Saturday, May 20, 2023
As of 2025, please go to stuff.davidaugust.com, my newer blog. See you there!
Being Human in the Age of AI
being human is big, bigger than we usually think it is
There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence (AI) doing as well or better than humans at things. Machines have long out-performed people at a lot of stuff. And this doesn't just apply to complicated machines like cars, but simple machines, like a lever, have long amplified or done better than us. A pry bar is better at prying things than our bare hands. But humans have not, ever since the first person used a rock to make their efforts easier, been made obsolete by the machines we've made.
Sure, some things we have machines do that people used to do. But humans haven't stopped existing because of this. If anything, machines have allowed us to grow: machines and technology are part of why there are more humans currently alive than there have been at any other point in history. Humans haven't been made obsolete by tech.
So why is AI disrupting things typically done only by humans? Things like writing, art making, film-making and acting are starting to be threatened by systems, artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Why isn't it pry bars and not artists? Life and limb.
A self-driving car getting things wrong immediately collapses into the tyranny of atoms: concrete and often irreversible consequences come when a machine driving itself ends a life, or ruins someone's property. While self-driving vehicles may get to the point they are safer than human drivers, they will never be perfect, and this imperfection when matters of life and limb are involved, makes them hard to cheer for or even experiment with out in the real world.
Not so with media, entertainment and the arts. Artistic creations made by non-humans don't leave grotesque consequences if they fail: any bad movies, books, music and more made by artificial-intelligence (AI) will fade into the noise floor of un-celebrated human artistic attempts. No life or limb is imperiled if an artificial intelligence (AI) made film falls flat, instead bank accounts and careers get impacted (and disappointed audience).
This lack of life and limb involvement can make creative and artistic endeavors feel like the "consequence-free" world of software and web development: as if one can fail quickly and iterate in order to experiment in public and refine as one goes. However, the context of software and any context where life and limb are in play react very differently to things if one tries to fail fast. Experimenting and learning are invaluable, but at scale and in public, the tyranny of atoms makes doing so with self-driving vehicles, autonomous weapons and other life and limb scenarios far more dire than an unpleasing painting or a film that flops at the box office.
While many life and limb contexts benefit from the fact automated and artificial intelligence (AI) systems don't suffer from fatigue, emotional compromise or inebriation, some of the same things that drive humans to be tired, emotional, or otherwise not consistent are vital to make good decisions in other ways. Logical decisions with zero emotion can be low quality decisions (there are studies suggesting this is true, but they are beyond the scope of our discussion here).
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises the benefits of intelligence with none of the "downsides" like inconsistency or asking for a paycheck. Taking humans out of the loop may be possible, even beneficial in some contexts. But imagining an artificial system will benefit from all the strengths we take for granted in humans (or even see as liabilities) seems a mistake. Human are imperfect according to humans. What we find desirable and what the universe has evolved us into for our survival as a species are not the same. Eugenics makes many errors, this is one among them. Humans are great at a lot, even things we don't think of as great.
Being human includes the foibles and messy parts. It's not pre-Copernican to suggest that humans, after millions of years of evolution, are excellent at being human. This includes messing stuff up, hurting ourselves and also creating great things, beauty, connection, grace, mercy, cruelty: all of it. To imagine in the space of a few years or decades one can do what has taken billions of people filtering through millions of years of evolving is the magical thinking here. To fall so I love with human ingenuity and creation as to believe in a few generations time we can out create the forces of evolution over the timeline of geologic epochs, that is feeling to me like the fallacy in this.
Yes, AI can do, and maybe even excel at, specific human-like tasks. The question of what is necessary and sufficient for something artistic to be art, what is the essential that makes art in fact art is an entire branch of philosophy. There is little consensus on this, and what makes art human, or what human component is necessary for something to connect and resonate may not have consensus either. That said: I think saying there is an X factor, some amorphous and undefined thing, that is a cop out.
The generative AIs, both images and text, are sophisticated mirrors. Highly complex yes, but basically reflecting back their prompt and their training data is all they're actually doing. Often compelling enough for us to forget this, but that is what is happening even if the results feel like more.
