Derrick Bryson Taylor on fear in NYT. He writes: ‘It took only a 15-second clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt duking it out on a crumbling rooftop at twilight to draw swift outrage, and sizable fear, from Hollywood over the last few days. The widely circulated video was created by the Irish director Ruairi Robinson using Seedance 2.0, a powerful artificial intelligence video generation tool owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. It had plenty of the bells and whistles of a big-budget Hollywood film.’

The fear is nuanced by Heather Anne Campbell, an executive producer and writer, who says that everything Seedance produces is ‘all just garbage’.

Before and after AI, plenty of garbage.

Humans are not garbage (remember Immanuel Kant), but some humans (screenplay writers and perhaps also actors) fear being replaced.

If AI produces a good enough Tom Cruise, why bother with the real one?

(a sf 2057)