As Bloomberg notes, at first glance, the discontent of guild members may seem strange. Indeed, in recent years, the television industry has been actively developing: the number of series and shows has increased by leaps and bounds, as well as investment in their production, which has created new jobs and expanded opportunities for beginning screenwriters. But their working conditions and pay have also changed under the growing influence of streaming services, including Netflix. For example, the length of a season for average shows has increased from around twenty to ten episodes, and the seasons themselves are now rarely longer than three or four. Today, screenwriters almost immediately sell the copyrights to Hollywood studios, which protects them from low salaries if they fail, but deprives them of additional income if the series becomes a hit. As a result, many screenwriters complain that their incomes have become lower and less stable.
Although the strike potentially results in losses for the studios, how well they will meet the demands of the WGA is an open question, as in a media crisis many companies have cut both costs and staff. First, daily evening programs will suffer from the WGA strike, and if the downtime continues, it could disrupt the release of new seasons of popular shows and series.
As predicted by the American media, everything will now end in a compromise. In the meantime, chances are that in the near future, many in Hollywood will find it much harder to fight for their salaries due to growing competition from artificial intelligence (AI). Against the backdrop of the furore that ChatGPT’s literary capabilities have caused, Variety magazine recently pondered the prospects for using neural networks in scripting. But potentially, AI can replace not only workers in the film industry whose work is text-related.
About how neural networks are taking over Hollywood, NBC News recently spoke, citing a company offering AI-powered “face replacement” services as an example. Its software allows literally on the fly to impose almost any effect on the actor’s face or even give them the appearance, movement and facial expressions of another person and even a fictional creature. In this way, the dead legends of cinema are revived.
First, the program looks at the video with various facial expressions of the subject and their movements for a while, and then can overlay their image on any other actor in the frame. For example, they showed on air how such a “cast” of the NBC News TV presenter overlapped in real time with the stunt double replacing her in frame. It was hard to find not just ten, but at least one difference. And then, on the contrary, the presenter herself was replaced throughout the show with a robot, an alien and other images that exactly repeated her movements. ‘You don’t have to go to work anymore,’ joked company spokesman Keith Pizzi, to whom he was given a reasonable question from the presenter about ‘how much of a threat this is to jobs’ in the industry. cinematographic.
Neural networks can potentially do the work of not only screenwriters, but also makeup and special effects masters faster and cheaper than people
Appearance replacement technologies existed before, but they work from sensors and require much more time. According to company representatives, using this technology, it takes up to several weeks to process a one-minute scene, and the neural network allows this to be done either in real time or within hours. In this case, it will come out not only faster, but also cheaper, because there is no need for expensive equipment – all you need is a browser and a camera. The active introduction of such technologies into the filming process is likely to force at least many makeup artists and special effects masters to learn new skills. And for actors, all of this creates the risk of unauthorized use of their appearance or voice.
Read the Latest Science and Technology News Today on The Eastern Herald.
