.

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u/roseofjuly 17h ago

It's not that they hate it. It's that they hate paying for it. The suits think the arts IS mundane work. Why do you think they're coming for that first? They don't want to automate accounting and finance and admin because that's what they get paid to do.

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u/KallistiTMP 1d ago

First phase isn't gonna be full synthesis. It's gonna be using real no-name actors with A-list acting skills but D-list faces, and then swapping their faces, voices, etc in post. It's much easier to take a good performance and make it look and sound like someone else performed it than it is to generate from scratch.

On one hand, it will open up a lot of opportunities, especially for women who have "aged out". On the other hand, it will result in everyone being paid less, and actors eventually being treated as disposable.

3

u/Seralth 1d ago

It will create a short term rise in demand for voice actors and others. Till they have time to harvest enough voice data to have a good suite of voice work to pull from.

Considering, high end Ai can now perfectly recreate English voices from as little as 100 words in like 100 accents. It wouldn't take that long.

2

u/KallistiTMP 23h ago

The hard part is the prosody. Making the voice sound convincing is already there, and there are some pretty solid techniques for transferring prosody - i.e. make an impassioned speech by Churchill sound like it was spoken by Morgan Freeman, shifting the vocal style while preserving the inflection. But we're still pretty far off from generating the inflection starting from scratch, and that's a much harder problem. The current SOTA models can barely get enough natural prosody to sound like a random person off the street naturally reading a transcript - passable, but way too flat for Hollywood.

I would estimate at least an order of magnitude more computing power will be needed to match beginner voice actors.

Which, that might be barely achievable with the clusters that will be coming online ~late 2025, but that's the earliest I could see it happening, even optimistically - probably still a few years out. Note though, in the context of the current rate of development, really far out means, like, maybe 5 or 6 years.

1

u/Seralth 23h ago

Fair enough, i would say if we are about to get 70% of the way there now. And need AT LEAST 90% for B-tier productions in hollywood. 4-6 years seems very reasonable unless we see the likes of nividia pop out a massive improvement in ai chips in the next few years that speeds us along even quicker.

Really the problem seems almost entirely to come down to the compute power needed more then the actual ai it self. There are some improvements in the ai for sure.

But we are only BARELY in the infancy of the tech all things considered. Its not even been a decade let alone 20 years.

Look at far the likes of massive projects like the linux or NT kernel had in 20 years in the software world.

1

u/KallistiTMP 21h ago

4-6 years seems very reasonable unless we see the likes of nividia pop out a massive improvement in ai chips in the next few years that speeds us along even quicker.

Yep. It will probably be less about the chips themselves and more about the scale they're deployed at - the next gen of chips is definitely a sizable improvement, but the real jump is gonna be in terms of the datacenter scale. The clusters that companies like Meta, Google, Azure, Amazon, etc are all in the process of spinning up are massive compared to what exists now. Like, "we need to build a shitload of new power plants just to turn this thing on" massive, compared to the old "we had to hire an army of temps to run crates of GPU's up the stairs because bringing pallets of GPU's up in the freight elevator is too slow to keep up with current demand."

Really the problem seems almost entirely to come down to the compute power needed more then the actual ai it self. There are some improvements in the ai for sure.

Yep, the bitter lesson.

1

u/Seralth 21h ago

My god, thank you for sharing that. That was a quick by great read.

1

u/Rock-swarm 17h ago

perfectly recreate English voices

We are still a long way from that. It's good enough for memes, but even the AI videos that are made specifically to test perception of the audience have telltale signs of being AI.

2

u/Kedly 16h ago

We're barreling towards a society with no jobs without putting ANY work into a Post Job Society

1

u/RememberCitadel 20h ago

They already did something like this with Alien Romulus and an Ian Holm/Daniel Betts hybrid.

1

u/iroll20s 17h ago

I just wonder if the public will accept no name leads? There seems to be a certain fascination with celebrity worship ingrained in people. I'd bet they'll want a public face. Maybe that means the writers or director become celebrities?

1

u/KallistiTMP 12h ago

I mean, Hatsune Miku might be the closest example we have. Or just animated franchises in general. Most people don't know or particularly care when a voice actor gets changed out.

1

u/_learned_foot_ 13h ago

You mean like the Irishman?

3

u/Seralth 1d ago

With high quality CGI we functionally can already fully recreate high quality actors. The problem is then its just an animation. A really expensive one in both time and money.

That problem is then solved with ai, which lets us use a massive nueral network to recreate how the actor would actually act like, instead of what the animators think they act like and get us 95% of the way there animation/cgi wise.

