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pyrophane 1 days ago [-]
I wish the article covered what is actually in the waiver, but I can hazard a pretty good guess.
The current rules that SAG-AFTRA negotiated with the studios already allow the studios to use AI for "fix it in post" type stuff that doesn't alter an actor's performance, such as extending a scene or modifying the environment around an actor.
If they want to use AI to modify an actor's performance or generate new footage of an actor (the so-called "digital replica") they need to get the actor's consent in advance and compensate them based on the number of days the actor would have worked to produce the generated footage.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything to confirm this, but it seems likely that Amazon is asking actors for a blanket waiver so they can use AI however they want. If that is the case it is understandable why Cage wouldn't want to work with them.
xtajv 10 hours ago [-]
My points of reference are
- Whatever Matthew McConaughey did to protect himself legally against AI-generated use of his likeness
- Whatever Michael Jackson's and Tupac's estates did to handle postmortem work. (Namely, MJ's album Xscape and Tupac's 2012 Coachella hologram).
- Whatever legal and economic shackles were placed on Britney Spears during her conservatorship.
- Terms of "360 deals" in the record industry.
- How SAG-AFTRA handled the introduction of CGI. Tl;dr: there's a distinction between "active performance capture" (e.g. live motion capture) vs. "passive capture" (e.g. photogrammetry scan of a face + CGI to animate it).
On another note: I remember watching BTS for National Treasure (where the treasure room scene in particular was somewhat new technology to be able to render that many reflective objects in one scene through CG alone). I know that Nicolas Cage has also done several CG-heavy films since then. Also, Nicolas Cage is a Coppola.
Overall, I imagine that the man has had enough exposure to the fiddly details of film contracts to know the difference between "the introduction of a new technology" vs. "somebody trying to screw him over".
And my 2c is that it sounds like the studio tried to screw him over.
petre 1 days ago [-]
> such as extending a scene or modifying the environment around an actor
I see. So if they want to put a giant phallic object behind the actor, that's covered.
Not a fan some of Cage's acting (Con Air was terrible, Lord of War was good) but I admire him for doing this and being cool and open about it.
Cpoll 6 hours ago [-]
> giant phallic object behind the actor
They could do that with green screen, so that's not relevant. Of course, now they can put the phallus anywhere else, and that's more of a problem.
davidee 22 hours ago [-]
Some films to try if you like films:
- Adaptation
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Dream Scenario
maximus-decimus 19 hours ago [-]
- Pig
- Mandy
m463 22 hours ago [-]
I remember his older stuff.
I liked when he was a normal guy being chased through an out-of-control situation.
But I think this happens with a lot of actors when they get really popular. The studios hire popular actors for super-alpha-male-top-dog roles.
Maybe he wants the roles that chuck norris/schwarzenegger would normally get, but in my mind he doesn't fit those roles.
Amusingly it goes the other way quite easily - schwarzenegger can actually do well in a kindergarten classroom.
pohl 21 hours ago [-]
I thought his portrayal of Herbert I. McDunnough was on point.
brg 17 hours ago [-]
Spider-noir was excellent in black and white.
InTheArena 1 days ago [-]
It’s not clear to me what this waiver covers? Everyone seems to be assuming his likeness, but it may be anything “AI” - which might include Photoshop (due to it’s editing capability) or any number of de-aging systems, which work far better with AI then other approaches.
dieselgate 1 days ago [-]
The article is light on details but crux mostly on Cage not being an “ai-friendly actor”. Not sure if the film would use extensive ai elements or what.
On a side note never heard a movie tout its “minutes viewed” by audience.
InTheArena 1 days ago [-]
All streaming shows primarily judge themselves by minutes view.
foobarchu 1 days ago [-]
Spider-Noir is a series. Minutes viewed is a very good metric for a series because viewers frequently drop off part of the way in. Combine that with viewership, and you can see whether people are giving up after one episode, many episodes, or finishing the whole thing.
xtajv 10 hours ago [-]
[humor]
The studio must've done something worse than introduce new technology, because they found a way to get Nic Cage to turn down a role.
cellular 19 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised a real max headroom hasn't instantiated!
tanseydavid 3 hours ago [-]
Are you familiar with this signal hijacking incident from 1987?
