Hollywood Studios' have proposed the idea of replacing actors with AI. In other words, they want the plot of a recent Black Mirror episode to come true.
Actors from the SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) have officially joined the writers strike. And at the same time, a new proposal to replace those actors was revealed. It's safe to say that concerns about AI are justified when you listen to Hollywood Studios' proposal - and the initial field reports.
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Hollywood Studios' AI Proposal Is A Black Mirror Episode
While the "Joan is Awful" episode of Black Mirror is quite entertaining (compared to other Black Mirror episodes) this news isn't. Mostly, because it's real and not a TV-show. For those of you who haven't watched it: Joan discovers that there's a series about her life, where she's depicted as an awful person, played by an AI-version of Salma Hayek. Salma sold her image to Streamberry (a Netflix dupe) which is now free to use her AI generated self for whatever they like.
You probably see where this is going.
The SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, revealed details about what Hollywood Studios suggested and has called it "a groundbreaking proposal":
they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day's pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and for people to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation
— Culture Crave (@CultureCrave) July 13, 2023
While this proposal is currently only for background performers, it's only a matter of time before it will also be applied to smaller actors and then the stars themselves (or just like in "Joan is Awful" on everyone).
Futuristic Dystopia? Nope, Already In The Making
As Fran Drescher noted earlier in the same press conference, AI has already made an impact on the business. Just think of the NSFW Skyrim mods or NSFW-corn-videos of celebrities. But as the Tweets of some background performers suggest, these things are already happening, e.g. at the set of Cruella.
I was a background actor on Cruella and we all got scanned. I didn't think much of it back then (we were told it was to make the crowds look bigger), but... yeah, wish that hadn't happened!
— Dariush Seif-Amirhosseini (@DariushSeif) July 13, 2023
According to @DariushSeif background actors would be taken at night to a trailer with a scanning rig, not knowing what was going on until they were there. Other Twitter users told similar stories from the sets of Creed III and Iron Man 2. While these scans are said to be used for big crowd scenes as a common practice, there seems to be no limitation for the studios to not use them again without knowledge or consent of the actors – and payment.
Also, Felicia Day, who is known for her roles in Supernatural and Buffy, confirmed this practice on Twitter, stating that friends of hers have been scanned for their image to be used "in perpetuity". If you ask me, that's scary as hell.
I have friends who have done extra work recently and they have been "scanned" three times for use in perpetuity. Limited to what?! They don't even know!!! Egregious. #SAGAFTRAstrong https://t.co/RVbAxXna2P
— Felicia Day (@feliciaday) July 13, 2023
This is going to be a big issue if you think of all the stars that started out as extras. Leonardo DiCaprio, Megan Fox, Bruce Willis, Kristen Steward and Marilyn Monroe to name a few, they all started as background characters. What if they had been scanned? Who owns the scan, who gets the earnings? Rhetorical questions of course; Hollywood Studios would be the ones to profit.
Maybe it's time that we as consumers chose a side, too.