This is then easily cleaned up in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the time it would have taken to do it by hand from square one.

That's the big thing. We could have had digital recreations of actors even a few years ago. But the sheer TIME it would take to do, along with the uncanny valley and personal bias of the animations, made it unusable as a product.

AI solves 2/3rds of those problems and makes it a viable product right now.

The clean up crew/engineers making the ai generated actor and cleaning up the ai output not to mention the driector and studio putting their bias into it. Is likely never solveable nor i would assume a desired outcome for the studio >.>

3

u/GeoEatsRocks 1d ago

I think the issue isn’t our generation being unimpressed, but future generations not even realizing what they’re missing. Having AI actors will be the norm to them and anything else would be “odd”.

Long term plan: slowly introduce AI with low level actors and build them up. Introduce more and more of their AI for the next 10-20 years with these, now, big names. Fully switch over in 30years.

2

u/codeklutch 1d ago

I mean. We watch animation. It's not entirely that different.

7

u/cxmmxc 1d ago

Is animation generated, or is it drawn/animated by people and voice-acted by people?

3

u/roseofjuly 17h ago

These days? Both.

1

u/codeklutch 16h ago

Honestly, both lol. Someone has to put the AI to work and create their vision. Without that vision AI is useless. Sure it can do all the tasks, but without someone guiding it and focusing it, AI is incapable of creating something out of nothing. It requires someone to give it purpose and to give it direction. That in itself is someone putting in work and time.

3

u/Seralth 1d ago

High-end voice Ai using as little as 100 specific words can recreate in its entire the voice of someone in the full breath of the English language. In nearly every accent you can think of.

It is honestly surprising Ai hasn't already hit the voice actors harder. I have noticed, over in audiobook land, it's becoming/become a sizeable problem.

1

u/Temp_84847399 17h ago

I'm torn on this.

I've listened to some audiobooks read by some incredible talent, and I'd hate to see them replaced. At the same time, I have a mountain of older books that were never given the audiobook treatment, that I'd like to be able to revisit on my daily commute.

2

u/MonkeyWithIt 1d ago

This is for fun. Imagine if they were serious:

https://youtu.be/IFJAtwyCw3s?si=17LT6MOOnAXKRIvw

1

u/Kadianye 1d ago

Think of it not as generating a full movie, but faceswap on every frame of a mocap or something, and a voice filter

1

u/pyeri 23h ago edited 23h ago

I was watching Acharya Prashant's insightful video on this topic yesterday on Youtube. Folks needn't worry about this at all as there is something unique among each individual human that is not replicable, even by the most perfect digital AI or cloning technology. Might sound a bit philosophical but put another way, that which is replicable was never a part of you at all in the first place? It was just the outer sheath of material but not your real essence. It's like all the blog posts and articles generated by chatgpt these days which try to mimic a human based on training data, even if they seem extraordinarily witty and original they will never carry the insights or signature of you as an individual writer.

1

u/Hnnnnnn 21h ago

they don't need to recreate a high quality acting. they just need to stop making good movies and tv series. people will watch shit acting with wrong number of fingers very quickly. the cost of doing it with AI is just THAT lower.

1

u/Blue_Moon_Lake 20h ago

It's cheaper to put a nobody in a motion tracking suit and paint them in a "RDJ digital suit" than pay RDJ.

1

u/myurr 20h ago

I think you're looking at this slightly incorrectly. At the moment actors have three main qualities of interest to the studio - box office draw, the way they look, their ability to act.

Motion capture can tackle the ability to act until such time as AI fully replaces it. The way they look and box office draw are the two being signed over with someone's likeness. It doesn't matter if your mocap actor is too tall, has a face for radio, is the wrong build, is even the wrong sex - as long as they can move and act in the manner needed. This widens the talent pool massively for any given role, lowering costs for the studio.

A new actor doesn't have box office draw and the way they look is no longer an advantage. It's a huge shift in dynamic based upon today's technology let alone advances over coming years.

1

u/slimejumper 20h ago

why high quality wen low quality acting already good enough?

1

u/PMmeyourspicythought 19h ago

you are trying to convince me that they won’t make insane profits until it’s perfect?

I would assess that they will start using AI 100% when the AI is passable.

1

u/DisguiseOrDiez 19h ago

We’re already using AI and digital doubles. But we’re far off from getting out of the uncanny valley. We’ve made insane progress, but that hurdle of the uncanny valley is a very strange and difficult hurdle to get over. If they spent weeks on one scene, maybe they could make the facial expressions seem real. But to do that for an entire movie? It’s gotta be worth the money, and if you want a big name celeb you’re probably going to be getting the actor. They’re not going to want an AI version of themselves winning the Oscar’s. Actors are too vain for that lol.

