Your Face or Mine?
Strikes are all the rage at the minute. And it is incredibly important that we support all our brave doctors, nurses, teachers, extras on The Big Bang Theory, and tube drivers earning an apparently insufficient £60,000 a year.
Turning our attention to one of the more contemptible components of that list: actors. The SAG are currently on the picket line in the US, showing solidarity and posing for photos – they are not mutually exclusive! – and one of the gripes of the group concerns the supposed existential threat posed by AI. We’re no strangers to prematurely lamenting the robot-fuelled extirpation of the species, so we should be all over this. But there isn’t complete unanimity amongst actors, with some celebrities now embracing AI-generated deepfakes.
Jamie Yeo, a Singaporean actress, has just agreed a historic deal with financial technology firm Hugosave which allows them to use a digitally manipulated likeness of her to sell their content. All she needs to do is spend a couple hours in front of a green screen, a couple more in a recording studio, and then the programme synchronises the images with the audio to create a digital alter-ego capable of saying and doing almost anything. Work smarter, not harder. And I for one don’t foresee any way this technology could be misused.
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