On the (ahem) Acting Career of Tilly Norwood

To say that Curmie is rather ignorant of popular culture is to err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole.  That wasn’t always true, or at least as true, but especially since retirement, he’s been more tempted to concentrate on things he likes rather than things he should know.  Yeah, he’s that crusty old fart who shouts “WHO?” a lot when watching a parade or a televised holiday celebration featuring “stars.”

But he’s definitely following the… ahem… career of Tilly Norwood, the attractive young woman pictured above.  She’s featured in a newly released two-minute film titled “AI Commissioner.”  She also, of course, doesn’t exist in any unmediated, three-dimensional, sense.  “She” (“it”?) is completely AI generated, and the folks at Particle6 seem pretty damned proud of their creation.

There has been a huge uproar from actors, SAG/AFTRA, and other predictable sources, and of course an equally predictable defense by Particle6 founder Eline Van der Velden.  In fact, about every media outlet you can name has covered the story, and several have published opinion pieces.  The British newspaper The Guardian has already published five different articles about Tilly and the attendant ramifications. 

Curmie finds himself agreeing with Stuart Heritage (why isn’t this guy a historian of the Jacobean period?) that “Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you,” but also that “even if it means that the market will soon be flooded by absolute slop, the betting is that she’s here to stay.”  Heritage also points out that other new ideas that were expected to revolutionize the industry—3D, for instance—turned out to be duds, so perhaps the degree of weeping and wailing is unwarranted. 

The Guardian article that interested Curmie the most, though, was a collection of comments by readers of the first couple of articles to appear.  Virtually all the commenters have a point: no, the threat, such as it is, isn’t immediate; yes, one can presume that “ostlers and bridlemakers were furious with Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford.”  But Curmie wants to highlight the commentary of AshMordant:

It’s too late to be scared.

Hollywood is not about making art, it’s about making money.

Give us one good reason why studios should pay for cameramen, makeup artists, set designers, lighting, catering and of course actors when AI can do the job and make money.

Films made with real people – actors as well as all the other innumerable people listed in the end credits – will soon be something like ballet or opera: enjoyed by a few cinéastes who are willing to pay all the money for this art form.

But why would a fan of the, say, Fast and Furious franchise or the Marvel universe or whatever it is called do that? All they care about are visual and aural stimuli, and AI can deliver that perfectly. 

Well, as Curmie used to say a lot in his Asian Theatre class, yes and no.  Certainly there is little interest in Hollywood in making art; mediocrity sells, after all.  Whether films featuring human actors will go the way of ballet and opera is speculative.  But the idea that movies that rely on “visual and aural stimuli” would not be seriously affected by replacing a couple of humans with AI-generated versions is, well, simply a statement of fact.

Regular readers here know that Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of TV whodunnits.  Not infrequently, the stars of such shows clearly got their jobs more for being conventionally attractive than for their acting ability.  Almost always, they’re fine most of the time: no one will confuse them with Ian McKellen or Emma Thompson, but they can handle the vast majority of what they’re required to do.  Inevitably, however, they’re called upon to show a spontaneous reaction or display a real emotion… and Curmie finds himself shouting at the TV, “don’t make [insert gender-appropriate pronoun here] act!”  AI is all about processing the past, which makes it a paean to conventionality and mediocrity.  But if what it replaces is already, well, conventional and mediocre, then the loss is negligible.

Well, sort of.  A number of ultimately excellent actors weren’t necessarily brilliant from the get-go.  Whether they were learning their trade in full view of millions of people, or whether they were relegated to eye-candy roles that didn’t allow for actual acting doesn’t matter.  Talent can’t be taught; skill can.  And AI poses a threat in that it stands to short-circuit the career of those with the former but not yet the latter.

Moreover, the actors who will be affected by this aren’t the ones making eight figures for every film or seven figures for every TV episode.  Rather, it will be the ones whose names are unfamiliar to everyone but their family and friends.  As of two years ago, only about one in seven members of SAG/AFTRA earned even the $26,470 in film and TV work required to receive insurance through the union.  It may be easy to scoff at the not-really-so-hard lives of the millionaires and billionaires, but the overwhelming majority of actors in the trenches are struggling to make ends meet while living in the extremely expensive area around Los Angeles.  These, not the stars, are the folks whose jobs Tilly and her manipulators want to put out of work.

“AI Commissioner” is remarkably unfunny for what is advertised as a comedy.  Tilly is not required to do much, and what she does do requires neither significant talent nor skill.  But, just as other variations on the theme of AI have improved significantly over even the last few months, we can reasonably expect that future Tilly clones will be qualitatively better than what we’ve seen so far.  And we can reasonably suspect that some future project might actually hire some decent writers.

