For Live, Functioning Artists, The End Comes Not With a Bang, But an Email
In the never-ending, fruitless search for economy, actors are being replaced by algorithms
The “race to the bottom” in today’s economy is well-documented. It has always been well-documented, railed against, and ultimately won the day. From the obscenity of 400 years of enslaving Black people to prop up a weak economy in the United States to a smaller vulgarity of recruiting cheap, Bangladeshi customer service centers for “American” products, business leaders have continually destroyed the lives of people on this planet in order to make money for themselves. Add generous dollops of racist tropes, scoops of disingenuous attempts of outreach, and heavy truckloads of meaningless treaties to the mix and you end up with an outrageously inequitable country filled with fear, which leads to hate.
That race to the bottom has been exacerbated by the introduction of personless privilege. Using various versions of artificial, mindless, automatic machine intelligence (aka “AI”), the proposed elimination of paid actors lay at the heart of last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike. And while there was a solid majority of workers who approved the deal with the studios, not every union leader was convinced that the studios wouldn’t replace the actors with AI versions regardless.
“I cannot endorse a contract that compromises the independence and financial futures of the performers. It is purposefully vague and demands union members to release their autonomy…. Consent is surrender.” — Matthew Modine, actor and SAG-AFTRA board member
It turns out that Modine’s fears were well-founded, just as the fears of Indigenous Americans whose treaties were constantly broken by a Puritan nation that really didn’t care whether they lived or died were well-founded. The “well, it’s better than nothing” tactic has rarely served the workers or the oppressed population, and it didn’t do so here, either. When Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director and chief negotiator said, “I’m very happy with the result,” followed closely by “If we set aside the AI issue, it would have been ratified by 99% of members probably,” he tacitly acknowledged that the problem of actors being replaced by code was going to be a continuing problem.
And it is.
In the US, it wasn’t a big story. In fact, if you don’t live in the UK, you well might have missed it entirely. Rolling Stone carried it, entitling it “AI Debate Stirs in U.K. as Actress Replaced on BBC Project by Artificially Generated Voice.” It seems that actress Sara Poyzer, who has played the role of Donna Sheridan in Mamma Mia for 10 years on the West End, shared an email that not only told her that her voice services were no longer required by the BBC for an upcoming project where she deftly recreated a voice of a prominent (unnamed) individual, but with striking callousness, why.
As described in the Rolling Stone article, “News of Poyzer’s artificial replacement comes less than a week after BBC director general Tim Davie said that the broadcaster would ‘proactively deploy’ AI ‘on our terms’ but added the technology would never compromise ‘human creative control.’”
Trying desperately (and, in my belief, poorly) to deflect the outrage among even its most benevolent benefactors and artists, the BBC issued a strange obfuscation defined as a “statement.”
“We are making a highly sensitive documentary which features a contributor who is nearing the end of life and is now unable to speak. We have been working closely with their family to explore how we might best represent the contributor’s voice at the end of the film when words they have written are read out. In these very particular circumstances and with the family’s wishes in mind we have agreed to use AI for a brief section to recreate a voice which can now no longer be heard. This will be clearly labelled within the film.”
So, instead of a talented, professional voice actress with dozens of years of experience creating and re-creating voices doing the work, a machine will. In neither case will it be the person whose voice is being characterized.
Imagine Ken Burns insisting that the real voices of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysees Grant, Robert E. Lee, and all the various characters depicted in his 1990 documentary The Civil War be so authentic as not to be portrayed by the panoply of superstar speakers such as Sam Waterston, Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Morgan Freeman, Paul Roebling, Garrison Keillor, George Black, Arthur Miller, Christopher Murney, Charles McDowell, Horton Foote, George Plimpton, Philip Bosco, Terry Courier, Jody Powell, Studs Terkel, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Gene Jones, Jerome Dempsey, Laurence Fishburne, Betsy Apple, Carol Craven, Marissa Copeland, Halo Wines, David Marks, Pamela Reed, Ronnie Gilbert, M. Emmet Walsh, Hoyt Axton, John Hartford, Walt MacPherson, Colleen Dewhurst, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Bradford Washburn, Jesse Carr, Wendy Tilghman and Joe Mattys. Instead, the cast list might have looked something like this:
The BBC, despite their protestations to the contrary, has entered the race to the bottom. No doubt the Hollywood studios have already found ways to subvert the spirit of the new contract and are in the race as well. Ultimately, history tells us, they’ll win, and free (or next-to-free) labor will win the day.
So the question I ask is this: why? Why is it so urgent to create the kinds of technology that will absolutely put thousands, if not millions of people out of work? If the pandemic taught us nothing else, it reminded us that work is “that thing we do until we retire” or “a way to make enough money to live as comfortably as we can,” not “our legacy” or “our purpose.” Work can be fulfilling, but it’s really just something to do.
If there were no need to eat, breathe, drink, or sleep, would we? Maybe. But that’s not the world in which we live. So we’re here. We don’t really know (or often care) why we’re here. Why would we ever choose to have technology replace us? To make rich corporations richer? And their insatiably avaricious CEOs and shareholders — even at the Beeb?
Meanwhile, as this is in actuality a discussion meant for nonprofit arts organizations in the US (and beyond), does your work quantifiably make lives better? A few lives? Or are you just here to fulfill some anointed artistic god’s vision of whatever it is they want to do and it doesn’t really matter if anyone gets service from it?
And, in the context of this article, would you eliminate human beings from the process to make your art better? Have you? Did you create a “mini” version of a larger show? Hmm.
