I'd prefer they not even legitimize this composite of various actual human actors (unpaid and uncredited) by calling it "Tilly" like it's a real actor.
The only time I hear about this “AI actress” is when there is online outrage against it. I’m assuming the negative attention is part of their marketing campaign, and it is working wonderfully. So much so that I actually want to see the end result of casting “her”.
Like everything else in the attention economy if you want something/someone to go away then just...stop talking about them. Or at least let it become a real thing first.
That companies send a LOT of money to the "owners" of this animation instead of people linked to their union. Which is valid, but also, it's not a new thing - some years ago there was an AI generated model already that was huge on Instagram, or video game characters (Lightning from FFXIII was a Louis Vuitton model), animated characters (Hatsune Miku is decades old by now), there's thousands if not more influencers/personalities with generated appearances (vtubers), etc.
I don't think it's as big as the media makes it out to be, but there's rumours that people are willing to send money to the company behind the character, if that hasn't happened already, which is of course triggering outrage.
How? They're not actual people, companies don't need a union to represent AI characters because AI characters don't need any breaks or good worn conditions, because they're not real
I've seen unions do many things that don't seem to make sense at first sight (and often not subsequently either). But in this case, it does make perfect sense to me - unions like SAG-AFTRA could claim that AI-generated "actors" used for speaking roles unfairly displace their own members while not paying union fees. So as part of their negotiations with the studios, they could demand that such "AI actors" would be registered in SAG-AFTRA as due paying actors [0].
Maybe that the industry is getting destroyed by greedy managers, before they figure out that it's harmful?
> But Pixar proved that it isn't true for their actors made of pixels, so why would it become true when the pixels are arranged with the help of AI?
Animated Characters are obviously fake, while still having real humans creating them. AI-Chars are somewhere in the uncanny valley, unreal, orchestrated.
Animated movies are still moved and voiced by humans with individual choices. AI models take a lot of that out and smear it down to a lowest common denominator kabuki of whatever 'personality' it's been tweaked/prompted to approximate.
OK, but if "audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience" then the AI versions won't steal business from the actors..
Yes, I'm being facetious, the reality is that audiences will watch that stuff, just like audiences will use AI generated apps or listen to AI generated music, and SAG-AFTRA knows that.
I think two things are being communicated with "actor"
1. Unlike traditional animation, these AI characters are being "directed" in a sense that's unlike traditional drawing frame by frame.
2. The broader question of relationships that people are forming with AI, whether that's chatbots or AI influencers or the weird hologram Girls In a Jar stuff or whatever else.
That's not to say that actor is the right term. I think some of this is in "is a hot dog a sandwich" territory. But I think that's what people are trying to say with their use of the term.
> A producer's film is endangered when his star walks off, so he decides to digitally create an actress to substitute for the star, becoming an overnight sensation that everyone thinks is a real person.
Human interaction is dying because of AI. It is most predominant in customer service at the moment. All AI customer service disconnects humanity and turns it to an endless voice mail system.
AI content will increase body dysmorphic disorders. As children grow up with AI content, they will see themselves inadequate compared to the the pix-perfect idea of what humans should look like. Yet, humans never looked like that and attempts at plastic surgery will be taken by those who try to look like the AI drawings.
Knowing an actor or actress is a real person makes the more relatable. AI content is a void of that relationship. Adults and children benefiting from knowing some actor or actress or musicians have lived through trauma that hey have or are living through. It helps empower them to keep moving forward versus ending their lives. That human connection is more powerful.
What the CEOs are missing is that by replacing their workers with AI, they're effectively replacing consumers with AI also. And AIs don't buy products.
As of the last couple of weeks, AIs can buy products[0][1]. Obviously for now these are intended to function on a short leash, but I wouldn't bet against agents with long-term horizon goals becoming actual consumers on their own in a few years.
Since the dotcom era, it's not about getting consumers to buy the product at profitable margins, it's about getting investors to buy the stock on promises.
The subtext of this article is screaming that, in the view of professional actors, this AI actress is apparently really good. I think it will be interesting to see if Hollywood gets their version of Hatsune Miku. But it's not like Miku eliminated human singers so I'm not sure what makes this so worrying. We've already crossed the rubicon of CGIing just a regular human over another with Star Wars.
