We kinda knew this was going to happen. New Hollywood really wants to be classic Hollywood, where the studios own the lives of the actors and control every aspect. But I expected them to start by cyber-thesbianning Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Jean Harlow and Clark Gable.
But yeah, the studios are going through a creativity crisis, now decades into a best practices run of avoiding new ideas for less risky sequels and high concept films, preferring spectacle over introspection and character study.
The copyright maximalism and Hollywood accounting isn’t really about piracy or greed so much as desperation to keep old promises of exponential dividend growth.
Every bubble eventually pops, and the longer they try to keep it intact, the more disastrous the outcome.
In the meantime, I look forward to when small indie directors can star Bogart and Harlow in their concept film.
In our lifetime we’re going to see a lot of stuff become public domain and there’s going to be remixes, scene clipping and overdubbing of all kinds. I’m trying to figure out how to cash in.
In our lifetime we’re going to see a lot of stuff become public domain
Not if Disney has anything to say about it…
I fully expect them to claim they have rights to images of people who have started in Marvel movies because they own Marvel
Steamboat Willie hits public domain on Jan 1st. I’ve already got an over dub I can’t wait to release.
Edit: Fuck Disney.
Oh boy, the identity and copyright laws will be chaotic as ai gets more and more advanced. I’m all in for abolishing copyrights but I have no idea what to think about your identity being duplicated/recreated. When is something your identity and when it stops being it? It will be obvious with 1:1 copies of popular people/actors but what about situations where copies are tinkered with to resemble someone less or when you do a mix of multiple people to create one person? What about people that are not known by everyone? What if the virtual person resembles someone by accident?
One of the easiest ways to make consistent characters using stable diffusion is to combine two celebrities with different weights. How do you deal with stuff like that under copyright. Hey this person is 3/4 Jennifer Lawrence and 1/4 Salina Gomez, but it’s not either of them it’s a new character.
Also eventually we will (if not already) be able to generate brand new fake people anyway, so they won’t even need the extras. Obviously that won’t work for the actual main cast, but for background actors it makes sense. Crowds and far away people have already been done in CGI for over a decade now.
I take a modicum of comfort in the fact that no one will want to watch “half this actor and half this one with a dash of this one thrown in” because that’s weird and not enticing. After the initial novelty, I imagine those films will struggle.
Hollywood spent a very fucking long time cashing in on celebrity and name recognition and the lives and loves of these beautiful people, building them up to tear them down…they won’t suddenly build a new and flourishing market of not real people but cheap store brand knockoffs of the ones they’ve convinced us we give a shit about. That just won’t work.
I take a modicum of comfort in the fact that no one will want to watch “half this actor and half this one with a dash of this one thrown in” because that’s weird and not enticing. After the initial novelty, I imagine those films will struggle.
What are humans and their personalities other than just a mix of other people (genetics) and some random stuff thrown in? The ai generated humans and real humans are not different. It’s just that the ai generated humans wouldn’t exist physically in the real world. But that doesn’t matter though, movies are all about selling the illusion of the world they represent, you don’t need real stuff to represent fictional worlds. Take books for example, books don’t have actors and they sell pretty damn well, we still immerse ourselves into those worlds and see each character as a separate entity.
ai denial spotted in the wild
Edit: Imagine having characters that are not played by a real person. Your movie won’t be ruined just because the actor is controversial. Just an example.
That’s probably going to get instantiated by the law suits like Sarah Silverman vs OpenAI. Zero chance that will be the final word, but it will set the stage for the ongoing arguments and what the studio’s try to get away with. The basic argument that me and mine being ingested by your algorithm is a copy protected transaction makes sense on multiple levels, but would absolutely crush all of the internet. So it’s going to end up being a very ugly fight.
What makes copyright bad but identity protection good? Copyright prohibits the unauthorized duplication of your actual labor. To my mind that’s more egregious than simply copying the shape of your face.
I’d be a lot less pissed off if someone copied my face than if they copied something that actually took me effort to produce.
Wasn’t my point. It’s more about WHAT someone does with your “identity” in public media. In the long term I can see it being abolished too but in the short term there will be a lot of drama about it for sure.
Edit:
Wasn’t my point.
Yeah, it seems like it was my point in my original comment, my bad.
I imagine that movies where we have “real” actors will become a popular niche for enjoying the acting of those people and not the plot or events themselves.
live theater
Maybe theater will become more popular because ai will automate jobs and people will start pursuing art but I still think that movies will be more popular than theater because they’re just easier to access and you have more immersive representations of the worlds/events.
Seriously fuck the executive who thought this up. Literally just taking money away from folks because they can - shit like this leads to drastic change.
as a consumer, i am having a hard time convincing myself that this material, conjured inside a computer, would be of any interest.
i like to think that only the real deal will have real value.
Many sides to this for one there’s a lot of people in the world who simply don’t care where their entertainment comes from as long as it makes them happy.
Another side is. I’ve never met most celebrities, I’ve seen them in movies and on tv and read about things they did. If someone creates a perfect recreation of a well known celebrity acting in a movie, then go on to show that recreation showing up at red carpet events and doing interviews with other perfect recreations of well known personalities, write articles about things they did etc, and no one ever told me that they were not the real person, how would I ever know?
Same goes for double if they just create a new set of celebrities, the fact is that new people appear in this space every day, someone I’ve never seen before suddenly makes it big with a new song or something and it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it, I have no way to verify if it’s a real person or not. Sure I can look it up but all I find is a bunch of generated articles, tweets, interviews etc designed specifically to convince me that they are real.
In the future, how would you know? We’re not far off from AI content being indistinguishable from the real thing.
This is a valid concern.
However, if you are somewhat more observant, you can usually tell when something is off.
For example, in music, the sounds of synthesized orchestras can be distinguished from real ones. Autotune can be detected and it tends to give an “uncanny valley” / annoying effect on the attentive listener.
Then again most people don’t usually care about those things.
Guess time will tell.