It strikes Curmie that there are three areas of contestation here: the technological, the ethical, and the pragmatic.  Let’s tease those out a little.

We start with the technological.  Clearly, Tilly isn’t ready to play a major role yet, and probably won’t be by the time the current SAG/AFTRA contract expires roughly nine months from now.  But progress will be made, and everyone concerned had better be ready for the negotiations.  Actors, the real ones, still have enough clout that the threat of another strike will mean something.  But the studios and producers aren’t without power, either.

One of the principal disputes that led to the SAG/AFTRA strike two years ago was what Curmie called an “obscene” proposal by producers that background actors be paid a single day’s wage for the rights to use their image in perpetuity without consent or remuneration.  Obviously, variations on the theme of CGI were intended to replace background actors, whose images could be manipulated to fill in for a presumably slightly different group of actual humans. 

We know, of course, that CGI has been employed in manifold ways both before and after the latest SAG/AFTRA contract was finalized.  But, and here’s the transition to ethical consideration, CGI is different to the extent that a CGI-generated is generally employed to make a character do something a human actor can’t do (think superhero movies, for example) or to create a character that isn’t, in fact, human (e.g., Gollum, or Thing in the Addams Family franchise).  Curmie isn’t sure how the negotiations ended up on replacing background actors, so there may be an exception there, but some of the commentary he’s reading suggests that there is at least some protection for human background actors.

The unions’ claim that AI is “trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation” is both true and ethically ambivalent.  Where is the line between studying and de facto plagiarism?  When Curmie was 17, he did a show with an experienced comic actor who consistently got laughs by separating line and gesture.  Curmie adopted a similar strategy in future shows, and indeed taught it to younger actors when he began his teaching and directing career.  Was that stealing?  Or just learning?

Still, there is a line there that should not be crossed, especially when we’re talking about an AI “actor” doing literally the same thing as the source rather than simply employing a general concept.  In scholarly writing, even a two- or three-word description (something like “farcical tragedy”) sometimes shouldn’t be repeated without attribution, but at other times a much longer passage, even word-for-word (significant person X was born on this date in this place to this couple, whose occupations were… etc.), won’t cause much concern.  (Curmie, being Curmie, still wanted students to cite sources, even for that generic stuff.)  One supposes that some rules could be put in place to allow some uses of AI but nor others, but it’s difficult to imagine how. 

So now we turn to the pragmatic.  This is a genie that isn’t going back into the bottle, at least until everyone is satisfied that there neither are nor will be further advances in the technology (unlikely), or studios start thinking of rewarding actual artists instead of corporate suits (even more unlikely).  Hollywood is the very crystallization of late-stage capitalism, uninterested in anything but making more money for those in power. 

Tilly Norwood is being touted as the next Scarlett Johansson.  That’s not gonna happen, at least as long as the real one draws movie-goers in large numbers.  Tilly won’t do that, except perhaps very briefly as a variation on the theme of a freak show.  But she is a helluva lot cheaper, even after you figure in the salaries of the geeks who manipulate her, and we can expect studio heads to start circling around Tilly and her successors like sharks around a wounded seal if given half a chance.

Curmie isn’t seeing much of an upside here.  Perhaps, though, the citizenry is more interested in good work than in profits for overpaid capitalist hacks.  Or they’ll just get bored with the gimmick.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.  On the other hand, theatre, fiction, and film have all warned us of the dangers of allowing any form of artificial intelligence too much scope: think R.U.R. (which is over a century old!), 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the first Star Trek movie, for example.  That doesn’t mean the prospects are necessarily dire; they are just extremely unlikely to be positive unless, Gentle Reader, you own stock in Netflix or Amazon or Disney or whoever.

We shall see.

Overdue Comments on the WGA and SAG/AFTRA Strikes

What’s not to love about this guy?

Given Curmie’s long-time profession, it will come as no surprise to you, Gentle Reader, that he knows a fair number of people who are currently involved in the WGA [Writers Guild of America] and SAG/AFTRA [Screen Actors Guild/ American Federation of Television and Radio Actors] strikes. Nor will it come as a shock that all of them—and Curmie, too, of course—are on the same side of the issue. 

Not so curiously, Curmie knows nary a studio exec, so you may feel free to assert that he hears only one side of the dispute. Curmie would even agree with you if he thought the studios actually had an argument other than greed, hubris, and a particularly insidious form of predation. 

Curmie has seen a fair bit of sniping about the strikes from two predictable sources: news outlets which (ever so coincidentally, of course) are owned by the same folks who own the studios, and the kind of blinkered conservative who really thinks executives ought to be paid a zillion or so times as much as the people actually doing the work. 