AI movies, audiobooks, it's coming. Like every other industry that is pushing for AI to reduce cost and eliminate people, this is just another one. I'm convinced a not insignificant number of best selling authors have used AI to write part or entire books. Consider: feed every James Patterson book into it, and say write me a new one. There's a lot to work with.
If we succeed in creating a Tilly that can replace a human actor, then human actors are at risk of becoming obsolete. Any finite resource that we can suitably convert to infinitely digital is in the same position.
When we invented photography, realistic paintings kinda ... well I'm not qualified to talk about art but I feel like realistic paintings were like the last horse trying to merge into the model T traffic jam.
Just think how many more interesting movies there could be, if the costs to produce them were drastically reduced. There are pros and cons with AI actors
While this looks good on the surface. The stress and justifications a Director/artists makes to create a movie acts as an effective filter for quality work. Only with a lot of effort from a lot of people is that possible.
Without that effort and filters, We're going to have a deluge of poorly inspired, sloppy content.
My brain just switches off if I realize something is AI generated. be it blogs, videos or audio.
Theres already plenty of good actor making minimum wage serving coffees in LA while waiting for their breakthrough. Somehow, they are not hired, so I doubt that actor wages is the real issue at hand.
It really depends how you view the actor’s role. Are they a human prop executing the director’s vision or a co-collaborator? I think AI will struggle to be the latter.
I don't need more movies. I want higher quality movies. And I don't think AI will work out any better for movies than it does for youtube documentaries. It's getting tiresome to find anything worth watching among all the slop.
This is like saying it's a bad thing that phone cameras are getting so good because expensive cameras were keeping out the garbage films.
Expensive cameras are still better. And yet, it's good that people who were never going to be able to afford those cameras have something else they can use to tell their story.
But more isn't necessarily better; if producing movies costs nothing, then watching it is worth nothing.
I can fire up chatgpt and have it write a thousand stories. Would you read it?
AI is good for generating content, but that doesn't make it valuable content. And we had low value slop before AI, just thinking of e.g. buzzfeed back when.
Anyway, go browse Youtube, plenty of interesting content that doesn't get enough views as it is.
counter point, think of how much more interesting movies would be if there were only like 3 a year and the rest of your time you were waiting for one
i call this model: everything before 1990
i'm not appealing to tradition, i'm just saying what if our focus is the source of enjoyment... what if 1000 things to pick for dinner is exhausting but 1 that you think about all day always ends up good
For a better comparison, you could look at China which only allows for a few dozen foreign films per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_China#Quota...); which films depends on whether the publisher thinks it'll be successful there, whether it passes China's censors, and whether China was involved in its production. It's a different audience though, for example the Warcraft film bombed in the west but was hugely popular in China, possibly because of the relative scarcity of western films there?
You think a human audience won't be able to clock an AI actor in an instant? A huge chunk of our sensorium is devoted to finding the slightest thing "off" about human interaction. AI actors will mess with our suspension of disbelief in ways even cartoon actors can't touch.
Didn't we learn anything with streaming? The costs will stay low until a new tech is fully established and then continuously go up after we're dependent. Just benefitting different parties. And with streaming the main difference between the old and new parties is that the new ones, being primarily tech companies, added surveillance capitalism.
As if we did not need to worry enough about AI slop writing being injected into movies, now we get AI slop acting. Guess it was nice having some culture that actually grew for a bit... now we just constantly repeat everything and never deal with problems in any real way.
Seriously though, practically I just don't understand how this would work unless the entire movie was just CGI, AI Generated, whatever to begin with if real actors are supposed to work with a fake thing like this.
If you postulate 'good', who is in there wearing the AI actor like a mask?
I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.
But that's not what we're talking about, is it? Be honest.
If you want to impress me, well, I'm a techie nerd. Make a furry celebrity actress, that's the expression of a person. Like a Hollywood-grade implementation of a VTuber. Let 'em be driven by a person that I can get to know and recognize. In this day and age I'm not wedded to forcing everybody to be trapped in the form they're born in, still less so in art.
