Wagner James Au / New World Notes

The Screen Actors Guild strike is now in full throttle, with artificial intelligence a key component of the walk-out. (SAG rejected a proposal by Hollywood studios to create and own AI versions of actors in perpetuity without compensation.) Inevitably, that's caused some AI evangelists to wonder: Do we even need human actors any more at all?

"Doesn’t this just create demand for Hollywood studios to create Synthetic Actors?" As my colleague Jeremiah Owyang put it recently. "Disney+ Netflix: seems like over 50% of content is CGI or digitally altered."

There's already quite a lot of digital-only actors in movie and TV, especially in epic crowd scenes. (And for quite some time: WETA Digital innovated this for the battles in the original Lord of the Rings trilogy over two decades ago.) So the real question is whether we should expect studios to clamor for digital-only actors in bit parts — or even in starring roles.

There I'm high skeptical, not just on a "Do we really want all human culture synthesized?" moral and philosophical level, but on basic feasibility:

To be sure, the quality of digital humans has taken many impressive leaps (watch Unreal's demo above). At the highest level, you could even argue that the best digital humans have crossed the Uncanny Valley. By my lights, however, they're now in the Gulf of Mediocrity. Watching this demo, I'm struck by its lack of expressiveness, with little subtlety of emotion or ambiguity. Basically he (it?) is performing like someone who just signed up for a Theater 101 course.

Which brings up the marketability question: Is there really a paying audience for digital-only actors? Yes, to Jeremiah's point, there's quite a lot of CGI in many hit movies/TV shows — but mainly to enhance the performances of well-known, recognizable actors. That's even the case for all-animated features — the human actor voiceover then becomes a key selling point.

In other words: If there really was a mass audience for digital-only movies, then why did Universal Pictures just spend so much money touting the voice acting of Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Seth Rogen, etc. etc. in The Super Mario Bros. Movie?  Human actors who are celebrities are core to a movie/TV show's marketing campaign — and studios spend just as much on marketing a movie as they do on its actual production budget.

The fact that digital humans aren't quite past the Uncanny Valley/Gulf of Mediocrity also means a highly costly, escalating arms race, as digital animation companies compete with each other to make the most realistic human. So even if Hollywood could got rid of actual human actors, they'd just become heavily dependent on Silicon Valley companies, instead of SAG. (And the Valley charges way more than actual actors.)

All that in mind, I'm even skeptical if we'll ever see digital-only actors used as visible onscreen extras. Because extras are actually part of the Screen Actors Guild… which again, is on strike in part to protest the uncompensated digitization of actors!