Star’s estates welcome AI while California Bill provides IP protection and other news
In the Generative AI news round-up, it’s a win-win for the estates of some of Hollywood’s biggest 20th-century stars while the Digital Replica Act aims to prevent AI-generated replicas of artists without prior consent. There’s a new death tech company that has a hefty fee and Jackie Chan is the latest actor to be de-aged. The AI COPIED Act is here and video content platforms have issued label warnings.
Hollywood Stars Have New IP Life with AI
The biggest Hollywood stars of the 20th Century are reaching a new audience with the help of generative AI. Actress Judy Garland’s voice has been AI-generated for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz audiobook. Of course, this is after permission and a good IP deal between the star’s estate and AI company ElevenLabs, who plan to also recreate the voices of James Dean and Burt Reynolds for its new Reader app. The new app generates AI voiceovers for articles, newsletters, e-books, and other text content. The venture between ElevenLabs and Hollywood estates sets a precedent for IP licensing and future collaborations with families of dead celebrities.
SAG-AFTRA Thanks California AI Artist Protection Legislation
California unanimously passed the Digital Replica Bill which protects deceased celebrities’ IPs from non-consensual digital replication for profit. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) thanked the California Senate Judiciary for passing the California Digital Replica Bill (AB 1836), which aims to provide IP protection for the state’s deceased performers. If it passes into law, it would stop the unauthorized use of deceased artist’s images, likenesses, or voices in film, television, or music.
Hollywood Teams With Holocaust Museum L.A. to Launch Augmented-Reality APP
A collaboration between Hollywood and the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles has created an augmented-reality APP that can reimagine the lost history of victims of the Nazi Germany regime. Technology studio Magnopus, whose team created the Oscar-winning movies The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Hugo, has teamed with the Holocaust Museum L.A. to create an education app that uses augmented reality to recreate the Sobibor concentration camp. After WW2, the camp was dismantled and trees were planted to cover the site where 170,000 people had been exterminated. The Sobibor AR exhibit is free to download from Apple.
AI Death Tech Company Eternos Creates Digital Replicas of the Dying
AI startup Eternos has created a digital replica of terminally ill startup entrepreneur Michael Bommer. Robert LoCascio, CEO of AI legacy platform Eternos, teamed up with his friend Bommer to create a first for the company. The AI version of Bommer was created by Eternos with an in-house AI model and external large language models such as OpenAI and Meta. Eternos records users speaking up to 300 phrases and compresses the information through a two-way computing process that captures Bommer’s voice. The AI system can be trained further to answer questions about their lives and personalities. The AI voice costs $15,000 to set up and can tell stories and answer questions about a person’s life without repeating pre-recorded answers. The AI voice is legally treated as an asset and belongs to the person who created the AI voice, which can be passed down to family members.
No Opt Out for Meta Artists in Latin America but Brazil Fights Back
Latin American artists can not opt-out out of prohibiting Meta from using their public data on Facebook and Instagram. The region lacks the data protection laws that would prohibit Meta from using their content. To add insult to injury, the company did not notify its users in Latin America which means personal content such as family photographs and videos can be scraped by Meta’s AI models. Artists are also vulnerable because their work is often promoted on Meta’s platforms.
Meta announced last September the launch of AI features sourced from mined content from its platform. Any publicly shared posts on Facebook and Instagram were fair game for use as training data for its generative AI models. Most of Meta’s global customers had the option to opt out of having their content used in this way. However, Brazil has forced Meta to suspend the use of its AI assistant in the country after Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) banned Meta from training its AI models on the personal data of its Brazilian users.
AI COPIED Act Would Protect Artists and Journalists’ Content
The COPIED Act (Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act) would make the removal of digital watermarks illegal. The idea of watermark protection was introduced as a way to detect and authenticate AI-generated content and protect artists and journalists from having their work scraped by AI models without permission. Content owners, such as newspapers, broadcasters, and artists, could sue AI companies if it is found that their content has been used to train AI models. The COPIED Act would guide the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create guidelines and standards to prove the content origin and detect if it has been recreated by AI.
Video Platforms Enforce AI Content Labeling
Vimeo, TikTok, and YouTube have created AI content labels as a way for creators to label AI-generated content. Creators must now disclose the origin of realistic content if it is created with AI. This is to ensure that AI-created or manipulated synthetic humans aren’t mistaken for real humans, events, or places. Advanced generative AI tools make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and fake content.
I first noticed the new terms and conditions after watching a Fatboy Slim video which shows famous icons, past and present, AI lipsyncing to the lyrics of the song.
https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FZlAEQKRZNKE%3Flist%3DPL43DC4193A43A1752&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DZlAEQKRZNKE&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FZlAEQKRZNKE%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtubeFatboy Slim — Role Model
Sony Pictures CEO Aims to Cut Costs with AI
CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Tony Vinciquerra announced major changes to upcoming film and TV shows during an investor event. The cost-cutting solution, according to Vinciquerra, is investing in AI technology. This comes after the Hollywood strikes last year by writers and actors who expressed concerns about being replaced with AI. The concern here is that Sony and other producers will bypass human actors, writers, and artists. However, I guess that the result will be so devoid of human creativity that there will be a massive backlash.
Artists Protect Work from Generative AI Theft
Researchers from the University of Chicago have created two programs to protect artist work from AI model data mining. Glaze and Nightshade poison the source of art uploaded online in an attempt to scramble what the AI model sees. Glaze changes an image so that the AI system sees it as a different art style. While Nightshade is a more forceful tool that attempts to confuse the AI training model to stop it from accurately identifying an image. The tools hope to provide a safeguard against AI tools using content illegally, some of which are located in countries with limited or no regulation. Artists and writers have been in constant battle with big tech companies like Open AI and Microsoft, resulting in lawsuits and government regulation.
Jackie Chan is the Latest Actor to get AI De-Aged Treatment
Hollywood has created a de-aged Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, and Robert De Niro with some success but the latest Jackie Chan movie has caused fans to complain about the dodgy technology. The 70-year-old starts in A Legend, a sequel to his 2005 movie The Myth. However, his appearance has been altered by AI to resemble someone in his twenties, and the result, according to fans, is less than convincing. Director Stanley Tong Kwai-lai takes a different view and believes that AI de-aging provides longevity to an aging actor’s career. Fans of Chan argue that de-aging actors lack authenticity and even direct their disappointment at the Hong Kong actor for agreeing to the role.
Bite Size News
Fashion Brand Mango Creates Campaign with AI
Mango created a fashion campaign with photorealistic AI-generated content. The images in the are a mix of “real photographs” and generative AI. How long before real photographers are ditched for AI models?
CNN Will Layoff 100 Staffers to be Replaced by AI
It is another sad day in the life of news content platforms with the announced layoff of 100 staffers at the cable news channel CNN. CEO Mark Thompson sent a memo announcing his plans to create digital products behind a paywall and a push into AI.
Research Finds Generative AI Supports Creativity but Hinders Originality
Researchers at the University of Exeter Business School and UCL School of Management found that writers using generative AI platforms to create story ideas were more creative but the output was narrower in scope. In other words, generative AI platforms are good at bouncing off ideas with a human but not so good at creating original content. Tell us something we don’t know.
Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Writer/Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media — specifically Hollywood, death tech, digital afterlife, AI death and grief practices, AI photography, entertainment, security, and policy, and an author, writer, artist photographer, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast — The Digital Afterlife of Grief.
Ginger Liu is a writer who covers the latest developments in artificial intelligence, entertainment, and art.