The former generally takes the form of “look at all these innocent people affected by the strike,” to which the most reasonable response (other than “up yours”) is “then get the AMPTP [the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers] to negotiate, instead of literally saying (privately) “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” 

The other variation on the theme is to blame the unions who are trying to negotiate instead of the fatcats who aren’t: hence, for example, the New York Times headline, “Emmy Awards Will Be Postponed Because of Actors’ and Writers’ Strikes.” Yeah, it’s all their fault, right? We might also add that the short-term suffering of non-actors affected by the strike (makeup artists, caterers, wardrobe rental companies, etc., etc., etc.) may lessen if and when the strike is resolved, but much of the damage will become permanent if the most obscene of the AMPTP’s proposals is enacted. That would be the belief that background actors ought to be paid a single day’s wage for the rights to use their image in perpetuity without consent or remuneration. As soon as some studio exec agrees to submit to that arrangement (and their daily wage is a helluva lot more than that of a background actors), we can talk. 

It is not difficult to imagine that those images could be used for all manner of purposes for which the real person thus portrayed wouldn’t want to be associated, even with remuneration. And we don’t appear to be talking just about the films per se, either. For example, Curmie has a friend and former student who happens to be quite a beautiful young woman in a real-people-look-like-this way. She’s not a professional model, but she’s made a little money from appearing in print ads, at least one for a national corporation. But if the AMPTP have their way, they, not she, would control the rights to her image if she’d ever appeared as a background actor. 

Another of Curmie’s friends and former students, also a beautiful young woman, appeared in several episodes of a network TV show. Her character had a name but no lines, meaning she was “background.” She damned well ought to own the exclusive rights to her own image. 

Jack Marshall may be right that “SAG-AFTRA is whistling past the metaphorical graveyard.” Well, in the long term, at least. But this proposal from a cabal of amoral goons betrays the simple truth that AI is not yet at the point at which it can create realistic human images from thin air: it still needs a model, or you can be assured that the AMPTP would eliminate background actors altogether. In the short term, background actors are a necessary part of the process, and the AMPTP knows it. 

Of course, the other AMPTP (and minions) tactic is to remind us that the best-paid actors make eight-figure salaries for every film. That’s true, of course, and some of them aren’t terribly proficient thespians. But (and as the say in burlesque, it’s a big but), having the name of Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Brad Pitt (yes, the list is mostly men, but that’s a rant for another day) attached to a movie actually sells tickets. So would a handful of big-name directors—Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, Peter Jackson, et al.. But Curmie has to meet anyone who says something like, “ooh, that movie was produced by a studio headed by David Zaslav [salary a little over $39 million a year]. I’ve gotta see it!!!” 

The overwhelming majority of SAG/AFTRA actors, of course, aren’t even close to bringing in pots of money. [Note: Curmie is about to quote a series of statistics pulled from social media posts. He hasn’t verified their accuracy, but he knows enough about the industry to know that these figures are completely plausible. Still, you have been warned, Gentle Reader.] 98% of SAG members make less than $65,000 a year. 87% don’t even make the $26,470 a year to get insurance through the union. Meanwhile, execs at studios you’ve never heard of are pulling in eight-figure salaries. 

Residual checks are absurdly low. Jana Schmieding recently posted that she receives 3 cents every quarter for her appearance in six episodes of “Reservation Dogs.” Oh, but she was a lead in “Rutherford Falls,” appearing in all 18 episodes. For that, she raked in $33.15 a quarter. That makes… $132.72 a year for unlimited worldwide streams for the 24 episodes of the two shows. Surely she can retire on that, right? 

Other actors have shared similar stories: Kamil McFadden posted his residual payments—including some negative numbers (!?!); The problem here is that streaming wasn’t as big a thing when the last contract was negotiated. But, partially as a result of COVID, a number of movies are bypassing movie theaters altogether, and corporations like Netflix are now producing their own material. So compensation plans based almost exclusively on literal butts in seats are outdated. The studios know that, of course, but they like making huge profits—Netflix has a market cap of over $190 billion (yes, with a “b”); surpassing Disney’s paltry $157 billion. And, of course, they don’t want to share any of that lucre with mere actors… or writers. They know it’s unfair; they know it’s unethical. But they think they can get away with it. 

You can check out the SAG/AFTRA proposals here. In addition to the items noted above: Per diems haven’t increased in over two decades, and payments are habitually late. Payments for dry cleaning when performers need to provide their own clothing for a role are inadequate. The AMPTP rejected anything that even resembles revenue sharing. And on and on. 