So here goes:
It is the vast and minute combination of human intuition, rationality, emotion, fear, power, weakness, apprehension, insight and ignorance. At the risk of paraphrasing the dignity of man speech in Hamlet, we might sum it up as the human condition.
Wikipedia, a source of common meanings, sums the human condition up as "the characteristics and key events of human life, including birth, learning, emotion, aspiration, morality, conflict, and death." Mortality and love (not just romantic love) certainly seem to figure in to what I think the condition of being human includes. And how love and mortality figure into making art, or any creation in a way, is somehow uniquely human. We can probably spend a long time and many words defining, describing and discussing this.
For our purposes: knowing we will die perhaps underscores all our actions with a fleeting immediacy, even if that immediacy is an undercurrent and not the focus of what we do moment to moment, day to day. Does a machine have a functional life? Of course. But none of its activities are filtered, really in any way, through a lens of that mechanized mortality. Even in the back of our minds, under our awareness, the fact we may stop existing does inform in both subtle and bold ways how we do what we do.
Fictional characters are often revealed by how the do what they do. In many ways, how we do what we do is who we are. How the character says what they say, matters almost as much as what they've said. I leave the studies on non-verbal communication dominating the information exchanged between people for others to detail elsewhere.
How someone lifts a coffee cup can speak volumes about them, what they have done, are doing and will do. Does the way they lift it reveal the old injury from their time in a past captivity? Do they lift it in preparation to enjoy a moment's respite from current stress? Are they preparing to go without coffee as they are due too enter a coffee-less meeting? All of these options and a myriad more impact how the simple act of lifting a cup of coffee happens. They can be revealed and communicated in many ways like how quickly, slowly, angrily, happily and a bunch of other details that we all notice, even if not consciously.
And this rich, deep, full bodied (pun intended) action and all it communicates (literally, emotionally and maybe even spiritually) happens on some level even from this mundane act of picking up a cup of coffee. It can be filtered (pun intended again) through the whole of the human experience of the person lifting the cup, and also through the whole of the our human experiences as we witness it. With varying levels of awareness and attention, our neurology encounters and interprets what we behold in a rich amalgam of ways that help us understand, cognitively and otherwise, the world and those in it.
If all of this can easily become an overwhelming, almost unmeasurable amount of "data" were we to try to digitize it. Both the actor and the viewer are effected by it all and in turn effect the interaction in so many ways.
To imagine that we, in a handful of years, will be able to do this with a machine is folly. To replicate or emulate with a machine (let alone innovate) such a deep and complex moment as raising a cup of coffee is a little bit of hubris.
What's that you say? An mp3 compresses sound to about a tenth the size (in data) of what CD quality sound takes up by trying too remove what the algorithm imagines (was designed) to think we won't miss. And mp3s still give us the emotional and other impacts of the higher quality sound file? Our music on our phones and streaming services is still music, right? Yes, but if something walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and isn't actually a duck it still matters if it isn't a duck. And some people do consciously hear the difference between an mp3 and CD quality music. The rest of us unconsciously hear the difference (studies of galvanic skin response suggest different audio qualities and film frames rates effect us differently physiologically).
Why does that matter? Because there are many things the simulacrum (the simulation or reproduction) of things do not have that the actual things do have. People still flock to see the Mona Lisa despite reproductions, even very high quality and faithful reproductions. Those reproductions may have a "better" viewing experience than traveling to Paris and dealing with crowds. Is that some sort of fame fetish, or placebo effect? Maybe.
The fact remains: when we have had whatever day we have had, and crave the comfort of stories, we often yearn to have humans help us make sense, not just of events, but of our own experience, emotions and spirituality from the day. We have done this as long as we have done anything, even if at first it used to only be around the embers of a fire in caves long ago. Now we use tech to send reproductions of people to the far reaches of the globe, but the purpose and our need for it is the same.