But this is NOT what we're talking about. You're going to have an AI by committee, drawn from a pandering mass of popular reactions, producing problems not unlike modern-day movies that try so hard to pander to the audience at any given moment that there's no weight to them and no point to any of it.
Here's hoping we also get the other thing. Sort of 'T-pain autotune turned into a style' but for acting. And again, I'm down with it if it's letting artists execute on realities they are otherwise completely unable to reach. But that's not what we're going to get, is it?
> I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.
Outside of a select number of A-list actors, are there situations where the other 85-90% of actors are able to express their truth today?
One of the common problems with creative industries (and the primary reason I switched away from pursuing game development) was that you're not expressing your truth; you're expressing someone else's truth in exchange for money. And unless you have lots of other intangible and often uncontrollable qualities, and are willing to play politics, you will probably never end up in a position to express your truth (with any degree of notoriety) through your own or other people's work.
I am not disabled or disfigured, and while I'm blocked-from-stardom that's just because I have a fairly uninteresting existence overall that wouldn't warrant it on it's own. So I can only guess at this stuff from an outside perspective, but from where I sit, I don't see AI as a sea-change enabler for the people you're referring to.
> "I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into."
Reminds me of a James Tiptree Jr. novella although in this case it's a remote-controlled artificial body instead of a remote-controlled digital avatar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Was_Plugged_In . Avoiding spoilers, it doesn't exactly make one think that such avatarism would be a particularly good idea by the end of the story.
> So if the technical challenges are solved and the AI acting is quite good, that changes your view of it?
That "if" seems to be the running thing with everything AI right now. "If" we can fix hallucinations. "If" we can make it actually think and reason. "If" we can make a general AI system. And so on.
"IF" we actually hit that point that these systems can create truly creative genuine work instead of being nothing more than predictive engines than maybe we can revisit this conversation. But the fact is we are not there and we are nowhere near there considering we are still just iterating on the fundamental problem of these just being predictive engines.
> Actors have worked alongside CGI characters for many decades, I remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the late 80s.
Yes you are right, but there is a pretty massive difference between knowing what the fake thing will do that is already scripted, storyboarded, etc (ultimately controlled by a human the entire time) vs an AI thing that will be an unknown.
1. Hallucinations have been reduced. There are, in fact, reasoning models. The "ifs" are not as theoretical as you imply. But the reason I raise the question on what happens if the acting is of high quality is because it's important to be clear on what your objection actually is to the thing.
2. Your issue on the "how do actors work alongside AI characters" is that actors won't be able to do a good job themselves because it's not storyboarded enough for them? That AI characters aren't rigid enough?
Do you have any studies or data to back this up other than "trust us" from the companies pushing the models?
And how much "reduced". It is still a fundamental issue that is just being pushed under the rug since it is inconvenient for them to talk about anymore.
> There are, in fact, reasoning models.
Simulated (fake) reasoning models. They are still fundamentally LLM's talking to itself which goes back to the fundamental issue of hallucination and a complete inability for anything original.
Also this "reasoning" has been shown in multiple studies to fall flat on its face with complex issues because it is not true reasoning. There is no intelligence or "thinking" behind it.
> The "ifs" are not as theoretical as you imply.
My reason for saying it is because it always seems when someone is critical of claims being made the response is 1 of 2 things.
1. Trying to ignore the concerns and just say that it can already do X, its magic, its whatever.
Or 2. It is all about the promise. All about what it may supposedly one day be able to do "if" we can just fix this one thing that isn't somehow a huge fundamental issue.
I think this is somewhat overhyped. If you look at the video that actually exists of this character[^1], it's clearly AI slop that falls flat -- honestly kind of embarrasing for the studio to put out. This seems like more of a media stunt than anything.
> creativity is, and should remain, human-centered
Gentle reminder human creativity did not produce photosynthesis or crispr or the color blue. Throughout history its a small self praising gatekeeping elite that decides what is labeled creative. Its usually a over-paid nihilistic morally detached leisure class. So good riddance.
What's funny is that they only see the threat to their livelihoods that's where their concern lies.
But... do they protect their human animators from CGI? Or using cheaper foreign filming locations to cut costs?
