A Hollywood Hissy-Fit or an Unstoppable Threat

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A Hollywood Hissy-Fit or an Unstoppable Threat

“Some have labeled me unconstitutional because I am not a human being… That hurt me.”

Diella (Albanian for “sun”), on-screen address to parliament; “she’s” Albania’s appointed AI system,

a cabinet-level “Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence,” focusing on corruption.

The only 3-dimensional “being” pictured above is the last image. Diella (the first image) is a virtual politician (aren’t they all?), now a cabinet-level appointment in Albania, but Tilly Norwood (in the middle) is seeking an agent and has performed in a real production, sort of. “Norwood ‘is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers,’ the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, said in a statement… ‘It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human.’

"‘Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance,’ Van der Velden [the Dutch creator] wrote, adding such creations should be judged ‘as part of their own genre’ rather than compared to human actors.” BBC.com, September 30th. You may recall that 2023 maze of Hollywood strikes that seems to have dismembered an already-unraveling film/TV/digital media industry. There was an ambiguous railing at AI generated scripts, virtual actors and completed AI productions, but other than stand in abject terror, rejecting the very concept of AI automation taking over creative jobs, the resulting collective bargaining agreements seemed to crush the AI can before kicking it down the road. But AI is absolutely everywhere, even in Hollywood.

WME and CAA, two of the largest talent agencies in the world, have each issued pronouncements against specific AI software able to create very realistic scenes with very realistic virtual “actors,” indicating that their acting talent will not be allowed to support such virtual productions as a general matter. Well, recently there have been some elections at some of these labor unions and guilds, and the most anti-AI militants seem to have come out on top. Since Hollywood collective bargaining agreements run three years (uh… 2023 + 3 = 2026, uh oh!), guess what’s looming again? Pit this militant anti-AI fever among “we can stop it” union rank and file against the raging unemployment that resulted from the 2023 strike… and from which the industry has never recovered… and one way or another, suffering looms large.

“‘It doesn't solve any 'problem' — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry,’ the [actors’] union said… Actress and filmmaker Natasha Lyonne, known for her leading roles in Poker Face, Orange Is the New Black and Russian Doll, said anyone who works with Norwood should be boycotted… ‘Any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds,’ said Lyonne, who is currently working with ‘ethical AI’ to create a feature film that stars real actors.” Reuters on BBC.com.

It's a complete mess at every level in the world of artistic creativity, which pretty much defines my world as an entertainment attorney. Guardrails are almost non-existent, the biggest companies in AI admit they don’t truly understand how AI systems really learn or what is possible, trillions of dollars have been poured into this technology – standby for a litany of stock-market-shaking AI tech bubbles – and even our government is out of whack with reality.

Our confusion is exacerbated by an official refusal (read: the Copyright Office) to grant AI-generated “creativity” the benefit of copyright protection (except as to traceable human-created components) while at the same time courts allow a new definition, by some federal jurisdictions, of “fair use” to embrace access to copyrighted materials at a “teaching tool” for AI… that large language models (LLMs) need access to massive aggregations of information (creativity and history) to work. If you believe the numbers, individual companies, each with the wealth of entire countries, are powerful beyond power. We know that these issues will consume appellate courts, most certainly the Supreme Court, to resolve highly complex technologies which they clearly are not competent to resolve. That lack of competence is unlikely to stop the resulting rulings. And if the courts are ill-prepared, just think what a radically divided Congress looks like.

Our deeply fractured partisan Congress, populated with a large body of geriatric legislators with almost no capacity to understand, much less grapple with, containing and defining a desperately needed ground-up reset of AI-applicable definitions, protections, and guardrails for the intellectual property equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, is decades behind reality? Huge licensing agreements are entering the scene as the Tech Bros instead argue for no regulation and free use of “what’s out there” in feeding the generative AI LLMs the “knowledge” they need to be super-productive.

It is well and good to face “deep fakes” and privacy issues, but for the most part this massive AI war is wilder than our wildest wild west, with weapons that make six-shooters and Winchester rifles look like pop guns in the hands of angry infants. To labor unions and guilds, the accelerating pervasiveness of AI is over-simplistically viewed through the lens of protecting collective bargaining agreements and individual creative/personal rights. Really? That is going to work? I don’t think there is a serious practical analytical paradigm out there that has a shot in hell in grappling with this cosmic shift in computing power. Assume the crash position and brace, brace, brace!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we seem to have created the modern version of inventing the wheel, fire and nuclear weapons all at the same time; we clearly have no clue what to do with it… and remain productive human beings with meaningful lives.