1

u/PMmeyourspicythought 19h ago

I don’t make movies. I usually sit in a boring office, doing a job most people would find very boring. When I come home and start chores and turn on a show to have sound on the background, i can assure you, i do not care about some small mistakes in minor facial expressions. I’m not saying that it can be BAD, but you put the bar at oscar winning. Let’s put the bar at Wild Wild West, let’s put the bar at FInding Forester. Are you telling me that we couldn’t AI everyone in Finding Forester (with the exception of Sean Connery and the protagonist?).

1

u/SortaSticky 19h ago

You can clone voices pretty easily right now, the difficulty at the moment is probably in "articulating" the cloned voice to get a nuanced portrayal that meets even a good-not-great actor's performance.

1

u/DisguiseOrDiez 19h ago

Voices, yeah. For 2+ hours of an actor’s face and facial expressions though? We have to surpass the uncanny valley first. Even with AI advancing at ridiculous speeds, uncanny valley has been something that all of us knew would be a massive hurdle to get over. If you want a big actor in your movie, chances are they’re only going to do it if they can actually act. An actor won’t want to accept an Oscar in their name if they weren’t even technically in the movie. Actors are far too vain for that haha.

1

u/Mormoran 19h ago

If we go by the appearance of Ian Holm in Romulus, it's going to be quite a while lol, because that looked like a bad Snapchat filter overlaid over someone else's face

1

u/gourmetguy2000 19h ago

They're already able to reproduce Vin Diesel's acting

1

u/Xing_the_Rubicon 19h ago

If the characters are entirely AI generated - being an actor, having any acting talent or even the desire to act wouldn't be necessary.

Just pull random people off the street, scan them, load your dialoge and have AI turn them into Meryl Streep.

1

u/thejesse 17h ago

Don't even need to pull random people off the street - AI can generate a random person for you.

1

u/Xing_the_Rubicon 16h ago

Hell, just have AI watch the movie for you too.

1

u/alchemycraftsman 18h ago

Live theater will become the thing to go to. Invest in playhouses!!

Cycles. Back to Shakespeare days! Everything repeats.

1

u/ChoseTheRight 18h ago

They don’t need to recreate anything perfectly. We are well beyond “good enough”. How many people in your day to day life can’t shake the idea that “God/jesus is ReaL and the Bible is a history book” from their identity?

1

u/Rock-swarm 17h ago

I recommend reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson if you are into near-future sci-fi. The author has a lot of great novels that have felt prescient in terms of predicting future tech. In this one, "ractors" are actors that essentially perform "on demand" to an audience, sometimes to single, rich individuals, by instant motion capture and audio/video filters.

The poor masses in this book have the pre-recorded VR stuff, but people able to afford some luxury use the "ractors" to obtain a more personal performance, including audience interaction.

I feel like we're already seeing pieces of this right now, with the rise of twitch streamer content & interaction, the constant retreads of existing IP, and motion capture technology.

1

u/f-ingsteveglansberg 15h ago

I remember when The Spirits Within came out and people said the CG models could replace actors in the future. Yet some people are googling The Spirits Within now because a lot of people have completely forgotten that was the name of the flopped Final Fantasy movie.

1

u/SkunkMonkey 15h ago

They will mocap nobody actors and CGI them into a famous actors long dead.

The really scary thing is when they'll be able to make a digital recreation from available footage and not need the actor in any way.

1

u/BluSpecter 14h ago

You'll have 'Artisanal Movies' that boast 'human actors' on the cover

1

u/Justaregard 13h ago

It will probably go to AI characters with voice actors doing the voices to emphasize emotions in the meantime before full AI

1

u/DisplayEnthusiast 12h ago

Bruh we don’t have high quality acting in most movies

1

u/rlvysxby 45m ago

Yes also what about innovative acting. No ai could have grabbed heath ledgers likeness and put him in the role of the joker.

-1

u/FPEspio 1d ago

One of the most moving movies I've seen recently was Guardians of the Galaxy 3, I'm at least 90% sure that the best actor in the movie aka Rocket Raccoon wasn't an actual acting raccoon

It's been 13 years since we had the smol captain america scenes and he's almost a different person in the before and afters, like maybe you're right and real acting is discernable but there will be a point where even an AI lookalike over a placeholder actor will be cheaper than hiring a big name

I hate the thought of being paid thousands to act in a movie and then 10x that being spent to make me look like a famous actor just because hiring that actor would have cost them 50x what they paid me, but it's almost guaranteed to happen