If people still care about an original painting made centuries ago, can we really assume they won't care about original people on screen made now? Can our creation with only artificial intelligence (AI) really out human our ability to human? No. It can enhance, stand-in-for and supplement humans. Much as shoes do for more the fragile soles of our feet than going barefoot does, so too will artificial intelligence (AI) allow us to do new things. And like shoes, or a pry bar, or any other technology, artificial intelligence (AI) will change things, even in ways we can't yet guess at. But it seems deeply unlikely any artificial intelligence will somehow, inexplicably, transcend the makers of it.
What feature could allow any digital or electronic system to suddenly cross the threshold of passing from not human to beyond human? Since we don't agree on what being human is to begin with, we may not even be able to measure or meaningfully discuss when something we have made is more us than we are.
Our imagining we already consciously understand the what and why of how we connect with humans and human stories may be the big fallacy of this. Can we make something that imitates human stuff? Probably. We can probably even make imitations that we will believe are the real thing, at least in some contexts. Will this somehow become better at being human, whatever that means to us, than humans are? Probably not. Whatever our weaknesses and strengths, we probably aren't going to buck or defy our own natures enough to make a more human-than-human non-human.
Labels: acting, artificial intelligence, entertainment, film, technology, trends, tv
this posted by David August at 5:20 PM - 0 comments - 
Sunday, May 07, 2023
As of 2025, please go to stuff.davidaugust.com, my newer blog. See you there!
Hollywood Producers on the Brink: Why Making a Deal is Critical
Hollywood Producers' negotiating style threatens the industry
Hollywood producers are facing mounting pressure to reach a deal with striking writers, as more recognizable faces in the industry prepare to join picket lines once directors' and actors' contracts run out as well. Producers have only weeks to avoid a potentially disastrous situation, as audience backlash against intransigence could escalate. Economic uncertainty, compounded by a recent interest rate hike, adds to the urgency for producers to resolve the issue and maintain market stability.
Industry experts suggest that a deal with writers now on strike is a solvable problem, and could free up valuable resources to handle future economic challenges. With audiences increasingly interested in convenient, on-demand viewing experiences, any further disruption to their preferred entertainment could lead to lasting damage to brand sentiment and subscriber bases, ultimately resulting in a loss of customers.
While union-busting consultants may suggest a hard-line approach, the risks of such a strategy outweigh the benefits. As viewing habits shift rapidly, producers cannot afford to alienate their core audience by attempting to underpay workers, leaving them with no material to show. It is clear that producers must prioritize a deal with writers to avoid damaging long-term consequences and to maintain their market position.
As Hollywood producers continue to grapple with the ongoing writers' strike, they face the stark reality that long labor strikes can have disastrous effects on their companies. History shows that prolonged strikes can lead to financial losses, damaged relationships with talent, and negative public perception.
One of the most infamous examples of a long strike's impact on companies is the 1980 strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). The strike lasted for over 3 months, causing delays and cancellations of TV shows and films, and resulted in hundreds of millions in losses for the entertainment industry. The strike also included a boycott of the Emmy Awards ceremony by all but one single Emmy winner.
Another example of the potentially devastating effects of labor strikes on a media business is the case of the 1987 strike by the National Football League (NFL) players. The strike lasted for 24 days, causing the season to be shortened to 15 games per team. The NFL's total revenue loss due to the strike was estimated to be over a billion dollars, and it took several years for the league to recover from the effects of the strike.
In 2007–2008, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike for about 100 days, demanding higher pay for streaming content. The strike caused delays and cancellations of TV shows and films, and resulted in an estimated $2.5 billion loss for the entertainment industry. It also led to strained relationships between writers and producers, as well as a decline in public perception of the industry.
While these strikes were ultimately resolved, the importance of reaching a deal quickly to avoid long-term damage to the industry and to the companies involved is real and present tense. The past strikes highlight the potential risks to producers of a prolonged labor dispute.
The current negotiations between Hollywood producers and striking writers are particularly important, given the economic uncertainty caused by wider economic factors and the ongoing shift in viewing habits.
Beyond financial losses and damaged relationships, long labor strikes can also lead to negative public perception of the entertainment industry. Audience sentiment towards the industry is already fragile, with growing concerns over diversity and inclusion in Hollywood. Any further disruptions to viewers' preferred entertainment options could result in lasting damage to the industry's reputation and a loss of customers.
