Glenn Close acknowledged the ever-changing landscape of the entertainment industry during a stop in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival.
The Academy Award-nominated actress has been trying to keep her “equilibrium” lately, ahead of celebrating Sundance Institute icon Michelle Satter at a gala fundraiser.
“I’m very lucky to have a job,” Close told The Hollywood Reporter. “There were so many people impacted in LA already, and then now with the fires. I was astounded at how few jobs there are in our profession. I’m a big reader of history, and unfortunately, I think not enough people in this country understand the history and what we’ve just gotten ourselves into. That’s very dangerous.
“On top of that is [artificial intelligence]. What is going to be truth? What is true is going to be a big question.”
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Close told the outlet she had recently finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s novel, “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI,” a book which she found “incredible,” yet “more terrifying than anything I’ve read.”
When asked her interpretation of AI, Close said, “Depends on how it’s handled.”
“I don’t want my image or my voice to be reconstructed,” she noted. “I mean, people need jobs. It’s a sad dilemma.”
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Close pondered, “Is it progress that less people will work because of it? I don’t know. I think we’re losing one thing that a place like Sundance and what Michelle has done is so important — stories about what it means to be a human being. We have to cling to that.
“We have to keep coming back and be inspired by things that teach us, that help us with our emotions to know what it means to be human and [to always] to look into somebody else’s eyes — not a screen — but another human being’s eyes. If we lose that, it’ll be a very slippery slope, I’m afraid.”
Close isn’t the only star as of late to question the use of artificial intelligence in Hollywood.
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Last year, Nicolas Cage warned actors about the need to control their images amid the rise in popularity of AI.
“There is a new technology in town. It’s a technology that I didn’t have to contend with for 42 years until recently. But these 10 young actors, this generation, most certainly will be, and they are calling it ‘EBDR.’ This technology wants to take your instrument. We are the instruments as film actors. We are not hiding behind guitars and drums,” Cage said while accepting the Icon Award at the 25th Newport Beach Film Festival in October.
EBDR stands for “employment-based digital replica,” one of two digital replicas allowed following the deal settled by the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA and the studios following last year’s dual strikes.
Per the rules in the contract, an “EBDR is one created in connection with your employment on a motion picture” and may require something like having an actor’s body scanned. Compensation is based on how much a performer would have worked in person for the scenes the digital replica is used in, and performers are entitled to residuals from their replica’s appearance in the finished product.
“The studios want this so that they can change your face after you’ve already shot it — they can change your face, they can change your voice, they can change your line deliveries, they can change your body language, they can change your performance,” Cage warned.
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“I’m asking you, if you’re approached by a studio to sign a contract, permitting them to use EBDR on your performance, I want you to consider what I am calling ‘MVMFMBMI’ — my voice, my face, my body, my imagination — my performance, in response. Protect your instrument.”
Robert Downey Jr. admitted he intends to sue if his likeness is used with AI, while Ben Affleck believes movies will be the last thing artificial intelligence replaces.
“AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan, it cannot write you Shakespeare,” Affleck said at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit. “The function of having two actors, or three or four actors in a room and the taste to discern and construct, that is something that currently entirely eludes AI’s capability and I think will for a meaningful period of time.”
He added, “What AI is going to do is going to disintermediate the laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier for entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people that want to make ‘Good Will Huntings’ to go out and make it.”
Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Stanton contributed to this report.
