A ‘Collaborative’ Fight Against AI?

I listened to a conversation recently with Daniel Kwan and Jaron Lanier that I thought was worth sharing: 🔗 Link to X post

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Daniel’s view: filmmakers, agencies, unions, academies, and studios (temporarily) hold the cards. And if the industry is to adopt AI, then technology companies need to conform to the rules they set.

These rules might ensure:

• That video AI models have been trained on licensed data (Moonvalley has taken this approach)
• That a certain percentage of a film's crew are real actors rather than AI-generated
• That AI companies play an active role in preventing illegal and harmful deepfakes

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It’s not clear to me how technology companies would conform to these rules or what the regulation surrounding them would look like. But I definitely sympathize with Daniel’s perspective.

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That said, I’m not particularly hopeful about the prospect of all these parties working collaboratively against technology companies to set rules that protect their “collective interests.”

We’re already seeing major studios aggressively adopt AI into their pipelines because they see AI’s potential to be a substantial cost-saver.

And some of these adoptions are fundamentally at odds with the interests of:

• Agencies
• Unions
• Filmmakers

...who want to maximize their earning potential / the earning potential of talent they represent.

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If an AI-company offers a model with the strongest video output that shaves 50% off a film budget, but that AI-company:

• Hasn’t trained its model on licensed data
• Isn’t focused on stopping users from using the tech with malicious intent

— will studios opt out?

Maybe some will. But the ones that don’t, stand to financially benefit most from these cost savings.

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My view is that a meaningful collaborative fight against AI won’t happen due to the mismatch of incentives— and the studios that aggressively adopt the technology now in their workflows will take the lion's share of the profit.

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🎭 Actors can’t rely on regulation. No professional can.

In a world where Hollywood doesn’t meaningfully fight back, actors cannot rely on regulations and corporations to protect their interests. Actors need to take active steps to educate themselves about this technology and its implications.

In my mind, actors need to start using it to their own advantage—just as more and more studios are beginning to do so.

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We’ve been teasing the launch of a new feature we’ve been working on at Acting Pal ~ Projects:

The ability to safely collaborate with AI filmmakers, star in your own narratives, and distribute your content to vertical distribution platforms — all within one interface.

Again, we know this tool/feature won’t be for everyone. But we also know that there are many actors who are curious and wish to explore what I feel is:

🎬 “Acting at the frontier.”

For those who are curious about a potential collaboration with AI-filmmakers, Projects will be a very exciting prospect.