Recently, AI seems to be taking over everything, including entertainment. The latest technology in film production can take body scans of individuals and paste them into multiple different places and positions according to a producer’s wants, effectively creating artificial extras.
In Apple TV’s “Ted Lasso,” producers were able to take body scans of 20 individuals and create a stadium of over 26,000. According to Insider, “The team used crowd tiling to shoot one small group and physically move them around the set. They’re then combined together in post-production to look like a cohesive crowd. Digital doubles helped fill in the rest of the crowd.”
Crowd tilting like this is not new. What is new is the extent to which it is working. Other examples of this extent are abundant. For example, AI can move an actor’s performance from one movie to another or replace dialogue. It can make an actor’s lip move and replace it with an AI voice. It can even make an actor look younger and older in seconds.
Computer Science teacher Nikki Pitcher was surprised about this. “It’s pretty scary to think how far AI has come and I feel bad for those background actors who may be taken advantage of. Sadly, it all comes down to money so I don’t think there will be much they can do about it besides read the fine print of their contracts and try to fight for compensation if and when their likeness gets used. We are part of the problem because we rely so much on technology these days. How many of us are following AI TikTokers right now? Do we know? And do we even care?” remarked Pitcher.
On July 14th, film and television actors went on strike. While they were worried about many issues, including unequal pay disparity between writers and actors, their biggest concern was artificial intelligence taking their jobs. According to the Fran Drescher, the union boss of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), “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 should be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation.”
For the Motion Pictures Association of America, who oversee the entertainment industry, this seems like a great idea. Instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars for loads of different actors, they can pay a small handful of people to use their image indefinitely.
The SAG- AFTRA has been asking for “informed consent” if using AI to copy body images. Instead of paying extras for one day of work, the union suggests that they should get paid every time an AI copy of them appears in a movie or TV show.
Because it will take a few years for this technology to be perfected, the entertainment industry is still dependent on actors to do their jobs. However, the industry will continue to be at a standstill until the terms of the SAG-AFTRA are met.
