Would you watch AI actors?

[Iron Maiden]

I just watched The Flash (2023) on HBO and at the end it looks like they used AI for a couple of actors who didn't appear in the movie...Christopher Reeve and George Reeves version of Superman. It wasn't too bad but still a bit creepy.

[HollowSage]

How good would it really need to be? Look at some of the biggest movie franchises in the world and tell me how good are they?

"They drink the sand because they don't know the difference." -- President Andrew Shepherd

Exactly. With AI the Fast & Furious franchise could go on forever and nothing would really change. But seriously you will always have the older holdouts who didn’t grow up with it but to their grandkids it will be commonplace.

[Totoro Man]

So you don’t watch animated movies?

I understood achilles to be rejecting purely artificial AI constructs... not that they refuse to watch animation.
(this is a comic book forum. I have a hard time believing they've never watched a cartoon in their life!)

I believe the requirement is that the art be made BY people and FOR other people.

[Totoro Man]

I don’t see how it would be any different than watching animation which is technically what it would be. It’s just photorealistic animation and if the actors are paid then I have no problem with it.

I’m not sure I see the distinction. Self-driving cars learn how to drive from humans. They are still driving. To me it’s still animation even if an AI is doing the animating.

you're conflating CGI animation with AI for the sake of argument.

you're collapsing the decision-making process that governs the activity into the activity itself.

to take your deeply flawed logic... as long as the games being compared are using a deck of cards... they're the same thing!

in one scenario you play a game of cribbage with a person. you both sit at a table. they bring out the deck of cards, the board, and the pegs. they shuffle the deck and play a game with you.

in the other scenario a computer program generates a game of solitaire for you to play alone.

sure, they're both GAMES... but the mechanics and decision-making processes involved are very different. the results of the experience will be noticeably different.
likewise, for you to conflate CGI animation with AI is a categorical error. these two actions are not as similar as you are making them out to be.

to clarify:
Computer Generated Imagery Animation is a computer aided process of animation based on traditional storytelling techniques established in cinema and television.

Artificial Intelligence is a computer-generated decision-making process designed to accomplish scripted tasks.

[thwhtGuardian]

you're conflating CGI animation with AI for the sake of argument.

you're collapsing the decision-making process that governs the activity into the activity itself.

to take your deeply flawed logic... as long as the games being compared are using a deck of cards... they're the same thing!

in one scenario you play a game of cribbage with a person. you both sit at a table. they bring out the deck of cards, the board, and the pegs. they shuffle the deck and play a game with you.

in the other scenario a computer program generates a game of solitaire for you to play alone.

sure, they're both GAMES... but the mechanics and decision-making processes involved are very different. the results of the experience will be noticeably different.
likewise, for you to conflate CGI animation with AI is a categorical error. these two actions are not as similar as you are making them out to be.

to clarify:
Computer Generated Imagery Animation is a computer aided process of animation based on traditional storytelling techniques established in cinema and television.

Artificial Intelligence is a computer-generated decision-making process designed to accomplish scripted tasks.

It's only different if you're assuming the AI is writing the script as well as doing the "acting".

If the situation is: Here's the script, but I want James Dean to be Captain America so give me a digital character that looks and sounds like James Dean to read the script I wrote for the movie. Then I'm not really seeing much of a difference between the use of AI to create a digital character and having someone animate a digital character other than the fact that the latter is animated by a human. If you watch how they created the Luke Skywalker scenes in Book of Boba Fett you'll see just how similar the process is. In a traditionally animated feature you'll have a director give an animator a scene, then the animator might create a story board to block it out and then once the director approved the animator would then go and animate the scene and then the director might make some suggestions and the animator will then do some more work and so on until there is a finished work. And in a feature where AI animates the character the director blocks out the scene, tells the computer engineer/programmer what they want, the programmer feeds it to the AI and then the director and the programmer go back and forth refining the image with further commands and data until you get a finished product. The process is pretty much the same, with the key difference being just who is doing the animating and sound editing.

If the situation is: You(the AI) ARE James Dean, how would you act if you were cast as Captain America? Give me that movie. Then yes, that is much different than an animated film because the AI isn't just simulating how a person would look and sound in scripted situations it's actually simulating the entire situation.

The former situation is what I think is being proposed by the person who started the thread, and at the moment is the situation closest to us technologically while the latter is still a ways off.

[Jim Kelly]

One positive take would be a creator who has a great idea for a story but instead of taking that idea to a studio they use AI to bring that story to life. There has been a lot of focus on big corporations using AI to cut creatives out of the process. However those same creatives will also be able to use AI to cut out the big corporations.

This seems the fatal flaw in the studios' dastardly plan. If one day we all have this software installed on our home computer, what need do we have for movie studios? If I can just make my own movie by instructing my computer's A.I. to tell me a story based on my browsing history, why would I pay for content from studios?

