WASHINGTON — In the 2002 film “Simone,” Al Pacino stars as a director whose star, played by Winona Ryder, walks out on him after saying his on-set trailer isn’t great enough.

Disgusted, Pacino’s character secretly creates a dutiful CG actress to replace the temperamental one. Simone is a perfect-looking blonde, named after the computer program that created her, Simulation One.

But Simone is so successful, Oscar-winning, adored by fans, that she outshines her director, who becomes jealous and disposes of her with a computer virus. But he has made her so realistic that he is charged with her murder.

Be careful what you wish for, Hollywood studios, as you mess with the AI ​​primal force

Tinseltown is turning dark, as the actors join the writers on the picket line. Hollywood’s centuries-old business model was upended by Covid and also by streaming, which spread like an occupying army. Then streaming hit a ceiling and Netflix and company were quick to pivot.

With a dramatically different economic model shaped by transformative technologies (AI is a key issue in the strike), the writers and actors want a new deal. And they deserve it.

Brooks Barnes of the Times describes the mood of the city as très French Revolution, with writers and actors furious at the Marie Antoinette shenanigans of CEOs and studio heads cashing outsized checks, partying in Cannes and traveling in Plane to Sun Valley.

In addition to fair pay, writers want to make sure algorithms don’t make them irrelevant, and actors want to prevent their digital images from being owned by new owners.

It is a complex subject. Even as writers demand that studios not replace them with AI, some studio execs no doubt wonder if the writers are being hypocritical: Will they start using AI to help them finish their scripts by deadline?

Chatbots are so competent, and growing more by the second, that many studio suits are probably eager to bypass the middleman screenwriter.

As Puck’s Matthew Belloni said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “You can say, you know, ‘Here’s the ‘Social Network’ script. Write me a script, but do it about Elon Musk, not about Mark Zuckerberg.’”

Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, has long warned that we were looking for a bruise. As he told me nine years ago, the cloud lords were acting as if they had been inventing a digital brain when in fact what they were doing was making a mixture of real brains.

He said that when machines translated one language into another, they were drawn from human translators, taking matching phrases from aggregated data; those translators should have the right to negotiate compensation for inadvertently feeding the AI ​​brain.

He has also pointed out that Facebook and other social media companies have been mining our valuable data for years, without giving us payment or any of the other rights a first-class citizen would normally have. He said it would be unfair for Hollywood studios to create fake versions of actors and then not pay them.

The issue of compensation is now at center stage. Sarah Silverman has joined the class action lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta accusing them of copyright infringement and saying they “ingested” her work to train her AI.

The ingestion and synthesis of words, images and music is carried out by leaps and bounds. In fact, the day is fast approaching when the digerati will be able to make a completely bogus movie.

As Lanier put it, “they could say, ‘Make me a movie that’s similar to Tom Cruise’s ‘Mission: Impossible.'” However, make sure none of the synthetic actors can be mistaken for well-known actors and make sure we’re not going to get sued, but let’s go straight to the edge. That’s not entirely feasible today, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t. It’s just math. And we can do it.”

He said the Hollywood strikers are just the tip of the iceberg. “People say, ‘Why should we help these highly paid, left-handed, stylish actors? Fuck ’em.’ But if you make a living driving a vehicle or working in a place where you use heavy machinery like a body shop, all kinds of jobs, this will create the legal precedents that could protect you in the future as well. “Almost no one is immune to the risk that AI could devalue their economic position, although AI will also have widespread benefits.

“Technology companies would benefit from involving the whole of society in the process of improving model performance using economic incentives,” Lanier said. But, he added, if we get the “dignity of the data” wrong, society “will become destitute fast enough.”

“This is really for everyone,” he said of the effort not to get swallowed by the AI. “It may not look like it, but it really is.”