Lisa Kudrow is criticizing the movie “Here,” which used AI-based tools to help de-age Tom Hanks by decades.
Hanks:
“Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on,” Hanks said at the time. “Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”
Kudrow’s point is that even just de-aging to play a much younger role prevents younger actors from getting the experience older actors have.
Which is a much better point than I expected.
Hanks seems to be looking at what he’ll be leaving as an inheritance, either a finite amount of money, or the legal rights to print money by having Tom never stop acting. Which again would be taking roles from living actors.
It would essentially “freeze” Hollywood celebrities, and he’s fine if it happens when he’s at the peak. No future actor would ever get the amount of experience to rival him.
I haven’t seen the movie, but it could have been cool for Colin Hanks to play younger Tom.
On the Team Deakins podcast (which I HIGHLY recommend) Roger is notoriously pessimistic about the future of film. But they asked one of their guests - maybe Greig Fraser? - about AI and he basically said, “AI is here whether we like it or not. We as artists can either embrace it and lead the way in using it appropriately, or we can refuse and let big studios and big money ruin the industry by using AI without input from the artists.”
At the very least it endorses mediocrity and giving aging successful filmmakers carte Blanche to make boring high concept films that just don’t work.
With the prevalence of motion capture and digital effects taking the place of practical special effects, deaging tech, whether AI or an algoritm, seems like a natural path for entertainment to go down.
I get her concern, but mostly in the ‘we shouldn’t use it in these ways’ just like we shouldn’t use other improvements in malicious ways.
Three years ago this would have been done with CGI, not another actor.
Nobody would take her seriously if she was railing against a team using Nuke instead of a team using Metaphysic.
Tron flopped in theaters. Half the reason was people saying they cheated by using computers. That’s about where AI criticism is, right now, and it’s also about where AI quality is: visibly primitive. Fantastic if you want something to look unreal. Otherwise pretty limited. People still have to… do work… to make it do the thing.
“Set that completely aside, what work will there be for human beings? Then what?” the “Friends” star continued. “There’ll be some kind of living stipend for people, you won’t have to work? How can it possibly be enough?”
How can it possibly be enough? Well, it’s the best-case scenario so I hope it will be…
The funny thing about the ongoing AI revolution is that we expected machines to take over menial labor and leave humans free to do creative work, but it looks like machines are going to be pretty good at creative work. The future might be a place where movies are created by AI but humans are still useful for the sorts of physical labor that robots have trouble with.
I don’t think we know that AI will be good at creative work yet. De-aging old actors isn’t exactly “creative”.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you - I think it might be a while before an AI can just make a whole movie. With that said, the idea to de-age old actors isn’t creative, but the process of de-aging them before the advent of AI would have been done by an artist and called creative work (although actually having a human artist do it was not feasible in practice).
There’s a tendency to consider something uncreative because it is done by AI and according to that logic AI cannot possibly be creative, but I try to judge AI creations by the same standards I would have used if they were human creations before AI existed.
but the process of de-aging them before the advent of AI would have been done by an artist and called creative work
There’s a tendency to consider something uncreative because it is done by AI and according to that logic AI cannot possibly be creative, but I try to judge AI creations by the same standards I would have used if they were human creations before AI existed.
by the same token you can’t consider something creative just because it is done by an artist. To me de-aging leans much closer to “menial labor” than actual creativity. It clearly requires skill, but very little imagination.
I was going to say something about “uncreative” being in the eye of the beholder, but actually I agree with you. De-aging Tom Hanks isn’t a case of creating art under constraints (which can bring out more creativity in humans). There’s a “correct” way to de-age him: the way he actually looked when he was younger. Even without that as a guide, the range of acceptable de-aged appearances is quite narrow. Too narrow to contain the space needed for creativity.
I think even some present-day AIs display creativity in a meaningful way even though they are still far from matching the full range of human creative abilities, but de-aging Tom Hanks, although amazing in its own way, is not an example of creativity.