It's all a continuum but they didn't care about it till it came for them. Nothing else on the continuum mattered... So, yeah, I won
t shed a tear for them as they shed no tears for other parts of their production being replaced by different technologies over time.
I'd prefer they not even legitimize this composite of various actual human actors (unpaid and uncredited) by calling it "Tilly" like it's a real actor.
The name builds a brand of valuable IP, as with any actor. That's like asking McDonald's not to name their restaurants, not a small thing.
My comment is in regard to article writer, not the creators.
The only time I hear about this “AI actress” is when there is online outrage against it. I’m assuming the negative attention is part of their marketing campaign, and it is working wonderfully. So much so that I actually want to see the end result of casting “her”.
Like everything else in the attention economy if you want something/someone to go away then just...stop talking about them. Or at least let it become a real thing first.
> audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.
Then what are they worried about? If this is true then it is not a job threat to human actors.
But Pixar proved that it isn't true for their actors made of pixels, so why would it become true when the pixels are arranged with the help of AI?
That companies send a LOT of money to the "owners" of this animation instead of people linked to their union. Which is valid, but also, it's not a new thing - some years ago there was an AI generated model already that was huge on Instagram, or video game characters (Lightning from FFXIII was a Louis Vuitton model), animated characters (Hatsune Miku is decades old by now), there's thousands if not more influencers/personalities with generated appearances (vtubers), etc.
I don't think it's as big as the media makes it out to be, but there's rumours that people are willing to send money to the company behind the character, if that hasn't happened already, which is of course triggering outrage.
Just you wait until the unions decide they need more members to collect dues from, and decide it is worth their while to represent AI talent.
How? They're not actual people, companies don't need a union to represent AI characters because AI characters don't need any breaks or good worn conditions, because they're not real
I've seen unions do many things that don't seem to make sense at first sight (and often not subsequently either). But in this case, it does make perfect sense to me - unions like SAG-AFTRA could claim that AI-generated "actors" used for speaking roles unfairly displace their own members while not paying union fees. So as part of their negotiations with the studios, they could demand that such "AI actors" would be registered in SAG-AFTRA as due paying actors [0].
[0] (For human actors) These are currently set at an initiation fee of $3,060, annual dues of $241.32 plus work dues of 1.575% of covered earnings up to $1M - https://www.sagaftra.org/membership-benefits/membership-cost...
> Then what are they worried about?
Maybe that the industry is getting destroyed by greedy managers, before they figure out that it's harmful?
> But Pixar proved that it isn't true for their actors made of pixels, so why would it become true when the pixels are arranged with the help of AI?
Animated Characters are obviously fake, while still having real humans creating them. AI-Chars are somewhere in the uncanny valley, unreal, orchestrated.
Animated movies are still moved and voiced by humans with individual choices. AI models take a lot of that out and smear it down to a lowest common denominator kabuki of whatever 'personality' it's been tweaked/prompted to approximate.
OK, but if "audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience" then the AI versions won't steal business from the actors..
Yes, I'm being facetious, the reality is that audiences will watch that stuff, just like audiences will use AI generated apps or listen to AI generated music, and SAG-AFTRA knows that.
It's animation not acting. You can do cool things and not have this be an "actor".
I think two things are being communicated with "actor"
1. Unlike traditional animation, these AI characters are being "directed" in a sense that's unlike traditional drawing frame by frame.
2. The broader question of relationships that people are forming with AI, whether that's chatbots or AI influencers or the weird hologram Girls In a Jar stuff or whatever else.
That's not to say that actor is the right term. I think some of this is in "is a hot dog a sandwich" territory. But I think that's what people are trying to say with their use of the term.
> is a hot dog a sandwich
Just for those unfamiliar with the relevant research, the proper classification of a hot dog is as a Taco - https://cuberule.com/
And animated characters doing all kinds of acting or modeling jobs isn't exactly new.
We're getting the Blade Runner future without flying cars :(
Good news though, we will still get Harrison Ford! He will definitely be a replicant.
Still waiting for the Bicentennial Man story to happen with an agentic LLM specialised in judicial tasks. The perfect chance for AI Harrison Ford.
