Members of the Writers Guild of America Credit & Copyright: Michael M. Santiago
Cut! Celebrity actors Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Matt Damon were among the stars who took to the walk ahead of the London premiere of Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer on Thursday night. According to director Nolan, the stars left early to “go and write their picket posters.”
Murphy, Blunt and others left the screening in solidarity with Sag-Aftra, an American union that represents 160,000 film and television actors and was about to go on strike that would hurt the film industry. Hollywood writers are already on strike, and the first simultaneous strike in 63 years will bring nearly all film and television production to a halt, cancellations of movie premieres and press conferences, and likely a postponement of the September Emmy Awards.
Studios and streaming companies that rely on this content to make money said they were “deeply disappointed” with the move. At the heart of the actors' strike is the problem of artificial intelligence, or AI. In short, will fake computer actors put real actors out of work? It all sounds frighteningly futuristic. But if you think this is dystopian nonsense, think again.
According to Sag-Aftra president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, artificial intelligence poses an “existential threat” to humans. In a letter to the members announcing the strike vote, the couple said the actors needed contracts that would “protect them from exploitation of their personality and talent without consent or payment.”
The world of lovers created by laptops has arrived. Back in January, it was announced that the first big-budget Hollywood movie was in production using AI, known as deepfake technology. Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks, who won the Oscars for Best Director and Best Actor respectively for 1994's Forrest Gump, have announced that they will use the vast magic of artificial intelligence in Here, a Miramax film that also stars Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly and Gump alum Robin Wright.
When @sagaftra announced their historic strike today, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's chief negotiator, revealed that Hollywood studios offered them permanent ownership of copies of AI actors without paying them a dime. pic.twitter.com/Awt7RgyJf7
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) July 13, 2023
Deepfake technology will allow actors to “transform seamlessly into younger versions of themselves” in ways that were “previously not possible,” Zemeckis said in a statement at the time. It was a turning point. Zemeckis and Hanks, who also worked together on The Cast Away, The Polar Express, and Pinocchio, have both made $14 billion at the global box office. Fail or hit, AI deepfakes will appear on the map here.
It will be the deepest use of the technology,” Tom Graham, co-founder of Metaphysic, the company that developed the technology, told me in January from Pinewood Studios, where Here was in an unspecified stage of production. Of course, in this case, the actors involved are being scammed with their voluntary consent and, no doubt, well paid. But Sag-Aftra is concerned that actors will be cloned – and money made in their likeness – without their permission.
This is because deepfake technology is essentially a sophisticated illusion. This involves digitally altering a person's appearance with a camera using AI, and the “actor” in question must not be involved. Here is the explanation.
Fake Boy: Tom Hanks as Geppetto in Robert Zemeckis' Pinocchio. Credit & Copyright: Disney. movements can be filmed and digitized (as Abba did for their Abba Voyage show); it does not involve teams of visual effects artists (VFX) painstakingly creating 3D models on computers; nor does it include green screens, CGI animation, or layered digital compositing.
Rather, it involves software built into the camera that automates the process of recreating how someone looks. How? The software “learns” – in Graham's words – by showing thousands of images of the target person. The camera then uses algorithms to mimic and predict the movements of the target person and project this onto A.N. Another actor pretending to be that person. It's a digital face filter (which, by the way, can be up to five times cheaper to use than the technology mentioned above). AI means that a struggling actor with two pantos and a toothpaste commercial behind them could be, visually at least, Leonardo DiCaprio.
The movie is just the tip of the iceberg. The film is the first collaboration between American talent agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which represents Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg and Brad Pitt, and Metaphysic. Together, the groups plan to “open up creative opportunities for artists using artificial intelligence in film, television and [other] entertainment,” they said in January. The real mainstream beckons.
Deepfake supergroup Metaphysic 'performs' about America looking for talent. Credits: NBC
What's unusual about AI is the speed at which this happened. It wasn’t until last September that deepfakes by Elvis Presley and Simon Cowell’s pop swengali, again created by Metaphysic, were featured in the America’s Got Talent finale. The audience saw how little-known singers lined up on the stage, and on the big screen behind them they turned into the aforementioned celebrities.
It was this performance that caught the attention of CAA and Miramax executives. And earlier this year, British audiences were introduced to deepfakes thanks to ITV's tepid comedy Deep Fake Neighbor Wars. It featured supernaturally realistic fake versions of Idris Elba, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jay-Z, Olivia Colman and Harry Kane squabbling over mundane household issues like gardening. It was a meeting between Stella Street and Avatar.
Metaphysic was behind a series of Tom Cruise deepfake TikTok videos that went viral due to the ban. In them, the (fake) megastar did stupid things like dancing to George Michael's Freedom in her underwear. Over 250 million views helped spread the word. Cruz didn't participate at all, but now people know what the so-called “manipulated media” is. “Everyone in Hollywood knows about it. Everyone loves it,” Graham told me. Except for the actors.
Deepfakes were first predicted some time ago. In 2013, director Nicholas Roeg reflected on the future of filmmaking. The author of Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth wrote that the industry can only take two further technical steps forward.
It was the creation of a man-made machine that either “has an 'opinion' based on the information it was processed to obtain, [or] an opinion of its own based on information physically 'given to a person'”; but combined with emotionally driven reasoning.” Rogue predicted that any of these developments would be “The Birth of the Future”. The director died in 2018. But a version of his future was indeed born. With actors using emotional reasoning and cameras using their carefully programmed opinions, Rogue's prediction came true with frightening accuracy.
At the heart of the actors' strike is the question of consent. This is an ethical issue: if something is fake, does it need approval for what it fakes? The Union of Actors firmly believes in this. An actor would be out of a job, deprived of income, and literally rendered useless if filmmakers could use their images without permission. The music industry faces similar consensus issues: A recent song created by AI Drake and The Weeknd featured neither Drake nor The Weeknd, despite sounding incredibly similar to them.
In January, the creators of Here prominently mentioned Metaphysic's “ethical approach”. Graham emphasized that his company “will not create anything without the express informed consent of the people whose hyper-real synthetic polishes we recreate.” What is needed, the actors argue, is strong regulation to codify these remedies into law. Now it's up to the studios and politicians.
How will this develop? Can we see a situation where these tech companies become so powerful thanks to this brave new world that they end up being bigger than traditional studios? Can we get to the point where the AI studio acquires Columbia Pictures, Universal or Warner Bros?
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Robots have not yet replaced Radu. It's much more likely that studios will grab new AI companies and integrate their technology into their own creative processes. But this is on condition that after the end of this brutal strike, the studios will remain. Sounds almost like the plot of an exciting blockbuster, doesn't it? If only there were actors who could appear in it.
Stop the AI stealing the show.
We are calling for increased rights for performers across the board.
But without your support, we can't do it!
Visit 👉https://t.co/P2ebvwPUG2 pic.twitter.com/liUq8gyGx9
— Equity (@EquityUK) April 21, 2022
Silicon Valley and Shanghai-based AI developer who recreated President John F. Kennedy in Special Agent.
< p>Industrial Light & Magic
Lucasfilm affiliate ILM is working on dozens of machine learning or AI shows.
MARZ
The company, which stands for Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies, has used AI technology in movies and programs including Stranger Things and Jack Ryan.
Deep Voodoo
Founded by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the AI company created the music video for Kendrick Lamar's The Heart Part 5, in which the rapper's face has been transformed into many other famous faces.
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