philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

De-aged stars, cloned voices, resuscitated dead icons: AI is changing the art and business of acting

• While AI boosters celebrate new creative frontiers, critics like Justine Bateman argue digitally manipulating a performance erases what makes acting human.
• “AI is not going anywhere,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who used a clone of Brad Pitt’s voice as a temporary workaround during post-production on “F1.”
• After seeing himself digitally recreated as a young Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill says, “I don’t know the full impact AI will have but I find it very ominous.”

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A few years earlier, he had been dismayed by how a German dub of his 2015 thriller “Heist” flattened the performances, including a key scene with Robert De Niro, to match stiff, mistranslated dialogue. That frustration led Mann to co-found Flawless, an AI startup aimed at preserving the integrity of an actor’s performance across languages. As a proof of concept, he used the company’s tech to subtly reshape De Niro’s mouth movements and restore the emotional nuance of the original scene.

On “Fall,” Mann applied that same technology to clean up the profanity without reshoots, digitally modifying the actors’ mouths to match PG-13-friendly lines like “freaking” — at a fraction of the cost.

Still, Mann doesn’t see AI as a threat so much as a misunderstood tool — one that, used carefully, can support the artists it’s accused of replacing. Flawless’ DeepEditor, for example, lets directors transfer facial expressions from one take to another, even when the camera angle or lighting changes, helping actors preserve their strongest moments without breaking continuity.

“Plenty of actors I’ve worked with have had that moment where they see what’s possible and realize, ‘Oh my God, this is so much better,’” Mann says. “It frees them up, takes off the pressure and helps them do a better job. Shutting AI out is naive and a way to end up on the wrong side of history. Done right, this will make the industry grow and thrive.”

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“The allowances in the contract are pretty astounding,” Bateman says by phone, her voice tight with exasperation. “If you can picture the Teamsters allowing self-driving trucks in their contract — that’s on par with what SAG did. If you’re not making sure human roles are played by human actors, I’m not sure what the union is for.”

To Bateman, the idea that AI expands access to filmmaking — a central tenet of its utopian sales pitch — is a dangerous myth, one that obscures deeper questions about authorship and the value of creative labor.

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“Suddenly you can write a scene — a woman is walking down the street, she looks like this, she’s wearing that, it’s raining, whatever — and AI can create a video for you,” Cronenberg says. “To me, this is all exciting. It absolutely can threaten all kinds of jobs and that has to be dealt with, but every technological advance has done that and we just have to adapt and figure it out.”

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When Luke returned again in a 2022 episode of “The Book of Boba Fett,” the process was even more synthetic. Hamill was minimally involved on camera and the character was built almost entirely from digital parts: a de-aged face mapped onto a body double with an AI-generated voice delivering his lines. Hamill was credited and compensated, though the exact terms of the arrangement haven’t been made public.

The visual effect was notably improved from earlier efforts, thanks in part to a viral deepfake artist known as Shamook, whose YouTube video improving the VFX in “The Mandalorian” finale had racked up millions of views. He was soon hired by Industrial Light & Magic — a rare case of fan-made tech critique turning into a studio job. ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2025-07-24/hollywood-tomorrow-acting-jobs-ai-mark-hamill