Finally, with these viewing preference possibly in flux, and fact technological hurdles to building distribution on one's own are lower than ever before, the producers risk making their own possible competitive existential threat a reality: the writers learning to finance, market and distribute their work themselves. Producers in the past could rely on big obstacles like access to movie theatres and broadcast airwaves to keep their position in the entertainment ecosystem secure, even during labor actions.
Today, most forms of entertainment can reach their audiences with out any involvement of theatres, broadcast airwaves or other technological bottlenecks. While it would take a lot of change for the writers to cut the producers out of the equation of modern entertainment, the longer the producers refuse to deal and the strike drags on, the higher the incentives for them, and their companies, to be circumvented entirely. Producers delays slowing a quick and stable resolution speeds up the process of their own obsolescence.
Ultimately, the success of the negotiations between Hollywood producers and striking writers will have significant consequences for the industry's future and the viability of producers' businesses as profitable, ongoing concerns. It is essential that a deal is offered soon to avoid long-term damage, and to ensure that the industry can continue to thrive in the face of ongoing challenges.
Labels: acting, contracts, entertainment, film, labor, tv, unions
this posted by David August at 2:12 PM - 0 comments -
Thursday, December 22, 2022
As of 2025, please go to stuff.davidaugust.com, my newer blog. See you there!
Lights Out
ephemeral nature of our work
I imagine these same questions are what the Twitter alums are dealing with right now. It will be difficult for them, too. But this [company closing and turning off all the servers] is a necessary step in the career for anyone who wants to arrange electrons for a living. Because the things we make, the ways we express our creativity, none of it is tangible. It can all go away with the press of a button. And we have to face that part of the bargain with our eyes open. Making something lasting of our lives is difficult, and very few of us will ever do it. But making something lasting with electrons? It might be damn near impossible.
(from When the Lights Go Out).
Projects fall apart. We hate it when they do, but they do sometimes. Blue Sky is a movie made in 1991 that spent 3 years in a vault after the production company Orion's bankruptcy. Then, Jessica Lang won an Academy Award for her work in it after it was later released. There is a story I've not been able to confirm that Brad Pitt, before Thelma & Louise, was in a movie that was going to be his star-making turn, and the footage was lost in the scramble to evacuate from Yugoslavia as it descended into war.
But less dramatically, sometimes funding falls out. Sometimes people withdraw, sometimes any number of things make a project stop, dead in its tracks. The lights go out.
What are we to do as actors, how are we to seek any sort of meaning, will our work even be remembered?
Even highly established actors may not be widely known in a generation. I once heard a story of a teacher in the 21st Century marveling that their students didn't know who James Cagney, Marlene Dietrich and other major 20th Century stars were. Their students simply hadn't been exposed to work by some titans of the industry, people who helped define what film is.
So what are we to do? If every project we are in can go into turnaround or stall out entirely at any time, and if our work can be forgettable in decades (or in the case of most films from the silent era, lost entirely), how do we cope?
How do we handle knowing our work is fleeting? We try to embrace it.
Life is fleeting. Don't stop reading worried I'm going into some woo woo jag, or worry I only mean "all we have is now." While life, and our work, does happen in the now, it changes everything. Everything. Our work changes everything.
The American people have spent more on entertainment than they do on food for over ten years now. More money than being nourished physically is being spent on nourishing our hearts and minds (with some distraction thrown in there too). People are arguing about media and entertainment's role in civilization as before, only now more loudly since the internet lets people's anger and joy find audiences like no generation ever before.
From the time when we all lived in caves and told stories around the fire at night, and someone stood up and acted out a sequence, we have needed entertainment. We have needed storytelling. We need it like we need air.
Not only is a whole hemisphere of our brains seemingly built to make narratives out of our experiences, but whole countries need stories to understand and invent who they are, their identities. A people need to have a story of how they are a group, and a person needs a story of who they are and how they're living.
We risk collapsing all of this into solipsism, saying that our mind is all that we can be sure exists. But story, the narratives of our lives, are central to how we do what we do, and how we understand the world. And actors are assistant storytellers.
My occupation is assistant storyteller. It is not "icon."