"Is that a real dog?"
"Ask him."
This headline reminds me of a great movie made on this exact subject:
S1m0ne ("Simone", or "Simulation One") https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153
> A producer's film is endangered when his star walks off, so he decides to digitally create an actress to substitute for the star, becoming an overnight sensation that everyone thinks is a real person.
I have couple simple things on my bucket list.
1. Never scan a QR code.
2. Never fund AI content.
Human interaction is dying because of AI. It is most predominant in customer service at the moment. All AI customer service disconnects humanity and turns it to an endless voice mail system.
AI content will increase body dysmorphic disorders. As children grow up with AI content, they will see themselves inadequate compared to the the pix-perfect idea of what humans should look like. Yet, humans never looked like that and attempts at plastic surgery will be taken by those who try to look like the AI drawings.
Knowing an actor or actress is a real person makes the more relatable. AI content is a void of that relationship. Adults and children benefiting from knowing some actor or actress or musicians have lived through trauma that hey have or are living through. It helps empower them to keep moving forward versus ending their lives. That human connection is more powerful.
A defense of customer service holding queues and parasocial relationships? That's it? That's the moat for humanity?
i'd say the last lines, at least if your country is americanized.
Looks like a lot of people in the business and actors in particular seem to be scared.
There's an explicit campaign to AI Great Replacement all non-CEO staff.
Finally, the true artists can work unhindered. CEOs can fund and cancel movies for write-off value all without involving humans.
What the CEOs are missing is that by replacing their workers with AI, they're effectively replacing consumers with AI also. And AIs don't buy products.
> AIs don't buy products
As of the last couple of weeks, AIs can buy products[0][1]. Obviously for now these are intended to function on a short leash, but I wouldn't bet against agents with long-term horizon goals becoming actual consumers on their own in a few years.
[0] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a... [1] https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/
Since the dotcom era, it's not about getting consumers to buy the product at profitable margins, it's about getting investors to buy the stock on promises.
That was true during the ZIRP era. I think it's becoming less true now.
The subtext of this article is screaming that, in the view of professional actors, this AI actress is apparently really good. I think it will be interesting to see if Hollywood gets their version of Hatsune Miku. But it's not like Miku eliminated human singers so I'm not sure what makes this so worrying. We've already crossed the rubicon of CGIing just a regular human over another with Star Wars.
And why shouldn't they be?
AI movies, audiobooks, it's coming. Like every other industry that is pushing for AI to reduce cost and eliminate people, this is just another one. I'm convinced a not insignificant number of best selling authors have used AI to write part or entire books. Consider: feed every James Patterson book into it, and say write me a new one. There's a lot to work with.
Anyone remember "Devin" the "AI software engineer"?
If we succeed in creating a Tilly that can replace a human actor, then human actors are at risk of becoming obsolete. Any finite resource that we can suitably convert to infinitely digital is in the same position.
When we invented photography, realistic paintings kinda ... well I'm not qualified to talk about art but I feel like realistic paintings were like the last horse trying to merge into the model T traffic jam.
How did that turn out for animated characters? Mickey Mouse didn't make any human actors obsolete as far as I know.
Excellent point, No character that didn't look human has ever made human actors obsolete.
if? more like when.
[flagged]
Sorry I just woke up. This was unfair of me. Maybe I am just burned out with this industry.
Just think how many more interesting movies there could be, if the costs to produce them were drastically reduced. There are pros and cons with AI actors
While this looks good on the surface. The stress and justifications a Director/artists makes to create a movie acts as an effective filter for quality work. Only with a lot of effort from a lot of people is that possible.
Without that effort and filters, We're going to have a deluge of poorly inspired, sloppy content.
My brain just switches off if I realize something is AI generated. be it blogs, videos or audio.
Theres already plenty of good actor making minimum wage serving coffees in LA while waiting for their breakthrough. Somehow, they are not hired, so I doubt that actor wages is the real issue at hand.
I have no doubt there would be more movies. But more interesting? I seriously doubt it, outside of a rounding-error percentage.
That’s a silly framing. Without actual human actors? Considerably fewer. Something around zero I’d say.
And who's going to be able to afford to see them, when all the jobs are gone?