To be fair, some of the union’s proposals are a bit over the top, some of their characterizations of the AMPTP’s positions are less than entirely accurate (assuming the AMPTP’s public proclamations and private negotiating positions actually align), and some of the counter-proposals seem pretty reasonable. 

But it’s rather a tell when the studios keep changing their standard of measurement from dollars to percentages and back, according to which makes their side look less absurd. For example, hefty percentage increases in residuals for SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand, e.g., Netflix or Amazon) performances don’t mean much: 122% of bupkes is still bupkes. There are plenty of other variations on this theme, of course. Curmie won’t bother to enumerate them all. 

Of course, the real clue to what’s going on and who’s to blame comes in the fact that a considerably smaller studio, A24, is able to meet SAG/AFTRA’s conditions, and therefore received a waiver. One of their recent films was “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” You may have heard of it, Gentle Reader. It received Oscars for Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Directing, Leading Actress, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, and Editing, plus four other Oscar nominations and a raftload of other awards and nominations. That ain’t bad. 

Among the actors whose A24 projects can move forward because of the SAG/AFTRA waiver: Anne Hathaway, Paul Rudd, Matthew McConaughey, Sigourney Weaver, and Rebel Wilson. There are some folks there whose work people would pay to see! 

Let’s put this in the terms of The Horror Guru: “I want you let it sink in that A24, the smaller company that makes and distributes low budget independent films, is able to adhere to SAG-AFTRA'S terms while the big studios making the top 10 grossing films of the year are acting like they can't afford it.” Funny, that, innit? 

The WGA strike is framed a little differently, but the basics are the same: multi-millionaire execs thinking that people actually doing the work shouldn’t be able to pay the rent. The writers do a little better than the actors, in part because there are fewer of them, but an average income of $69,510 doesn’t go all that far if you’re living in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is over 44% higher than the national average. 

There are a number of areas of contention here: “minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production.” Of course, the sniping here comes from conservative talking heads who couldn’t write a two-minute skit with the proverbial gun at their heads. “AI could do better,” quoth they. Here’s the thing: yes, there’s some bad writing out there. But there’s also some really good writing, and AI basically translates as the celebration of mediocrity, the literary equivalent of paint by numbers. It can re-create the same-old same-old really well; creativity is beyond its capability. 

In the realm of “if this isn’t true, it should be” comes a social media post which says that ChatGPT was asked which job could be more readily replaced by AI: screenwriter or corporate CEO. The verdict: the latter, of course.

As a CEO, much of the decision-making process is based on data analysis, risk assessment, and resource allocation, which are areas where AI is particularly effective. AI can process large amounts of data quickly and accurately, identify patterns and trends, and provide insights that can help inform strategic decision-making….

AI may be able to analyze data on successful screenplays and provide insights into what elements are more popular, but ultimately, the creative process of writing a compelling screenplay relies on human intuition and emotion. In conclusion, while AI can assist with some aspects of both roles, it is more likely to be better suited for tasks related to a corporate CEO than screenwriting.

Meanwhile, Netflix is advertising positions with high six-figure salaries for AI gurus, and at least a dozen A-listers have kicked in a million dollars or more apiece to fund SAG/AFTRA’s Emergency Financial Assistance Program. 

The battle lines are being drawn, and both sides seem firmly entrenched. Not all of the unions’ demands are reasonable (that’s why there are negotiations), but it is clear that they’re the good guys in this skirmish. And the stakes are extremely high. 

Especially on the issue of AI, Curmie finds it difficult to argue with the nightmare (doomsday?) scenario outlined by Justine Bateman. As a WGA and Directors Guild member, former SAG board member, and a coder with a degree from UCLA in computer science and digital media management, she offers a level of expertise and experience Curmie doesn’t come close to matching. So when she says “I believe this is the last time any labor action will be effective in our business. If we don't make strong rules now, they simply won't notice if we strike in three years, because at that point, they won't need us,” we—all of us—damned well better pay attention. 

Commerce and art are often at odds, now as much as ever. One of the things Curmie is most grateful for as respects his year in England in the late ‘70s was exposure to the Tom Robinson Band, which never made much of a ripple west of the Atlantic. Two of their songs come to mind. “Power in the Darkness” opens with “Power in the darkness / Frightening lies from the other side / Power in the darkness / Stand up and fight for your rights.” 

Even more relevant, perhaps, is this sequence from “Better Decide Which Side You’re On”: “You better decide which side you're on / This ship goes down before too long / If Left is right then Right is Wrong / You better decide which side you’re on.” 

Those songs, of course, had nothing to do with labor actions in a different country taking place some 45 years later. Or did they? Art has always opened doors to understanding far beyond its immediate context. It’s time to decide which side we’re on.