Artificial intelligence and Hollywood is a combination that has led to some amazing, if off-putting, moments. Think Mark Hamil's de-aged return as Luke Skywalker in "The Mandalorian," or Harrison Ford's de-aged return as Indiana Jones in the latest installment in the franchise.
Love it or hate it, the rise of AI in Hollywood, in part, is the reason that both the writers' and actors' guilds are currently on strike. The studios want unfettered access to the technology, to use how they wish. The creators that make their content possible, however, want assurances and safe-guards in place around the tech, preventing it from displacing their jobs.
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But among actors and writers there is another group that has already been faced with the potentially disastrous consequences of an AI-dominated media landscape: background actors. Unlike their celebrity colleagues, these actors are not being digitally de-aged. They are being digitally replicated.
And the studios own that replication.
After several weeks working as a background actor on the set of the Disney+ show "WandaVision," Alexandria Rubalcaba, according to NPR, was sent to a trailer along with dozens of her peers. In all of 15 minutes, a full-body digital scan had been created of Rubalcaba.
"Have your hands out. Have your hands in. Look this way. Look that way. Let us see your scared face. Let us see your surprised face," Rubalcaba told NPR, referencing the instructions the production team gave her.
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But she and her peers were never told if, when or how this digital recreation of her might be used. If (DIS) -) decides to fill a future scene of a different film with a digital recreation of her body, she might never know about it, and she won't get paid for it.
Disney did not respond to a request for comment.
"What if I don't want to be on MarioVision, or SarahVision?" she said. "I fear that AI is eventually going to weed out background actors. They won't have any use for us anymore."
A union negotiator said in July that the studios had made a proposal that suggested "background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness for rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation."
A spokesperson for the studios denied the claim, however, saying that the proposal only allows the digital replicas to be used in the same project the actor was hired for. Any other use, he said, would require the actor's consent.
"Imagine ballroom scenes, party scenes, any scenes that need tons of extras," Andrew Susskind, an associate professor of Drexel University's film and TV department told NPR. "Imagine the amounts of money they would be saving."
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