Rise of the machines: AI spells dystopian danger for Hollywood stunt workers

LOS ANGELES: Hollywood’s striking actors fear that artificial intelligence is coming for their jobs -- but for many stunt performers, that dystopian danger is already a reality.

From “Game of Thrones” to the latest Marvel superhero movies, cost-slashing studios have long used computer-generated background figures to reduce the number of actors needed for battle scenes.

Now, the rise of AI means cheaper and more powerful techniques are being explored to create highly elaborate action sequences such as car chases and shootouts -- without those pesky (and expensive) humans.

Stunt work, a time-honored Hollywood tradition that has spanned from silent epics through to Tom Cruise’s latest “Mission Impossible,” is at risk of rapidly shrinking.

“The technology is exponentially getting faster and better,” said Freddy Bouciegues, stunt coordinator for movies like “Free Guy” and “Terminator: Dark Fate.”

“It’s really a scary time right now.”

Studios are already requiring stunt and background performers to take part in high-tech 3D “body scans” on set, often without explaining how or when the images will be used.

Advancements in AI mean these likenesses could be used to create detailed, eerily realistic “digital replicas,” which can perform any action or speak any dialogue its creators wish.

Bouciegues fears producers could use these virtual avatars to replace “nondescript” stunt performers -- such as those playing pedestrians leaping out of the way of a car chase.

“There could be a world where they said, ‘No, we don’t want to bring these 10 guys in... we’ll just add them in later via effects and AI. Now those guys are out of the job.”

But according to director Neill Blomkamp, whose new film “Gran Turismo” hits theaters August 25, even that scenario only scratches the surface.

The role AI will soon play in generating images from scratch is “hard to compute,” he told AFP.

“Gran Turismo” primarily uses stunt performers driving real cars on actual racetracks, with some computer-generated effects added on top for one particularly complex and dangerous scene.

But Blomkamp predicts that, in as soon as six or 12 months, AI will reach a point where it can generate photo-realistic footage like high-speed crashes based on a director’s instructions alone.

At that point, “you take all of your CG (computer graphics) and VFX (visual effects) computers and throw them out the window, and you get rid of stunts, and you get rid of cameras, and you don’t go to the racetrack,” he told AFP. “It’s that different.” SAG-AFTRA last month warned that studios intend to create realistic digital replicas of performers, to use “for the rest of eternity, in any project they want” -- all for the payment of one day’s work.

The studios dispute this, and say they have offered rules including informed consent and compensation.