- Harrison Ford
So maybe it is perfectly fine if in a few decades strangers don't remember us. We still help tell the stories, we still touch the lives of those we know, meet, work with and love. If we make some great work, really truly great stuff, and if the world doesn't end up noticing, it hurts. It does.
It is not fun to do amazing things and have that stuff go away and seem like it never happened. But that's the thing. Since an early human acted out a story around the fire, an actor's work has been fleeting. For centuries, live performance was all there was. It was gone when the curtain fell, save for the hearts and minds it touched.
There could be paintings or sketches of an actor's work, but the performance itself: vanished.
Then photographs could capture fractions of a second of our work more accurately. Finally, film could hold the performance over time. Then something interesting started to happen: everyone could think something can be forever.
But maybe even then we're missing something, risking solipsism again. The performance never had substance in a tangible way to begin with. The film is not us, it is a representation of us. A reflection or sorts. Sure, films made today can be preserved and seen by people not yet born. Time shifting is compelling, but our selves, our bodies and minds aren't on that celluloid or in that binary data stored on a chip.
We can go further. The live stage performances didn't put us actually into the audience so much as move their hearts and minds. The early human acting around the fire did the same. We have always been touching the minds and hearts of the audience. That's the work.
Commerce and technology make it seem like our lives and the lives of those generations of pre-film actors are fundamentally different. Our need to light things well for a self-tape audition, so we can capture and digitize our image and voice, and then send them off to far places, makes it easy to think we're different than other epoch's actors. It seems like we're different than other epoch's humans.
But here's the permanence of it, here's the everlasting part of our work. It's not the disk drives, or the database entries that hold our work, that give our work substance. It's not the reviews and moldering stage costumes in theatres around the world that make our work real and impacting. It is the fact humans are the only part of the physical universe we know of that are conscious of themselves and we, actors, tell that part of the universe's stories.
You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.
- Alan Watts
If you think being a wave means having no impact, just ask anyone who's experienced an undertow, or been in a city that's faced a storm surge.
Actors absolutely have substance and our impact echoes through the ages.
Actors used to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. Those people's performances so troubled the onlookers that they feared their ghosts. An awesome compliment.
- David Mamet
Our power and lasting permanence is in our ethereal and unbounded possibilities.
One only needs to read Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley to start to grasp the folly of fixating on permanence:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Our work may be fleeting, even if the technology of film and TV lets it last for decades or centuries. But the hearts and minds we move, and the way those people then change the world, those things will ripple on through to the end of time. And that is the un-substantive substance of our work.
Like lighting in a bottle, an actors work cannot be held: it is intangible. That's sometimes scary, and hard to get our minds around. Especially when we've bills to pay. That's partly why acting takes more than our minds to do. It's why getting in our heads alone usually doesn't get the scene or the moment the life it really needs. We are the squishy, and that's more than ok, it's good.
People talk about content often using that word in part to try to put a handle on something that cannot be contained. Sure, cat videos are content too, but at its most moving: our work is meant to be hard to hold in our hands, our minds and hearts.
It is part of why accidental behavior caught on film is often so compelling. Which is why having the illusion of the first time and being in the moment can be so vital. It is part of why facing uncertainty with courage is often something good acting (immediate, authentic, interesting and fun) has as part of it.
So between action and cut, or curtain up and curtain down, amid fake danger, courage and life is the order of the day.
Let the realm of paying our bills, grocery shopping and other concrete things get our attention when we seek the tangible, purely physical and logistic. But when we're acting, let yourself fly.
And if you want help flying, I'd love to work with you. I'll use this corpuscle of the physical, tangible and concrete to button up this post: my acting coaching website, that I put together in like five minutes when a friend asked if I had one, is here: about.me/davidaugust
Labels: acting, film, inspiration, money, process
this posted by David August at 1:54 PM - 0 comments -
Tuesday, November 02, 2021
As of 2025, please go to stuff.davidaugust.com, my newer blog. See you there!