Good. Consequences meeting actions for movie studios that cuddle up with AI thinking it's the future.
iamronaldo 20 hours ago [-]
I mean this is just cope. Ai is clearly the future... (whether its at that level currently is maybe a different conversation but your implying it won't be)
motbus3 1 days ago [-]
I guess he didn't read the terms of usage for Amazon prime folks
Spider Noir was horrible. Bad coloring, idiotic base idea, brrrrr.
Nic Cage is a great actor, let's hope he would have more roles like Moonstruck, not these horrible abominations that are nowadays offered to older actors. Look at Mobland housing Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.
penskymaterial 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
dude250711 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
canelonesdeverd 1 days ago [-]
God forbid a professional cares about his job!
elmer2 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tortasaur 1 days ago [-]
Assuming they are the "same people" sounds an awful lot like the Goomba fallacy. There are plenty of people who are consistently against the concept of intellectual property.
elmer2 1 days ago [-]
No fallacy here. I've seen it here on HN pretty consistently.
causesothere 1 days ago [-]
Scale matters. Stealing all humanity's collective output and stealing one movie to watch one time are very different. Knocking down one hornets nest and spraying a whole city with DDT are very different. Cutting a tree and clear cutting are very different.
Take a moment and try to understand before you construct such obviously silly and banal statements.
elmer2 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
123la-qqg 1 days ago [-]
Modified Grok bot?
causesothere 17 hours ago [-]
This poster must be AI.
righthand 1 days ago [-]
> Stealing software and music put all the independent software conpanies and musicians out of business.
What are you talking about? Itch.io still exists, indie game studios still exist, FOSS software still exists, Bandcamp still exists, indie musicians still exist, etc.
The only thing I can think of that went out of business are platforms like Grooveshark (which was supported by “piracy”) which was litigated out business by the music industry. Spotify, the music industry main stay, is the one not paying artists.
elmer2 1 days ago [-]
Many small software companies have gone out of business due to piracy. I've seen this countless times in my career.
Before rampant piracy, independent musicians could tour small clubs and sell music. I knew many artists that basically lost their entire business due to piracy within a year.
Nobody was willing to pay for music online, but sharing it for free was fine.
I have the same reaction now that many here and in the tech industry have had over the last decade or two:
Times change and you aren't owed a living. If you can't make money with the new AI landscape, I guess you should be going into a different industry.
FOSS licensing won't matter much anymore when you can use LLMs that make changes to a code base and it looks nothing like the original.
We needed protections 25 years ago, but too many in the industry didn't want to give up the free games, movies, music, and software.
Now that it's hitting their bottom line, there's talks of unions and protections from the government.
I'm pretty tired of the hypocrisy.
Why should I care now?
causesothere 5 hours ago [-]
Name three.
righthand 1 days ago [-]
Have you ever heard the song “Everything is Free” by Gillian Welch? What you’re describing is not a new phenomenon. People also “pirated” music during the radio and cassette tape era. If you business model relies on giving away things for free and expecting the customer to have some sort of conscious, you are asking to go out of business.
I’m from rural no-where and we still have bands and acts pass through that town on the regular making money. I now live in Nyc where there are PLENTY of places that have indie bands playing gigs and charging a door fee. So what has changed? Anyone that’s a serious about their output isn’t going to quit because of “piracy”.
As far as unions go, that talk was always squashed by the high pay and early retirement trend in the software industry. I would like to see it happen a long time ago too but it didn’t not happen because of “piracy”.
If they were such good devs and musicians you should be willing to link to them as examples. That would go a long way to link to their software/music site/blog/bandcamp in promoting them and getting people interested in them rather than complaining no one knows these people except from what’s been stolen from them.
watwut 1 days ago [-]
> Many small software companies have gone out of business due to piracy. I've seen this countless times in my career.
Surely you will be able to name some of them.
> I knew many artists that basically lost their entire business due to piracy within a year.
So, you know many small companies and many musicians? Sounds honestly made up.
22 hours ago [-]
righthand 1 days ago [-]
Probably not made up but the poster is definitely just as guilty for not supporting these people by not sharing links or at least name dropping some of them.
The current rules that SAG-AFTRA negotiated with the studios already allow the studios to use AI for "fix it in post" type stuff that doesn't alter an actor's performance, such as extending a scene or modifying the environment around an actor.
