philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

These IATSE Artists Are Voting ‘No’ on Their Next Contract, and AI Is to Blame

...

While actors “were able to maintain the rights to their own images and identities and to choose to be replicated or not,” the memo read, “in the new contract language, we have not been given any protections relating to our individual processes when designing, building models, illustrating or creating documents.” ...

Zach Berger, the lead creature designer of the in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” also published a social media thread outlining why he was voting against the contract. Berger explained he was part of the AI task force for the ADG that constructed “proposals that both acknowledged AI’s proliferation, but attempted to protect members’ jobs.”

To his dismay, he did not find any trace of the proposals the task force had assembled in the tentative agreement. ...

“If a producer wants to effectively pre-design the movie for themselves before it even gets to an art department…they want to have the power to do that,” Saunders said. “It’s a huge, huge, huge cost savings. I don’t believe for a second that it’s an accident that stuff was left out.” ...

“We can’t say, ‘Well, this work would normally have taken 10 illustrators three months, and now you’re having two illustrators do it in three weeks,’ Saunders said. “The displacement doesn’t come from the prompts. The selling point of these AI systems is that it means fewer people need to be hired to start with, and that will lead to the credits lists getting shorter on films.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/iatse-artists-voting-no-next-132200635.html