When the union that represents TV and movie actors announced its plans to strike last week, chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland talked about concerns relating to the use of artificial intelligence. This is what the studios proposed, he said: “That our background actors should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan, their image, their likeness and to be able to use it for the rest of eternity in any project they want with no consent and no compensation.”
A studio owning and profiting from a person’s image and likeness for the rest of eternity? It sounds dystopian. Talk about eliminating the need for pesky, annoying, expensive humans altogether, be they actors, writers or anyone else other than C-suite executives.
Something like that outcome is mentioned by a fictional studio executive played by Tim Robbins in 1992′s “The Player,” a scathing Hollywood satire from writer Michael Tolkin and director Robert Altman:
