Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas

Copyright needs reforms, it's broken as fuck.

The music and film industry have been exploiting this for decades and changing the entire model to a system where artists don't hold copyrights or get compensated for their work, content or (soon) bodies. Art does not enter the public domain anymore. Greed is all there is.

Burn it all down.

Copyright law? Oh you mean Disney Protection Law?

A typical point that I severely miss from most discussions about AI is what it means for future artists or, in this case, future actors. And therefore what it means for us as a society.

By taking the art from the artists, regardless of whether it's an actor, illustrator, author, etc.., the way it is done currently, we will see much fewer people who will even try to learn these skills, or share them. At some point there won't be anything new anymore.

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- These are my thoughts exactly as well. I find it especially infuriating how in some discussions and articles about AI people try to spin a tale of artists being these allegedly elitist "bourgeois" individuals. And with AI now supposedly "the little man" can finally unfold their creative potential. In truth I suspect it's more the other way around.
  
  It looks to me like the only kinds of people who could afford to get into my line of work in the future are people with rich parents or something
  
  Someone from a not so well-off background but with dedication and grit was more likely to get their feet into illustration, für example, then they are now.
  
  Instead people who already probably come from a privileged background (PC, technical knowledge, money to pay for AI credits) can just swarm the market without needing to dedicate much time at all.
Maybe I'm overlooking something, but isn't the actual change that doing these things will no longer be a viable way to earn a living?
- On the long term yes it presumably is a threat to entire professions. On the short-mid term I think it will decimate the entry level tier of a lot of those professions first because it's easier work to replace.
- That’s the problem - it take a lot of practice and experience to get really good at graphic design or illustration. When people are paying you to do it, you can afford to do it all day. If not, you need to spend the majority of your time doing something else, so it takes longer to advance in skill. I see this in my own field with hobbyists/people who do art on the side vs people who do it full time.
- It will mean that not only do you need to compete with your peers, you'll need to compete forever with all the best talent that has ever worked.
  
  And those talents, at a certain point, will cost less. They'll be able to do more for less money because they'll be on to other things or dead, and thus are handling their living (or not) expenses differently. While you'll still need an apartment near the studios and food to survive.
  
  There's no real up side for 99.99% of people. The only ones who will make any real money from these changes are the executives and producers.
- Most artists can't earn their entire livelihood by their craft alone. Even those considered good, in most cases, need a main job.
  
  But even the little money you make from your art can at least pay for art supplies (which are very expensive). Learning to be a good in your craft costs an enormous amount of patience, time and money as well. With no money at all to be made out of it, no commissions, and your work immediately flowing into the AI pipeline, new artists will be further discouraged from even trying to hone that craft.

We are doing all the AI thing wrong. We were supposed to be replacing hard repetitive manual work with technology. Not replace the art creation.

puts on Obi-Wan's beard

"Technology, you were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the need for work, not join them! Let us focus on culture and enlightment, not leave us with the hard manual work!"

The problem is that replacing art is an entirely software task. You don't have to figure out a robotics issue for actual manual labor to be done. And for white collar work, art doesn't have an objectively correct finishing point, spreadsheets and reports do.
We were supposed to be replacing hard repetitive manual work with technology.

That already happened, for the most part, 30-40 years ago in manufacturing and industrial applications. Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.
- There is still a lot of hard manual (and underpaid) work left that AI and robotics sadly did not replace. Instead it seems to go for the jobs some people actually might enjoy first.
  
  I feel online platforms like the Fediverse are a conceivably bad place to discuss this, though. Because I assume a lot of people here do work in technical jobs they often enjoy at least a bit.
  
  But a huge chunk of people works in delivery, in warehouses, at assembly lines, as cleaners, in construction, the not so nice parts of elderly care, etc. etc.
- Factories employ a fraction of people they did before the 80s.
  
  Depends on the industry. Automobiles? Yeah, that has been largely automated. Trailers? The most common trailer brands I can think of are still built manually.
  
  CNC machines still need operators, and those operators are still doing manual labor. An entire factory only needs one guy on a computer to manage all the programing those CNC machines need. Everything else is about making sure the material is correctly positioned and the machine is working correctly.
  
  Manufacturing isn't nearly as automated as you might think. Not as many industries have adopted the rote programing robotic arms that you're imagining from some Ford production line.
  
  Plus factories and industrial are only a fraction of the manual labor world. Agriculture, construction, forestry, trades, all sorts manual labor jobs exist that have nothing to do with factories. And that's not even counting other unskilled labor fields like the service industry.

Don't worry, this is only a problem until they can fully generate actors from scratch. It's just a matter of time.

So much this, creating actor's looks and personality from scratch to fit the demographics is an Hollywood exec wet dream.
- "I'm thinking, muscular, gruff looking white man who loves his kids".
Years ago a music studio generated an Asian pop artist. (I can't provide details about it because when I web-search for it I get a hundred results telling me how I can do the same thing myself.)
It's already been done, it's _being _done now, and we're not far away from it being relatively undetectable.
The little secret of AI is that it can't generate shit from scratch. It relies on a large and diverse training dataset in order to make anything at all.

To put it in perspective they want to have a background actor on set for one day, scan them, then use that forever and not just for that movie. And only pay them for one day of work.

That's fine. Than we will only buy one movie and get all the other ones for free, since we already paid for one...

The actors should get license fees everything their likeness is used. The movie studios already rake in a ton of money.

Book authors also get royalties when their books are published, why not use a similar system.

Working people need to all be ready to reject a new wave of AI-powered exploration, the scope and scale of which we have never seen before.

I think viewers need to be prepared to never pay for a film that contains AI-generated assets that steal actors' looks.

I mean, yeah, no kidding. If my employer could get my skills at a fraction of the price, I would be out of a job before lunch.

Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever