While working on a movie in Taiwan, actor and screenwriter Peter Skagen got very sick and was unable to finish filming.
Fortunately for the producers and unknown to Skagen, during the makeup and wardrobe tests they had Skagen against a green screen and were digitizing his face, which they would end up using to finish the film.
“The director said ‘That’s alright we’ll just get your stuntman to do the movie, and then we’ll put your face on him’,” Skagen says. “So I had no choice. I wound up doing the whole movie from my hotel room in Taiwan as a reference, so my stunt man would know what to do.”
Skagen, an actor and acting professor at Mount Royal University explains that in Asia there is no actors guild, so many practices are very different. This includes the digitization of actors being commonplace for the films, without adequate compensation for the actual people.
“He’s making the movie, but I’m going to be the guy in the movie,” Skagen says. “What it means is that they got me for almost nothing.”
Now that his face has been digitized and is in the possession of those producers, Skagen worries about what’s next.
“They have me digitized, and now the question is, what can they do with it, and what are they going to do without telling me and without paying me?”
With AI finding its way into every corner of our lives, artists and creatives like Skagen have found themselves uniquely threatened by the technology, which is growing quickly.
It only took five days for ChatGPT to reach 1 million users after its release in November last year. Now the website has over a billion visitors every month with more than 150 million active users, and now with ChatGPT’s newest update at the end of November, it now has access to the internet, previously only having data up until 2021.
ChatGPT is one of many avenues that users can go through for AI content, and its usefulness has become undeniable. As other AI programs develop and get more support, the technology will no doubt improve. But what will that mean for people who make their living from some of the adjacent fields?
Writers
Concern is the best word to describe feelings of writers in Alberta.
Jason Norman, programs and events coordinator with the Writers Guild of Alberta hears numerous concerns from writers, many of them similar to other creatives.
“People are just concerned with the idea as a whole. Mainly about the idea that AI is going to steal, steal their work or replace them,” says Norman. “These language models are being taught with copyrighted material and with written work that already exists. And then that work is being used to train different AI programs.”
Many writers are concerned with AI being able to write a story that mimics their style and approach to writing. When this occurs the writer’s hard work is being used to produce more products that can be profited on, without any say from the writers themselves.
“So then when somebody says ‘write me a story that sounds like a Margaret Atwood story’, it will have been,” says Norman. “It will have been trained on everything Margaret Atwood’s ever written. And I think Margaret Atwood has something to say about if that’s a good thing or a bad thing or not. At the very least, I think she wants to be recognized and paid for stuff like that.”
Writers who have pieces on the internet are being used to make artificial intelligence better, and improve the effectiveness of these programs. With artists receiving no compensation or chance to approve these processes.
“I think right now people are kind of just saying, ‘the technology’s moving so fast how can you keep up?’ and I think that’s how people end up not getting paid for their work and not getting recognized for their work,” Norman says.
The Writers Guild of Alberta has many legal resources online for any writers struggling with these issues, as well as having several conferences and panels throughout the year to try and provide as much information to writers as possible.
“It’s important now because when people are talking about it, that’s usually when the misinformation starts to grow and the fear element of things starts to grow. So we want to make sure that people have the proper information and the proper resources to make their decisions that are informed,” Norman says.
Artists
Every image used in this article was generated completely by Midjourney AI, a digital tool that creates images based on the user’s prompts.
Many of these images look fake and look created in a way that is unnatural due to the current limitations of these programs. They begin to struggle when asked to illustrate humans or bizarre situations, but do best when given simple prompts.
These next two prompts included different ratios and had specific instructions included to produce a paint-like picture, and these are much more likely to trick the viewer into thinking it was human made.
They can also mimic artist styles, such as Bob Ross as done in this example, above.
According to a recent informal survey, artists around the world don’t believe copyright laws are doing enough to protect them and are worried about AI replacing them in the future. In other words, this is a pressing issue for anyone who makes a living through their art.
Quality versus quantity
ChatGPT can write a 600 word short story in 10 seconds, whereas it can take much longer for a human writer to create a 600 word short story they are happy with. As more and more people use AI tools to create written stories, the question becomes to what extent do consumers care about the quality of their writing.
Norman understands the effort and work that goes into creating a written piece and the hours of labour that any story requires. But he hopes people will continue to prefer reading and paying for those pieces instead of AI content that will be cheaper.
“We might have to have a discussion whether society as a whole prefers reading content created by a robot or content created by a human being,” says Norman.
The quantity being put out by artificial intelligence is staggering and Norman fears people may eventually choose to read whatever is put out by AI just because it will be there quicker and there will be more of it.
“So if people just decide that they want more and the only way to create more of it is robots and they don’t care and they just want kind of stuff to stare at on the screen,” says Norman.
Skagen is worried about the quality of future films as producers work to digitize locations around the world and digitize actors to make unlimited sequels that might not be the greatest film product.
“It’s not going to look very real, but you might like it enough. And that’s what troubles me because they’ll just bring down this state of everything and people will get used to it,” Skagen says.
Like many other sectors, Skagen worries about job security for many in the film industry as so many aspects of movie production can be done virtually.
“Most of us in the business will be out of luck because they’ll literally just be making movies like animated Disney movies. So it’ll all be done on a desktop somewhere and the rest of us that are actually the people who make the movies will be out of work.”