When Steven Rigsby was working as a background actor on a movie set in Atlanta in the summer of 2018, he became a digital clone.
As dozens of extras waited in line for scans, Rigsby said he heard the crew talk about using the scans to add more people into a scene.
“It felt a little bit disorienting,” he said. “All I could think about was how many extras they weren’t paying in order to do that.”
For years, Hollywood’s biggest productions have relied on artificial intelligence along with sophisticated graphic design software for cinematic effect — it de-ages movie stars, creates realistic cartoon heroes and allows directors to tweak performances without reshooting. Body scanning technology, in particular, has been a boon for productions flush out big crowds. “Game of Thrones” and the Lord of the Rings franchise used AI to create imposing 10,000 strong armies. When the pandemic limited on-set actors, Apple TV’s “Ted Lasso” used digital software to fill out the fans in the soccer stadium.
But advancements in generative AI, a technology that can create audio, works and images, now allow companies to do more than create an invading throng: it can replicate faces and voices with eerie precision. And digital cloning has become a central tension between actors and studio executives as they face off in a strike that’s halted Hollywood.
The quickly improving technology provides studio executives a tantalizing way to save costs and time when making movies without compromising quality, media analysts say. But actors worry that without limits, the tools could eventually chip away at their shoot days or put them out of work entirely.
For Rigsby, 27, who earned a rate of about $150 a day for a 12-hour shift on his Hollywood movie, becoming a background actor was a way to learn about the movie business. If the movie industry begins using AI to replace him on shoots and use his body scans in ways he doesn’t approve, the impact will be severe, he said.
“It’s erasing jobs from the market, and being done so in a way that doesn’t financially compensate,” he said.
Hollywood is no stranger to artificial intelligence. The technology has made Harrison Ford look younger for his most recent “Indiana Jones” film. It gave Val Kilmer his voice back for “Top Gun: Maverick.” It made Thanos more closely resemble Josh Brolin in “Avengers: Infinity War.”
But the recent rise of generative artificial intelligence, which has spawned chatbots, image makers and voice-cloning tools that can mimic human output with lifelike precision has created a stir in Hollywood, as actors, writers and directors raise alarm that it could upend the industry.
The Directors Guild of America successfully won protections in June to prevent being replaced with AI tools. The Writers Guild of America is trying to gain similar assurances in its negotiations. The union doesn’t want AI to be considered the creator of “source” or “literary” material, two key provisions that partially determine how credit is given to script writers and how they are paid.
For actors, a key concern is that body scans could be used to exploit background performers — using their image for little pay and robbing them of creative control.
In a statement released on Monday, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists negotiating committee said Hollywood studios want to abuse the technology to “scan a background actor’s image, pay them for a half a day’s labor” and use the likeness “forever without their consent.” SAG-AFTRA added that studios have asked for the right to “make changes to principal performers’ dialogue, and even create new scenes, without informed consent.”
Studio representatives dispute this characterization of negotiations. Scott Rowe, a spokesman for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, said in a statement the group offered a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses” and includes a requirement that performer’s give consent for the creation of replicas and any digital alterations made to their performance.
Currently, producers use the digital clones largely to make small groups of actors appear more numerous to illustrate big scenes. Matt Panousis, the chief operating officer of visual effects firm Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies, said manufacturing a crowd starts with high-resolution body scan to capture “the shape and details of real people.” From there, crowd simulation software makes digital clones come to life, and allows for the “efficient creation of large crowds without the need for extensive physical shooting.” Though some body scanning uses artificial intelligence, this specific process does not.
But if studios were to use these digital clones for background scenes throughout a movie, the result would eliminate a huge amount of work for low-level actors, said actress and director Justine Bateman, who has been advising the Screen Actors Guild leadership on artificial intelligence.
“Let’s say it’s a big movie, where extras would work for 30 days. They want you to work for one day and scan you, and then not use you for the other 29,” said Bateman, who has a computer science degree from UCLA.
“Everything they proposed that related to AI is to eliminate paying for talent. It’s all bound up and inspired by greed,” she added. “It does not solve a problem that currently exists in entertainment. It is only solving the problem of profit margins.”
Joseph Looper, a 26-year-old from Phoenix who works as a background actor in Hollywood films and aspires to leading roles, said replacing extras with digital clones would ruin a common entry-point into the business.
“If you do a background role once and some studio owns your likeness — then they don’t really need you anymore,” he said. “Then you’re out of a job ... and how exactly is someone supposed to work their way to a speaking role if they don’t have any on camera experience.”
Joshua Glick, a film and media studies scholar at Bard College, said the strike illustrates that Hollywood sees how powerful artificial intelligence is getting and that jobs could be at risk.
“Because these technologies have gotten better, faster, week to week, month to month, there’s a real crisis point at this moment to dig in for these negotiations,” he said, adding that “at the same time, Hollywood is looking for platforms to become profitable” and know “that technology is going to play a part” in achieving that.
“The intensity and the conflict of this moment, speaks to just how important these technologies are,” he said.
Some celebrities welcome the use of artificial intelligence to create a digital double, allowing them to monetize their form and be in multiple places at once.
Maria Chmir, the founder and chief executive of Brask AI, said her company uses artificial intelligence software that’s trained on millions of photos and thousands of hours of video to learn how to create a celebrity double.
The technology cannot create a person from scratch, she said. It requires a stand-in actor who resembles the celebrity being duplicated to be present. The actor mimics the movements needed, and the software replaces the stand-in actor’s face and voice with a celebrity’s, she said.
Her company has re-created the face of French soccer star Kylian Mbappé for a television ad that he did not need to be present to shoot, she said, and was used in the film Tchaikovsky’s Wife to re-create a character who had a twin sibling in the movie.
Chmir said this allows celebrities to be present in two places at once, increasing their revenue streams, and also creates a job for the person who is required to be the stand-in actor.
Daniel J. Gervais, an intellectual property expert and professor at Vanderbilt University Law School, said creating AI generated images of celebrities based on algorithms trained on millions of photos is legally tricky.
Currently, if an AI-generated image competes with an original image, it is not deemed a fair use, he said. But it’s unlikely for U.S. courts to provide more direction on this until the middle of 2024, as several cases around artificial intelligence’s learning process work their way through the legal system.
Still, Chmir said that it’s highly unlikely that artificial intelligence will be a Hollywood job-killer anytime soon.
“We can’t replace the actor,” she said. “This is impossible. We need the performance, we need the charisma. … This is the place in which AI is not good.”
Joseph Menn contributed to this report.