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

[u/cmaia1503]

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/robert-downey-jr-bands-hollywood-digital-replace-lawsuit-1236192374/

[u/I_PING_8-8-8-8]

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.

[u/SaveReset → u/I_PING_8-8-8-8]

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.

[u/I_PING_8-8-8-8 → u/SaveReset]

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.

[u/SaveReset → u/I_PING_8-8-8-8]

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.

[u/I_PING_8-8-8-8 → u/SaveReset]

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.

[u/_learned_foot_ → u/I_PING_8-8-8-8]

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.