It really depends how you view the actor’s role. Are they a human prop executing the director’s vision or a co-collaborator? I think AI will struggle to be the latter.
I don't need more movies. I want higher quality movies. And I don't think AI will work out any better for movies than it does for youtube documentaries. It's getting tiresome to find anything worth watching among all the slop.
This is like saying it's a bad thing that phone cameras are getting so good because expensive cameras were keeping out the garbage films.
Expensive cameras are still better. And yet, it's good that people who were never going to be able to afford those cameras have something else they can use to tell their story.
But more isn't necessarily better; if producing movies costs nothing, then watching it is worth nothing.
I can fire up chatgpt and have it write a thousand stories. Would you read it?
AI is good for generating content, but that doesn't make it valuable content. And we had low value slop before AI, just thinking of e.g. buzzfeed back when.
Anyway, go browse Youtube, plenty of interesting content that doesn't get enough views as it is.
counter point, think of how much more interesting movies would be if there were only like 3 a year and the rest of your time you were waiting for one
i call this model: everything before 1990
i'm not appealing to tradition, i'm just saying what if our focus is the source of enjoyment... what if 1000 things to pick for dinner is exhausting but 1 that you think about all day always ends up good
To be pedantic, before 1990 there were nearly 5000 movies released: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/v1fsld/oc_... (based on IMDB's dataset).
For a better comparison, you could look at China which only allows for a few dozen foreign films per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_China#Quota...); which films depends on whether the publisher thinks it'll be successful there, whether it passes China's censors, and whether China was involved in its production. It's a different audience though, for example the Warcraft film bombed in the west but was hugely popular in China, possibly because of the relative scarcity of western films there?
Can't you still replicate the experience by only watching the top n blockbuster of the year? Spoiler: it'll mostly be mainstream slop.
Did porn get more interesting when it's just a bloke, his iPhone, and his trollop wife?
You described a married couple making a porno together but only felt the need to slander the wife.
Will you watch if it's a fat wanker?
Yes. The PornHub Community stuff was some of the rawest, realest, therefore sexiest porn out there.
You think a human audience won't be able to clock an AI actor in an instant? A huge chunk of our sensorium is devoted to finding the slightest thing "off" about human interaction. AI actors will mess with our suspension of disbelief in ways even cartoon actors can't touch.
Didn't we learn anything with streaming? The costs will stay low until a new tech is fully established and then continuously go up after we're dependent. Just benefitting different parties. And with streaming the main difference between the old and new parties is that the new ones, being primarily tech companies, added surveillance capitalism.
As if we did not need to worry enough about AI slop writing being injected into movies, now we get AI slop acting. Guess it was nice having some culture that actually grew for a bit... now we just constantly repeat everything and never deal with problems in any real way.
Seriously though, practically I just don't understand how this would work unless the entire movie was just CGI, AI Generated, whatever to begin with if real actors are supposed to work with a fake thing like this.
> AI slop acting
So if the technical challenges are solved and the AI acting is quite good, that changes your view of it?
> I just don't understand how this would work unless the entire movie was just CGI... if real actors are supposed to work with a fake thing like this.
Actors have worked alongside CGI characters for many decades, I remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the late 80s.
If you postulate 'good', who is in there wearing the AI actor like a mask?
I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.
But that's not what we're talking about, is it? Be honest.
If you want to impress me, well, I'm a techie nerd. Make a furry celebrity actress, that's the expression of a person. Like a Hollywood-grade implementation of a VTuber. Let 'em be driven by a person that I can get to know and recognize. In this day and age I'm not wedded to forcing everybody to be trapped in the form they're born in, still less so in art.
But this is NOT what we're talking about. You're going to have an AI by committee, drawn from a pandering mass of popular reactions, producing problems not unlike modern-day movies that try so hard to pander to the audience at any given moment that there's no weight to them and no point to any of it.
Here's hoping we also get the other thing. Sort of 'T-pain autotune turned into a style' but for acting. And again, I'm down with it if it's letting artists execute on realities they are otherwise completely unable to reach. But that's not what we're going to get, is it?
> I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.