I guess the studios might try to trademark certain characters and maybe even certain plots--and maybe there would be some way of tracking when our computers are using proprietary content--but there would probably be lots that's in the public domain for our home computers to access.

[DrNewGod]

One positive take would be a creator who has a great idea for a story but instead of taking that idea to a studio they use AI to bring that story to life. There has been a lot of focus on big corporations using AI to cut creatives out of the process. However those same creatives will also be able to use AI to cut out the big corporations.

That's not how it will happen. AI takes A Ton of power. Teaching a neural network one task has a bigger carbon footprint than a gas-powered car will eat in its lifetime.

This won't be like early social media, where there was ample computer and transmission capacity lying around, and any schmuck with a cool hook and access to a server could flip things upside down. At least, not for long. Full AI exploitation will take resources.

Right now, the folks owning those resources are offering them up on a plate. So we will train their machines for them. But they own them

Soon, they'll take them back. And anybody that doesn't own the AI computing source, but thinks they command their own destiny, is in for a nasty shock.

[HollowSage]

That's not how it will happen. AI takes A Ton of power. Teaching a neural network one task has a bigger carbon footprint than a gas-powered car will eat in its lifetime.

This won't be like early social media, where there was ample computer and transmission capacity lying around, and any schmuck with a cool hook and access to a server could flip things upside down. At least, not for long. Full AI exploitation will take resources.

Right now, the folks owning those resources are offering them up on a plate. So we will train their machines for them. But they own them

Soon, they'll take them back. And anybody that doesn't own the AI computing source, but thinks they command their own destiny, is in for a nasty shock.

I never said it would be free. However I think the corporations controlling the AI will provide access for a price. It remains to be seen what that price will be. With several different companies working on different AI models hopefully there will be competition.

[j9ac9k]

Imagine if you could generate your own movie pretty much how you want with a few prompts the way Stable Diffusion creates images. (but with realistic hands) Silicon Valley would make Hollywood obsolete. Well, that's just a thought...

[Jim Kelly]

That's not how it will happen.

Actually, the way to do it is to build a Dyson sphere around the Sun. That will power the artificial reality we create--and we will be so happy inside this artificial world that we won't care about doing anything else. Some think this already happened and we are all in the artificial world. Or the reason we don't see life on other planets is because those planets built their own Dyson spheres.

[AndrewCrossett]

I would bet money that most people won’t be able to tell the difference once it’s good enough. People are already being fooled by AI created deepfakes online. If you can’t tell the difference between fake art and real art does it matter?

It does to me.

[thwhtGuardian]

It does to me.

...if it literally gets to the point where it's advanced enough that there is no discernable difference, and it's being ethically done as proposed in the opening post, then why does it matter to you?

[Mister Mets]

How good would it really need to be? Look at some of the biggest movie franchises in the world and tell me how good are they?

"They drink the sand because they don't know the difference." -- President Andrew Shepherd

Even bad films are made better by A-list talent. Frances McDormand made a Transformers sequel slightly less bad.

Blockbusters I like are often improved by great actors. No Way Home was elevated by Andrew Garfield, Willem Defoe, Jamie Foxx, Marisa Tomei and Alfred Molina.

[Mister Mets]

Imagine if you could generate your own movie pretty much how you want with a few prompts the way Stable Diffusion creates images. (but with realistic hands) Silicon Valley would make Hollywood obsolete. Well, that's just a thought...

This may be lonely, if AI gets so advanced in fifty years that it can make a film/ TV show that just appeals to one viewer, but it really makes that person happy.

It's something hard to share, and has weird implications (IE- what are the moral lessons the viewer is absorbing from AI-generated content created explicitly to make him happy.)

This seems the fatal flaw in the studios' dastardly plan. If one day we all have this software installed on our home computer, what need do we have for movie studios? If I can just make my own movie by instructing my computer's A.I. to tell me a story based on my browsing history, why would I pay for content from studios?

I guess the studios might try to trademark certain characters and maybe even certain plots--and maybe there would be some way of tracking when our computers are using proprietary content--but there would probably be lots that's in the public domain for our home computers to access.

This gets to be a different question.

I suspect it's going to take a lot of work for someone to edit an AI film, but it will open a lot of options, allowing it to go super-niche.

[j9ac9k]

This may be lonely, if AI gets so advanced in fifty years that it can make a film/ TV show that just appeals to one viewer, but it really makes that person happy.

It's something hard to share, and has weird implications (IE- what are the moral lessons the viewer is absorbing from AI-generated content created explicitly to make him happy.)

If you were to imagine the best comic book movie or something, you don't think anyone else would like it? I honestly don't think people in general are that niche or particular in their thinking - it's why Hollywood blockbusters exist now. And the question about moral lessons, or challenging films v. crowd pleasers has been going on for decades. (most recently about Marvel)