Hey Mom, is that you? Or is that your AI-You?

Issue #47 Keith’s SciFi Musings July 30, 2023

One of the most contentious bargaining points in the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike pitting writers and actors against the multi-millionaires and billionaires who own the studio corporations that employ them is the disagreement about how to deal with the rapidly escalating use of artificial intelligence in filmmaking (commonly referred to as AI).

It’s all pretty complex stuff when you dig into the details, but on a basic level it’s pretty simple; actors don’t want to be replaced by artificially created versions of themselves, and writers would rather not have their skills shoved aside by ChatGPT which can essentially be programmed to write scripts and whatever else - scripts that read as if a real honest-to-God human wrote them.

The studios, on the other hand, see this as an opportunity to pay actors less - and maybe even replace them altogether at some point in the near to distant future - by employing AI-generated actor lookalikes who obviously don’t need to get paid because they ain’t human.

And as for Chat GPT, why not replace those pesky human writers when ChatGPT will never join a union, doesn’t need health care, and won’t give you attitude? Well, at least not until the machines figure that one out too.

This is real-life sci-fi playing out on the picket lines in Hollywood. I’m not even musing here, because this rather twisted debate is going on in real time; should we or should we not as humans continue to employ other humans when a replicant will do just fine?

Obviously, that’s not the way the studios would characterize it, but how they would characterize it really doesn’t matter. Would Jeffrey Dahmer have characterized himself as a monster? Should Jeffrey really be the one you ask?

Right.

So then the question becomes, how much do we, as the humans watching all this go down, give a damn? If we go to watch a movie (or, more likely these days, watch it on our phone, iPad, or TV at home) how long do you think it will be before it makes a difference to us is that really Samuel L. Jackson or Brad Pitt we’re watching?

Or are those the AI-generated versions who look, walk and talk almost, just practically almost but not quite yet but almost exactly like the originals? Especially if the studios manage to win the legal right to say that the AI version is the same as Sam Jackson, and therefore can use his name as promotion and to list in the screen credits at the end, even though Sam isn’t getting a dime for that performance because, well, it ain’t him but his clone…?

Or, even better, what about when the day comes when the few remaining human Hollywood stars are working alongside AI-generated Hollywood stars who aren’t even clones but are completely artificial beings who don’t exist in the real world?

And yet somehow they have very human fans who don’t care that their cinema heroes aren’t real because they’re just so damned cool? Isn’t that the whole idea of movies is to make you suspend your belief so you can enjoy the ride?

Here’s what makes me think we as humans may be on the losing end of this, and it’s totally unrelated to the strike, or even AI. Before the pandemic, there was a very nice - expensive, but nice - grocery shop in downtown Detroit not far from where I work called XXX Market. It had some nice specialty items in the market, a very tasty deli in the back, and a very friendly staff.

Two years later, post-pandemic, I paid XXX Market a visit and…I got chills. Because the only thing the same about XXX Market was the name. The only few humans in the place were other customers. There were no cashiers, no visible employees of any sort. No deli anymore because, I only guess, a deli would require employing humans.

So now, the expectation was that you pick what you want, scan it, and leave. If the scanner didn’t work I don’t know who you were supposed to talk to because there wasn’t even a robot around to handle customer service. I guess if you stole something the cameras would catch you and the alarms would go off and then…

Hell. I dunno. But I haven’t been back since, and that’s been over a year. But the market is still there, and as far as I know, it’s still operating just fine. Because humans no longer need to apply.