Celebrity internet bullshit is not acting. Acting is done in a theatre, not on Instagram.
Sorry, "celebrity internet bullshit" is on its way to being acting.
Remember that acting in 2024 isn't reciting Shakespeare at a copy of the Globe Theater. There's tons of stuff that basically require a figure on a green screen.
I didn't expect to have to point out what's really obvious but the Internet is already full of deepfakes. The first attempts a few years ago were indeed pretty laughable but the people who do these are getting better, the tools are better, and the end results are getting more harder to call out. There are now AI fakebusters who are using things like eyeball reflection analysis to identify AI generated content because unassisted visual analysis is no longer reliable.
And remember that fakebusting is not a new practice. Some major art museum directors believe that half of the artifacts in the world's best museums are fakes or so heavily restored to be tantamount to it. And people have been faking art pretty much as long as people have been making it.
When will AI generated NIL reach prime time? When the average person can't recognize the difference between fake and real content, not whether or not that onscreen Judi Dench or Patrick Stewart are fake. We have been watching television and cinema content set in artificially generated environments, whether it's a sports program studio (Tokyo Summer Olympics in 2021 was the first major broadcast of a large scale event like this) or some Hollywood blockbuster.
Apple's product announcements -- all prerecorded canned footage since the pandemic -- are all fake except for the people. That's been 4+ years. Again initial attempts were pretty obvious by sharp-eyed observers but it's getting harder to tell in 2024.
If we have been faking backgrounds successfully for almost a decade (and realtime for 5+ years), having fully generated AI actors is knocking at the front door. And Joe Consumer won't be able to tell the difference.
Things like these Instagram models (and Internet deepfakes) prove that we have basically arrived.
Sticking your head in the sand doesn't really change that fact that generative AI is front and present. Remember that no type of fakebusting is 100% reliable, there will be false positives sometimes. But if experts are arguing and Joe Consumer says "looks good to me" that's enough validation for the people creating this type of content.
Whether or not you agree with me today isn't going to change what will happen in the twelve months. The fakes will get better. The fakebusting will get more difficult. And the fakes will be involved in more complex situations: full-motion video interacting with a wide variety of other characters.
Remember that animated content and CGI is already completely fake. The movie industry has used mo-cap for years because it's easier to create mo-cap motion curves, walk cycles, whatever with a live actor but with generative AI, saying "give me a stork with Usain Bolt's walk cycle and Sean Connery's voice" is just close to the touch of a button.
At this point we don't see content like that because of the inevitable legal action that would ensue, but that's probably the main inhibitor. The technology is already here.
Another salient example: an AI company was caught using a synthesized version of Scarlett Johansson's voice. Even close friends and family members couldn't tell the difference if it weren't for the fact that she said she had not given the AI company permission to use her voice. The AI company quickly pulled the voice avatar and mumbled something about unintentional.
It's important to note that this strike follows the film/television actors strike by about a year later for many reasons that overlap the previous action. This is not a new issue that has come up, it was already being discussed a couple of years ago. It's only now that the game voice actors have caught up likely because the contracts expired at different times.
I expect more strikes like this including other workers in the entertainment industry. Maybe musicians will be next? I don't know when the current contracts installed but for sure singers of film/television/videogame soundtracks don't want generative AI to take away their livelihoods. It's not just about acting, it's about anyone who does creative work in the entertainment industry.
And it should be noted that this only covers SAG/AFTRA productions. There's a whole world outside of the USA. Even during the actors strike last year, many productions in North America continued (especially Canada) because those productions were outside of the scope of SAG/AFTRA. What happens here will set a precedence for many other workers around the world.
), they can only do the one job which is a major flexibility problem, they still need to be serviced and maintained by a Human, AND just like Windmills when the wind doesn't blow they need backup to step in, a Human to make burgers, and a gas power station instead of the windmill to produce electricity, which begs the obvious question of whether the burger flipper machine or windmill are ultimately worth it when they are not dependable enough to actually replace a better solution that also happens to cheaper (a Human).