Individuals Investing in Film
Back in about 2015, the SEC started to allow small investors to invest in public offerings (regulation crowdfunding), to invest in and own small pieces of things. The possibility for individuals who had not previously invested in films began to change, and now it seems to be getting people's attention more broadly:
The Fresh Kills offering is structured so that Upstream investors will be at the front of the line should the movie make money and receive a 110 percent payout on their investment before other shareholders in the film receive any dividends or returns. After the payout, the investors’ preferred shares will convert to common shares representing 25 percent of the copyright in the company/film. The remaining 75 percent will be owned by Horizon
(from AFM: Why Indie Filmmakers Are Betting on NFTs).
NFTs are often lumped in with cryptocurrencies in general, and unlike how some sell them, they are not a panacea or single solution to funding art, including movies. However, as the quote above suggests, crowdfunding equity combined with both traditional and non-traditional funding sources may be a more popular path to getting films funded now than ever before.
Film has always been a somewhat atypical investment instrument, and so it makes good sense that new-ish things like regulation crowdfunding, as well as new things like NFTs, have found their way to the film finance world. That said, film finance still by and large falls into certain types:
- Equity - the investor owns a piece of the film, as intellectual property, and therefore profits as the deal describes if and when the movie makes money. Profit participation of people who are in or made the movie can be seen as falling into this category, they simply brought something (like themselves) to the movie instead of simple cash; they brought capital: the means of production.
- Loans - money of borrowed and must be paid back to whomever or what ever loaned the money. Often, negative pickup deals fall into this category because someone, like a bank, loans the production budget knowing the film will be bought at a given price by a distributor or something or the loan is guarenteed by a studio or something like that.
- Ad Fees - ad buys or other marketing fees paid to the production don't need to be paid back and give the buyer no ownership of the final film. All that's required is the agreed ad or product placement happen, and the final film see the light of day. Once the ad is published as agreed, the contract is satisfied and the producer and ad buyer can go on about their business happily and without any further obligations to each other.
Worth noting that the first 2 are by and large how any business is funded: equity or loans. The third is almost the whole business model of over-the-air TV. The third also gives the most flexibility to whomever owns the movie to do with it what they want. Selling ads, structuring a loan and getting investors are also different skills; being good at one may not translate to being good at the others. Having good investment contacts may not mean one also has good loan contacts of advertiser contacts, and so to all around.
NFTs somewhat unavoidably have to fall into the equity style fundraising: the buyer owns a unique piece of the project. However, perhaps NFTs allow segmentation of a film, or the transaction of its purchase to happen in ways we haven't quite seen exactly before. If an entire film is sold as an NFT, then unlike in previous decades, the transaction can be sort of recorded in the global ledger of the blockchain. Just like previous decades, the ownership of the film changes hands as intellectual property law dictates, especially copyright law. However, the auction process itself could be more efficient.
[Kevin] Smith noted, saying that the NFT auction for Killroy was essentially a high-tech version of what he did in 1994 when he took his debut film Clerks to Sundance and sold it to Miramax
(AFM: Why Indie Filmmakers Are Betting on NFTs). So perhaps, in an NFT auction, multiple bidders can efficiently bid and arrive at a better valuation than an older and somewhat more fragmented offer/counter-offer technique that has typically been used before. Selling films as NFTs to their eventual distributors may make the purchase process smoother and one hopes better for both buyer and seller.
Regulation crowdfunding the partial or complete equity ownership of the film could open a film to get funding without needing major deep-pocketed investors to be interested. If both there is a big enough pool of small investors and the deal is put together as the law requires (and doesn't overextend those smaller investors who may be less able to safely risk larger sums) then this can be a new avenue to get funded. However, so far, there haven't been prominent successes from this model. While many films have crowdfunded their budgets, I know of none that have given the funders equity ownership and then have also have found their way to wide distribution, yet.
Yet is perhaps the key word here. Just because these new instruments and mechanisms do not yet have long track records, doesn't they mean can't or won't be part of successful films and wealth creation. As has often been the case, film finance is a risky situation, and risks both big downsides and tremendous upsides.
Creativity both with the creative work and how it's financed has always been, and will continue to be, the path to success.
Labels: contracts, film, money, trends
this posted by David August at 12:19 PM - 0 comments -
