AI Won't Replace Actors (At Least It Shouldn't)
Thoughts from an AI non-expert
On Tuesday, The New York Times published a fascinating and enjoyable op-ed by Hank Azaria, an actor best known for his work portraying countless characters on “The Simpsons” — a show I have regrettably never watched. In his piece, he offers a hopeful case for why he believes AI won’t necessarily replace voice actors like him, but at times, he expresses some anxiety that AI might become good enough soon to replace him.
Azaria displays a substantial amount of creativity, improvisation, and experimentation it takes for him to give an compelling and believable performance as voice actor. There’s so much more to his line of work than merely “neck-up” acting. We may not consider this fact — including many young actors at first — but a voice actor needs to use his whole body to do his job excellently. If a character is running, for example, it is extremely difficult for an actor to nail the performance unless he’s actually running. As of now, AI can’t quite capture all those nuanced circumstances the voice will go through to give a believable performance. It can only really capture the “neck-up” part of voice acting.
“An A.I.-generated voice has enough little things askew to make you think there’s something missing,” Azaria notes. “It just isn’t compelling or funny, in the same way that A.I.-generated faces in video seem to be missing elements that would make them believable and human-seeming — too often micro-expressions and gestures are not quite right.”
But Azaria worries that could soon change.
The A.I. model may not know what’s funny or what timing is, but it could do a million different takes. And it could be told to do them as I would — and it might be pretty convincing.
So, if I’m being honest, I am a little worried…. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that the technology for making faces seem fully human is five years away. I fear that the voice equivalent is also coming.
Personally, my knowledge of AI is very limited. I am no expert for sure. But count me skeptical that AI will end up replacing actors.
If you go through Azaria’s piece, I think he pretty effectively proves that there’s a uniqueness to acting that can only come about if humans are in the acting process, whether that’s a human experimenting to come up with a new voice impression or a human just ad-libbing. In fact, on that ad-libbing point, there are plenty of iconic moments in films that wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for an actor improvising on the fly, including in animated movies. As much as AI will improve as the years go by, I can’t envision a scenario where filmmakers — if they care about making great content — would want to trade the creative spontaneity of a human actor for a machine.
Also, we need to consider the star element when it comes to film. A huge driver for many movies and TV shows is often the cast. Viewers like certain kinds of actors, and if an actor is in a film (good or bad) that a viewer really likes, they’re more likely to go watch that film. Not only that, but people also like enjoying an actor’s performance. Normally, it’s the impressive performance of the actor that gets people talking about the film. Even in animated films where the physical performance is captured by the animator (which people enjoy, too), most of the buzz centers around the men and women behind the voices of the characters. If AI wipes out the existence of actors, I can’t think of way that would happen without all the hype for a new film or series vanishing.
The only times I could see AI taking an actor’s job is when filmmakers settle for mediocrity. Bad movies have always been a feature of the film industry, and I suspect AI will become a huge component of the art of making crappy films. But those films will always remain unnoticed by the general public, and the actual entertainment that people go to watch will always have large swaths of humans involved in everything — including the acting.
Sure, there might be some jobs that will be largely sidelined by AI. (Azaria suggested that staff writers could be replaced by ChatGPT as long as a human head writer is rewriting the AI prompts himself). And time will tell if that’s going to downgrade the quality of films. But honestly, I just don’t see actors, behind the camera or behind the microphone, ever really going away.
We don’t know how good or impressive AI will become, but I doubt it will ever become good enough that it won’t take away from movie magic if it takes over. And I think the same applies to any other job that requires creativity — like writing. At the most, I bet we’ll see AI being used as a tool in stuff like the acting process more often. But AI actually taking over? No way!
Well, at least I hope “no way.”
This is an interesting piece, and the presence of AI in the creative world is something I think about quite a bit, not so much in the film industry but in the writing industry.
I have been freelancing on upwork for 15 years now, and work that clients used to hire me for, such as transcription and now even proofreading and editing, is increasingly being done by AI.
In fact, I've recently been invited to place bid for several projects that involve editing manuscripts that have been written by AI. It's a matter of personal standards that, at this point, I would not want to edit a book that has not been written by a real person. Someone with a soul.
There's enough bad stuff out there written by real people that we don't need a deluge of bad stuff written by non-real people (aka, AI) but that's exactly what's happening now. A person can "write" a book within minutes if they get AI to do it for them. So, why not?
It's the same reason I don't use templates that people often use in their writing. Stories need to be more than just words. They need to "ring true", as N. D. Wilson puts it. And beings without souls can't manifest the truth of being created in the image of God.