If they want to use AI to modify an actor's performance or generate new footage of an actor (the so-called "digital replica") they need to get the actor's consent in advance and compensate them based on the number of days the actor would have worked to produce the generated footage.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything to confirm this, but it seems likely that Amazon is asking actors for a blanket waiver so they can use AI however they want. If that is the case it is understandable why Cage wouldn't want to work with them.
- Whatever Matthew McConaughey did to protect himself legally against AI-generated use of his likeness
- Whatever Michael Jackson's and Tupac's estates did to handle postmortem work. (Namely, MJ's album Xscape and Tupac's 2012 Coachella hologram).
- Whatever legal and economic shackles were placed on Britney Spears during her conservatorship.
- Terms of "360 deals" in the record industry.
- How SAG-AFTRA handled the introduction of CGI. Tl;dr: there's a distinction between "active performance capture" (e.g. live motion capture) vs. "passive capture" (e.g. photogrammetry scan of a face + CGI to animate it).
On another note: I remember watching BTS for National Treasure (where the treasure room scene in particular was somewhat new technology to be able to render that many reflective objects in one scene through CG alone). I know that Nicolas Cage has also done several CG-heavy films since then. Also, Nicolas Cage is a Coppola.
Overall, I imagine that the man has had enough exposure to the fiddly details of film contracts to know the difference between "the introduction of a new technology" vs. "somebody trying to screw him over".
And my 2c is that it sounds like the studio tried to screw him over.
I see. So if they want to put a giant phallic object behind the actor, that's covered.
Not a fan some of Cage's acting (Con Air was terrible, Lord of War was good) but I admire him for doing this and being cool and open about it.
They could do that with green screen, so that's not relevant. Of course, now they can put the phallus anywhere else, and that's more of a problem.
- Adaptation
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Dream Scenario
- Mandy
I liked when he was a normal guy being chased through an out-of-control situation.
But I think this happens with a lot of actors when they get really popular. The studios hire popular actors for super-alpha-male-top-dog roles.
Maybe he wants the roles that chuck norris/schwarzenegger would normally get, but in my mind he doesn't fit those roles.
Amusingly it goes the other way quite easily - schwarzenegger can actually do well in a kindergarten classroom.
The studio must've done something worse than introduce new technology, because they found a way to get Nic Cage to turn down a role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijackings
Nic Cage is a great actor, let's hope he would have more roles like Moonstruck, not these horrible abominations that are nowadays offered to older actors. Look at Mobland housing Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan.
Take a moment and try to understand before you construct such obviously silly and banal statements.
What are you talking about? Itch.io still exists, indie game studios still exist, FOSS software still exists, Bandcamp still exists, indie musicians still exist, etc.
The only thing I can think of that went out of business are platforms like Grooveshark (which was supported by “piracy”) which was litigated out business by the music industry. Spotify, the music industry main stay, is the one not paying artists.
Before rampant piracy, independent musicians could tour small clubs and sell music. I knew many artists that basically lost their entire business due to piracy within a year.
Nobody was willing to pay for music online, but sharing it for free was fine.
I have the same reaction now that many here and in the tech industry have had over the last decade or two:
Times change and you aren't owed a living. If you can't make money with the new AI landscape, I guess you should be going into a different industry.
FOSS licensing won't matter much anymore when you can use LLMs that make changes to a code base and it looks nothing like the original.
We needed protections 25 years ago, but too many in the industry didn't want to give up the free games, movies, music, and software.
Now that it's hitting their bottom line, there's talks of unions and protections from the government.
I'm pretty tired of the hypocrisy.
Why should I care now?
I’m from rural no-where and we still have bands and acts pass through that town on the regular making money. I now live in Nyc where there are PLENTY of places that have indie bands playing gigs and charging a door fee. So what has changed? Anyone that’s a serious about their output isn’t going to quit because of “piracy”.
As far as unions go, that talk was always squashed by the high pay and early retirement trend in the software industry. I would like to see it happen a long time ago too but it didn’t not happen because of “piracy”.
If they were such good devs and musicians you should be willing to link to them as examples. That would go a long way to link to their software/music site/blog/bandcamp in promoting them and getting people interested in them rather than complaining no one knows these people except from what’s been stolen from them.
Surely you will be able to name some of them.
> I knew many artists that basically lost their entire business due to piracy within a year.
So, you know many small companies and many musicians? Sounds honestly made up.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/netflix-nicolas-cage-s...
And of course there is no difference when people pirate a movie for their friends and $2 trillion companies stealing everyone's work. None at all!