Thoughts on the Hollywood AI Uproar
AI infringement upon performers’ rights is an interesting topic, but I believe most of the current debate will become moot shortly.
When CGI creates photorealistic scenes, and AI can string these scenes together into video indistinguishable (at least, to the layman) from professional film-making), then the limiting factor becomes the capacity of AIs to turn well-written scripts into well-performed movies and television.
Like most other AI capacities, this one appears to be increasing faster and faster.
Assuming I am correct, the effects on industry employment will be severe, collapsing many professions, and eliminating some. Consider actors; especially the “stars”.
Much like with writing, video “stars” are recognized as such by virtue of having established strong platforms, or followings.
Once the copyright issues are sorted out, which I am confident will redound to the benefit of the performers, some of those stars will selectively license the use of their images into AI-generated video productions and enable their estates to do so even after they stop performing or even become deceased.
It will require far less effort for a star to thus generate a performance, if any. Perhaps it will be limited to fine editing of the simulated performances, to maintain one’s reputation.
Stars will be available for a larger and larger percentage of the work. Why hire a “B” lister when an “A” lister is available for less money, and on exactly the production schedule desired?
This will make it far more challenging for new artists–in all creative media, not just video–to break into what are already extremely rarified professions.
By the late 2030s, I would not be surprised to see producers offering to viewers their personal choice of actors for a given role, from a set of licensed image and voice attributes that define an “actor”. To be clear, I mean that you will be able to personalize your experience of each movie and television show you watch, not even considering the endless possibilities for personal engagement in VR worlds with AI characters. (Do you want the lead role of the hard-boiled detective in this movie played by Leonardio DiCaprio or Humphrey Bogart?)
All of this will enhance consumer options while reducing prices thanks to the slashing of production costs. It will, of course, be yet another case of technological unemployment, among a rapidly growing set of such cases.
Thus will superstars, in acting the same as in other fields, crowd out lesser talents even more fully than is already the case today.
We are going to need a viable and sustainable universal basic income worldwide, of which the MOUBI proposal of Basic Income Australia is the only example known to me.