C.Ragged, gray-haired, and 80 years old, Harrison Ford may look a little old to don his brown Fedora-style hat or crack his whip like Indiana Jones. But a trailer for his upcoming film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny offers a flashback to Indy in his swashbuckling glory days.
“That’s my real face at that age,” the actor explained on the CBS show. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “They have this artificial intelligence (AI) program. You can go through every single footage Lucasfilm owns because I made a ton of movies for them and they have all this footage, including the movie that didn’t print: stock. They could undermine where the light comes from, the expression. But that’s my real face. Then I put little dots on my face and say the words and they do it. It’s fantastic.”
having discovered the secret of eternal youthFord quipped: “That’s what I see when I look in the mirror now.”
He is not the only actor who underwent a digital facelift with the help of AI. Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and other cast members will play younger versions of themselves in Here, directed by Robert Zemeckisthanks to a tool that, according to the artificial intelligence company Metaphysic, can create “photorealistic, high-resolution face changes and de-aging effects on live actor performances in real time without the need for further compositing or VFX work.” .
Metaphysic’s website proclaims: “We are world leaders in creating AI-generated content that looks real” and suggests: “Use AI to create your own hyper-real avatar.” The company has just reached an agreement with the Creative Artists Agency “to develop generative artificial intelligence tools and services for talent.” according to Hollywood Reporter.
as well as the buzz Chatbot with AI ChatGPT threatens to revolutionize journalism, speechwriting, and school essays, so AI could turn digital aging from something that requires many months of highly-skilled artists into something many people can do in their bedrooms. And as technology becomes more and more sophisticated, there are fears that deepfake technology could fall into the wrong hands and be weaponized.
Olcún Tan, a German-born visual effects supervisor based in Los Angeles, reflects: “We are going through a great revolution. This is like the invention of nuclear power. This is a big problem. It is underestimated and overlooked. Currently, it feels like, ‘Oh, it’s a toy, it’s amazing, look what it can do,’ but this is just the beginning of a big change in our economic structure because it will do so much more than normal humans can do. ”
Aging has had mixed results so far. Examples include Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Revenge of the Dead, Jeff Bridges in Tron: Legacy, Robert Downey Jr in Captain America: Civil War, Michael Douglas in Ant Man, Kurt Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, Will Smith in Gemini Man and Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill in various Star Wars installments.
One of the most impressive was Samuel L Jackson who, in 2019’s Captain Marvel, shed some 25 years of age and appeared throughout the story instead of just a cameo. “The artists meticulously compared Jackson to how he looked in his mid-’90s movies to see precisely how the skin would hang off his face or how light would hit his cheeks.” according to the Wrap website.
Why bother? Some argue that it’s better to have an aging Harrison Ford than to have a different actor playing one of his indelible roles, as happened when he faced off against the young Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Many fans found it to be a jarring experience.
Drexel heard, a political activist who has worked in Hollywood, says: “We are getting to the point where viewers want to see that same person who is not going to take them out of the moment. Because our brains automatically say, ‘Well, that’s not the same person. Who is that actor? Is he going to be that actor better than the actor we’re looking at right now?’ No one wants to have to go through that as an audience member.”
However, not everyone sees it that way. Tan, who uses an AI-assisted tool called Shapeshifter, says: “It’s time for the old farts to make room. It’s annoying. There’s no reason someone should be 80 and still look 30. It doesn’t make sense. What it does is create a culture of recycling.
“It’s like Mickey Mouse forever. You have a Mickey Mouse and he doesn’t need water, he doesn’t need food, he doesn’t need a contract. They can monetize it however they want. You don’t need sleep. It works 24 hours if you want 10 copies or 30 copies simultaneously. What’s happening right now is these actors are becoming more than that. They become like a brand.”
Tan adds: “In the case of Harrison Ford, the guy, of course, was Indiana Jones, but there could easily be a new Indiana Jones introduced, a next generation. Why even recycle all that stuff constantly? Because it is a sure thing to make money, obviously, but the question arises, what does it do to our society if the same idols are always recreated on the screen? It’s like we’re somehow stuck in the past and don’t want to look to the future.”
Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman took four decades off Al Pacino, then 79, and Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, both 76, but fell into the “uncanny valley” trap of being a distraction. , disturbing and not real enough. If the test of visual effects is that you shouldn’t notice them, The Irishman flopped. And despite all the digital magic, the bodies of the actors betrayed the ravages of time.
joe pavlo, an Emmy Award-winning visual effects artist based in London, says: “Marty should have come to me. He would have told her that you can’t do that with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci: they’re too famous and everyone knows them. If you’re going to do it, do it with unknown actors and age them and get a young guy and age them.
Bless his heart, but Robert De Niro moves like a 70-year-old. An older person does not move like a young person. They don’t walk the same. His gestures are not the same. There are all kinds of problems, but people will pick up on this and it will be another tool for making movies. A movie making tool can be used by someone very artistically and with great vision or it can be clumsily used as a novelty and a gimmick.
Drawing on Industrial Light and Magic’s anti-aging work in The Irishman, a fan quickly created a fake version that was released on YouTube and widely praised as an improvement.
Pavlo, who uses AI tools to save time on boring and mundane tasks, adds: “Technology is getting better and better. You can see things fall apart a bit and they’re not perfect, but every time I dive back into it, I find that it’s improved exponentially since I last looked at it.”
Asked if he’s worried about a Pandora’s Box of deepfakes being opened, Pavlo points out that AI software is also used to detect deepfakes with high precision. “AI technology is the disease and the cure.”
Tan, however, has doubts. He says: “The AI is, in a way, cool and fun at first, but then you realize it’s actually dangerous. You can imitate people and get them to do things on screen and then you can have a complete societal belief that those people are dishonored by what they did on screen and it wasn’t really even them. It’s just a ploy to annoy people.
“You see it in the war, which I think Russia tried with Ukraine. There was this usage that made the Ukrainian president say that they were surrendering and that the soldiers should put down their weapons. That was done with AI. A simple tool that doesn’t seem dangerous can suddenly be very dangerous because now you’re affecting reality with it.”
It has the makings of an ethical quagmire, and government regulators are scrambling to catch up. A source in the visual effects industry, who did not want to be named, writes in an email: “In the hands of well-meaning people, I don’t think it would cross an ethical line as we’ve been doing this manually with makeup or CG for decades. and it can be a really effective part of the storytelling.
“However, the problem is when it becomes so accessible that it is used by less scrupulous people and when society has not caught up in understanding how to deal with it. Where the required skill was an impediment, now anyone can make people say or do whatever they want.”
The source adds: “You can already see this with the start of deepfakes for celebrity pornography. The average person’s ability to tell if something is fake is always years behind the state of the art in technology, and ripe for the spread of misinformation. The past few years have shown how much fake news (often efforts sponsored by foreign states) affects society, even just as text.
“How will we cope when we can’t trust what we see or hear? How can we trust that a celebrity didn’t say something egregious years ago instead that it was just a poorly filmed cell phone video? Or, conversely, how would we hold people accountable when they can pretend everything is fake?
