Are These "People" Really People? Am I?

"I researched why movies aren’t yet made with just CGI for all of the human characters. The answer given is that computer generated actors actually look too good to be believable."

Ed Harris as “The Man In Black” in the sci-fi series WestWorld.

All of these movies and TV series we watch — do you think the people are really real? I don’t mean the characters, I mean the actors; the physical beings playing the characters. Are they really physical beings? Are they human?

One of my favorite satirical lines about the movies comes from a movie that was about movies. The Player was a 1992 Robert Altman picture about a murder investigation, but set against the backdrop of a send-up of Hollywood. In an early scene, a hot new producer proposes to a meeting of executives that they don’t need to pay screenwriters anymore. They can just get the stories from the newspaper.

“Griffin Mill,” played by Tim Robbins, is the older producer who’s supposedly on his way out. When he hears the idea from the guy in line for his job, he sarcastically replies:

“I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”

Tim Robbins as “Griffin Mill” in The Player.

Thirty-three years later, is that idea so far fetched? The concept of CGI (computer generated imagery) actually goes all the way back to Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1958. But that was just for the opening sequence.

CGI advanced over the years as computer technology did. Pixar was created by George Lucas back in 1979. In 1995, Pixar became the first CGI to generate a full film, Toy Story. That film was animated, but in the three decades hence, CGI has been used to enhance or modify actors’ performance in scores of films.

In the 2015 film Antman, Michael Douglas is “de-aged” through the use of CGI to resemble how he looked in films like Fatal Attraction 30 years earlier.

The impact of CGI on film might be best expressed in how the media covers Tom Cruise’s stunts in his epic Mission Impossible films and others. The story isn’t that he uses CGI — it’s that for the most part he does not.

You can see where this is going. I researched why movies aren’t yet made with just CGI for all of the human characters. The answer given is that computer generated actors are too good to be believable. The little things missing give it away: breathing irregularities, facial expressions, pregnant pauses, little tics and movements that just don’t look quite right.

But how long will that last? A few years ago a guy wanted me to reach out to political candidates because he had a new A.I. technology that could take a candidate’s video message and vocally address it to each individual recipient’s name. Think of how far past that we are now. Entities are producing entirely phony monologues that seem like they come straight from an actual person’s mouth. Deep fakes. And we get fooled by them all the time.

I can hear my actor friends’ heads exploding as they read my thoughts on the possibility of Griffin Mill’s droll line coming true. For those who are troubled by this, trust me, writers are too!

This morning I signed up for an AI Mastery Course online. I’ve resisted learning and using ChatGPT for quite a while now, even as a few of my author friends have consistently urged me to get with the program.

Ostensibly, AI is supposed to help writers to better brainstorm themes, organize ideas, and perform editing functions far more efficiently. But we all know that what AI also does is generate actual text — and a lot of text ultimately comprises a standalone piece. An article. A screenplay. A book.

I’m keeping as open a mind about it as I can. And I don’t doubt that AI will eliminate plenty of writing hassles once I know how to leverage it as a tool.

But I do worry — similar to my concern about the potential replacement of the human actors I love — that a time may come when AI writing becomes indistinguishable from the human scribe. For instance, this article you’re reading right now: Did I write it — or should the byline be “ChatGPT?”

If you ask me, I’ll respond. The real me.

MICHAEL GOLDEN is the cofounder of One Million Degrees, a national award-winning journalist and bestselling author. The Golden Mean is where he works to convert ‘hidden lessons’ into active wisdom.

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