Cage rage: How AI still divides actors and studios

Nicolas Cage attends the premiere of Neon’s “Longlegs”. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images via AFP
Nicolas Cage attends the premiere of Neon’s “Longlegs”. Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images via AFP
PARIS – A bruising months-long Hollywood strike helped secure actors and writers some protection from AI, but a year after those ructions studios and creatives are still divided on the tech.
Hollywood royalty Nicolas Cage has labelled AI a “nightmare” in the past and renewed his attack, particularly on the use of “digital replicas” of actors — a practice permitted under the deal that ended the strike.
“The studios want this so that they can change your face after you’ve already shot it,” Cage said at the Newport Beach Film Festival in comments reported in US media.
“They can change your face, they can change your voice, they can change your line deliveries, they can change your body language, they can change your performance.”
Cage likened actors to members of a band and said “this technology wants to take your instrument”.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in the south of France at a TV industry gathering this week, the attitude was starkly different.
Marianne Carpentier of French company Newen Studios told the Mipcom trade show in Cannes that she had her first “wow” moment with AI when it was drafted in to generate the face of a sick actor.
“It was really amazing… It was cheap, it was efficient and we couldn’t see on screen the difference with the real [actors],” she said.
The AI boom has seen astronomical valuations and investments in the sector.
Companies now need to justify the investment and they still see profits to be made in Hollywood even after the strike.
– ‘Give me a blockbuster’ –
Last week, Meta announced a partnership with horror film production company Blumhouse, whose credits include “Get Out” as well franchises like “Paranormal Activity”.
The firm’s filmmakers are experimenting with Movie Gen, Meta’s new video tool that can generate short videos from simple prompts or pictures — or add to existing videos.
Industry behemoth OpenAI is expected to launch its video tool Sora soon, and there are plenty of other video tools on the market.
Social media is flooded with people claiming to have generated a “movie” with AI.
But these “movies” are stitched-together clips with no story or consistency of style.
Even Meta’s tool, which is not yet available to the public, can only generate 16-second clips.
Emily Golden of Runway AI said for her the goal was not to have AI-generated movies.
“There’s a common misconception that you’re going to be able to type in ‘give me a Hollywood blockbuster’. Enter,” she told Mipcom.
“You can’t. And that’s not the world we’re building towards.”
– Hordes of orcs –
The technology has been bleeding into Hollywood in more subtle ways since before AI was known as AI.
Back in the 2000s, special effects pioneers created a tool to generate hordes of orcs, elves and other Middle Earth dwellers for the mass battles of the “Lord of the Rings” blockbuster trilogy.
Actors have been given life after death, as in the case of Peter Cushing, who appeared in 2016’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” despite having died in 1994.
Cushing’s voice was AI-generated, while his image was created using traditional CGI.
Since then, actors from Harrison Ford to Robert de Niro have been dramatically de-aged with techniques mixing AI and CGI.
But there have been bumps in the road — Star Wars producer Disney is being sued over its use of Cushing’s likeness.
And Cage is not the only actor to rail against AI.
Scarlett Johansson publicly rebuked OpenAI for using her voice — or one that sounded very similar — for one of their chatbots.
And last week, Julianne Moore added her name to a list of thousands who labelled the unlicensed use of material to train AI models “an unjust threat to the livelihoods” of creatives.
Nevertheless, industry figures at Mipcom waxed about how AI could now be used to generate an aerial tracking shot from just a simple photo, or a “mood board” from a text prompt.
They outlined a benign vision of an industry slowly reaping the reward of innovation, contrasting with the frequent promises from Silicon Valley that world-shattering tech is just around the corner.
But some at Mipcom did let themselves run with darker speculation.
“Will it take jobs? You betcha,” Jonathan Verk of US tech firm Social Department told the audience.
“But this is good news for us because there’ll be a lot of people at home with nothing to do. They’re going to need more shows, more content, more stuff to watch.”
And AI will be there to help create and monetise that content, he said.
Some in the audience stifled awkward laughs, most listened in silence. It was not clear if he was joking.
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