I am confused as to why some Hollywood studios attempted to gain ownership of the likenesses of extras. The topic is timely because it is one of the issues that led to the current actors’ strike.
As I understand it, studios wanted to insert a clause into contracts that would allow them to scan the likeness of actors hired for the day — and then to retain the right to reuse that data in perpetuity.
The reason I find this puzzling has nothing to do with the ethical considerations, as large as those are. What stumps me is this: Anybody in my field of computer graphics will tell you that it is totally unnecessary.
For quite a few years the technology has existed to synthesize an extremely wide variety of highly realistic human faces. Many technical papers were published showing how to do this, long before the recent A.I. craze.
Didn’t anybody at those studios do even a little research? If they had simply talked to their own effects people, they would have learned all about these existing techniques.
I’m starting to think these studios might not be all that well run.