Outside of a select number of A-list actors, are there situations where the other 85-90% of actors are able to express their truth today?
One of the common problems with creative industries (and the primary reason I switched away from pursuing game development) was that you're not expressing your truth; you're expressing someone else's truth in exchange for money. And unless you have lots of other intangible and often uncontrollable qualities, and are willing to play politics, you will probably never end up in a position to express your truth (with any degree of notoriety) through your own or other people's work.
I am not disabled or disfigured, and while I'm blocked-from-stardom that's just because I have a fairly uninteresting existence overall that wouldn't warrant it on it's own. So I can only guess at this stuff from an outside perspective, but from where I sit, I don't see AI as a sea-change enabler for the people you're referring to.
> "I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into."
Reminds me of a James Tiptree Jr. novella although in this case it's a remote-controlled artificial body instead of a remote-controlled digital avatar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Was_Plugged_In . Avoiding spoilers, it doesn't exactly make one think that such avatarism would be a particularly good idea by the end of the story.
> So if the technical challenges are solved and the AI acting is quite good, that changes your view of it?
That "if" seems to be the running thing with everything AI right now. "If" we can fix hallucinations. "If" we can make it actually think and reason. "If" we can make a general AI system. And so on.
"IF" we actually hit that point that these systems can create truly creative genuine work instead of being nothing more than predictive engines than maybe we can revisit this conversation. But the fact is we are not there and we are nowhere near there considering we are still just iterating on the fundamental problem of these just being predictive engines.
> Actors have worked alongside CGI characters for many decades, I remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the late 80s.
Yes you are right, but there is a pretty massive difference between knowing what the fake thing will do that is already scripted, storyboarded, etc (ultimately controlled by a human the entire time) vs an AI thing that will be an unknown.
1. Hallucinations have been reduced. There are, in fact, reasoning models. The "ifs" are not as theoretical as you imply. But the reason I raise the question on what happens if the acting is of high quality is because it's important to be clear on what your objection actually is to the thing.
2. Your issue on the "how do actors work alongside AI characters" is that actors won't be able to do a good job themselves because it's not storyboarded enough for them? That AI characters aren't rigid enough?
> Hallucinations have been reduced.
Do you have any studies or data to back this up other than "trust us" from the companies pushing the models?
And how much "reduced". It is still a fundamental issue that is just being pushed under the rug since it is inconvenient for them to talk about anymore.
> There are, in fact, reasoning models.
Simulated (fake) reasoning models. They are still fundamentally LLM's talking to itself which goes back to the fundamental issue of hallucination and a complete inability for anything original.
Also this "reasoning" has been shown in multiple studies to fall flat on its face with complex issues because it is not true reasoning. There is no intelligence or "thinking" behind it.
> The "ifs" are not as theoretical as you imply.
My reason for saying it is because it always seems when someone is critical of claims being made the response is 1 of 2 things.
1. Trying to ignore the concerns and just say that it can already do X, its magic, its whatever.
Or 2. It is all about the promise. All about what it may supposedly one day be able to do "if" we can just fix this one thing that isn't somehow a huge fundamental issue.
Pretty sure that was HGI
I think this is somewhat overhyped. If you look at the video that actually exists of this character[^1], it's clearly AI slop that falls flat -- honestly kind of embarrasing for the studio to put out. This seems like more of a media stunt than anything.
[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sVO_j4czYs
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The plot of S1m0ne (2002) actually happening was not on my 2025 bingo card.
> creativity is, and should remain, human-centered
Gentle reminder human creativity did not produce photosynthesis or crispr or the color blue. Throughout history its a small self praising gatekeeping elite that decides what is labeled creative. Its usually a over-paid nihilistic morally detached leisure class. So good riddance.
Could you dive in to that "over-paid nihilistic morally detached leisure class" and describe it a bit more so I can understand?
What's funny is that they only see the threat to their livelihoods that's where their concern lies.
But... do they protect their human animators from CGI? Or using cheaper foreign filming locations to cut costs?
It's all a continuum but they didn't care about it till it came for them. Nothing else on the continuum mattered... So, yeah, I won t shed a tear for them as they shed no tears for other parts of their production being replaced by different technologies over time.