[gamblor956]

Hollywood productions have already begun shifting back toward using extras instead of CGI actors.

It turns out it's a lot cheaper to just tell a real person to do something different in real time a bunch of times over the course of a day then it is to tell animators to animate a bunch of CGI people differently a bunch of times.

Extras don't get paid that much to begin with (a fixed, flat rate which varies depending on the type of production i.e., commercial vs TV vs movie). Digital artists don't get paid all that much either, but the disparity is large enough that you actually lose money (compared to hiring a real-person extra) if you need to re-animate a CGI extra more than once. And quite frankly, given the limited VFX budgets most productions have to work with, it's better to spend the VFX budget on actual visual effects than on background filler. Otherwise, you end up with Dr Strange 2, Secret Invasion, and the Book of Boba Fett...

[kromem]

You literally just made their point.

"Generative AI is going to replace actors."

"Well actually productions are moving back to actors because they are cheaper than digital artists."

Yes. And guess what else is going to be cheaper than both actors and digital artists?

[gamblor956]

Not generative AI, if that's what you're implying. Just because companies are offering it for free right now as a loss leader means they're going to keep it free when the accountants come home to roost.

An extra costs $100-$1000. A digital artist's time costs about twice that. A license for a generative AI image will cost at least 4x what it costs to pay the extra, and that's not including the subscription you'll need to pay to access the AI service.

[jameshart]

Wait until the LLM interface to the behavioral model of your virtual extras means you can tell the CGI actors to do something different a bunch of times without having to have an animator involved... and they don't need you to provide craft services and wardrobe or complain about being stood on their feet for hours.

[gamblor956]

I'm not sure anyone alive now will still be alive when this magical feat happens.

After all, people were saying that robots would talk like humans and be indistinguishable from sentient life before you or I were ever born.

Decades later, even with CPUs with more than 1,000,000,000,000x the processing power it's still news when a company releases a robot that can walk in a straight line without falling over, which is something that human babies can do before they're able to figure out how to control their own bowel functions.