Better get used to this folks. Fast and Furious XXXVIII is going to star James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, with an original soundtrack by Nirvana.
Christopher Reeves’ Superman is going to face off against Heath Leger’s Joker.
Their will come a time when nobody remembers the original talent, only the simulation. I can’t wait for Baudrillard’s next book.
I wonder when media will become dynamic, as in making subtle to drastic changes in a work to tailor the experience to the individual. For example, in The Fast and The Furious XXXV the main character can be either James Dean, Mario Andretti or any other actors likeness that has been licensed. Entire scenes can be condensed or expanded on the fly depending on the individual users profile. Their cars are different from viewing to viewing. There might not even be a consensus on what a work is.
Buy a Christmas skin for {lead actor} for $8.99!
Fast and Furious XXXVIII is going to star James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, with an original soundtrack by Nirvana.
No lie, I’d watch it.
Christopher Reeves already made an appearance in the recent Flash movie.
You’re saying this all with sarcasm, I presume, but I actually don’t see the big problem here. Actors are portraying characters, which are not people. Replicating a character digitally is fine IMO. Would there be a big problem if Hollywood happened to find a human actor that looked and sounded uncannily like Christopher Reeves and cast him as Superman? Casting look-alikes has been done before. Digital stand-ins for actors have been used frequently for many years now, including in some cases for dead actors. This isn’t new and I don’t see what’s wrong with it.
Casting lookalikes is a thing but the original actor should still get recognition and be paid. Crispin Glover sued the producers of back to the future 2 when they did this and got a settlement payout.
Holy sh*t - TIL
The problem with replacing actors with digital replicas is that now you need to figure out how to find work for (hundreds of?) thousands of actors to support themselves.
Edit: “you” as in society
No I don’t, that’s not my responsibility. If they wind up literally unemployed I’m fine with contributing to a social safety net for them, and ultimately I’m a fan of UBI which would help everyone, but if they find that they can no longer earn a living as an actor and still want to have a job then they should look for a different line of work. Lots of people try to make a living as actors and find that they have to do something else instead.
Sometimes changes in technology cause changes in fundamental economics, resulting in classes of jobs going away. There used to be human telephone operators that would connect you directly to whoever you were calling on the phone, they got replaced with automation and had to go find other lines of work. Should we have prevented the automation of telephony in order to save those jobs?
I myself am a programmer, and I can see the writing on the wall for some of the sorts of work that I do. Eventually AI will get good enough at coding that I’ll be relegated to a “manager” role of sorts telling AI what code to write, or possibly even have to find a second career to get started on. I accept that this sort of thing happens sometimes. I would rather have this sort of thing happen than ban the progression of technology, because I can look beyond my immediate needs and desire for a paycheck at the greater good that lies ahead from these increased capabilities.
When I die just upload all of the internet content I’ve made into a LLM so I can post forever
This assumes you aren’t already the product of just that process taking place in a further future scenario.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The makers of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special mimicking the late and great American comedian and actor George Carlin have been criticized for, apparently, not obtaining explicit permission from his family to impersonate his voice and style for the vid.
The show, titled “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” was uploaded on Tuesday to YouTube by actor and comedian Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen.
It appears the duo have crafted an AI personality called Dudesy that attempts to impersonate celebrities – in this instance, George Carlin.
Widely accessible generative AI tools and a wealth of content that can be easily scraped from the internet has made it easy to train computers to replicate someone’s work.
Performers in the entertainment industry have grown increasingly concerned that their faces or voices can be cloned using AI without compensation, and that their digital replica will be used in TV, films, commercials and replace them in their jobs.
At CES this week the union announced it had entered into a deal with Replica Studios, an AI startup, to license members’ voices to be used in video games and other media.
The original article contains 546 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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It is in terrible taste, that said, I’d wager Carlin himself would find the title hilarious, even some of the content is half decent. I would also wager he would have some concerns about the technology.
Anybody have a link about how that was done? I think that would be way more interesting to learn than if his daughter liked it… Was the script entirely crafted by AI? Or AI assisted writing? Or written by the two people? And I know there are several methods to generate the audio, record it by a human and do voice transfer, or do it entirely with AI. Is the audience also AI or edited in manually? And how much editing was needed to get the pacing, pauses etc right? Listening to it, I think there is quite some human work involved to get to a result like that.
They mentioned last year that a company is behind it, but there is an NDA preventing that company from being named publicly: https://biv.com/article/2023/05/meet-dudesy-ai-hosts-comedy-podcast-bc-born-actor-will-sasso
Thx! I’m going to listen to one of the podcast episodes. Guess they keep it a secret for some reason. I can only say I was impressed by the George Carlin impression. The voice/audio was excellent and the content had some nice bits in there. I mean all in all it was more of a rant than an elaborate script that took months to write, has multiple layers to it etc. But the real George Carlin perfected his art for decades and we can’t expect that. The ending was a bit rough but I guess that is also to be expected. I tried a bit of storywriting with AI and it always struggles to tie things together and find the exact point to do so. Also it didn’t sound like ChatGPT. In my experience GPT has an overbearing urge to mix adjectives very well and always sounds like a know-it-all… Something I don’t really like and I haven’t noticed that in the video. 👍
Here’s the link to the video in question, for those of you who were curious. I realize this is providing clicks to the people who made this without permission, so you might not want to click this link and maybe use the Piped link that the bot will probably respond with
I think it’s surprisingly good. Of course it doesn’t compare to the real George Carlin, but still a decent homage.
The special was actually really good in my opinion. I personally like the idea of preserving cultural icons a la the talking heads in Futurama via AI. I do think the estate should get royalty rights like they would with deceased artists, but why not embrace this medium of immortality?
The special was actually really good in my opinion. I personally like the idea of preserving cultural icons
What if the cultural icon specifically says no before their death. Should that be respected?
I do think the estate should get royalty rights like they would with deceased artists,
Does the estate get veto rights?
What if the cultural icon specifically says no before their death. Should that be respected?
Did he, though? The article only seems to talk about what his daughter wants.
Can you point to where he did agree?
What if the cultural icon specifically says no before their death.
This is the quoted line I was responding to.
Preservation would be keeping copies of his standup. This is not a special by George Carlin, this is a copycat. And the copycat will get stale because it won’t create anything new, it will only regurgitate jokes based on the very limited material that exists.
The content is not Carlin himself, its mimicry.
This means it’s not preservation, it is invention and by extension of that, it’s nothing close to immortality, it’s bastardization.
the first two minutes or so of the special make it abundantly clear it’s an imitation, it’s intended as an impersonation, and should not under any circumstances be taken as a “AI clone” of carlin. they’re very up front about it, and the reasoning for doing it.
it’s been blown way out of proportion by newsfeeds jumping on the “his daughter doesn’t like it” side of the story. it’s no different than comedians doing impersonations of each other on late night talk shows
Do the icons themselves have a say in that ?
George Carlin is dead. He was an atheist so he would probably be rather surprised to be asked about it at this point.
why not embrace this medium of immortality?
isn’t it weird that it’s not them, it’s like a caricature of them? And, as time goes on is their legacy who they actually were or would it be this? It seems questionable even for people who agree before they die, but it seems really unethical for anyone who didn’t agree or were even aware of the possibility.
My major problem with it is not getting permission from his heirs before creating it. With that being said, the AI Bill Cosby joke was pretty damn good.
