Technology

First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation.

I promise you that I am not attempting emotional manipulation. We just appear to be coming at this from very different assumptions on the nature of likeness. I see it in relation to one's identity, to which I see it as tightly coupled, where you seem to be approachining it from the perspective that it is an asset or a commodity. We're not talking about taking inspiration from another human being's performance but plagiarism of it and copying their external identity in voice or image, with the express intent of compensating them less (when it comes to the studios).

You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people's bodies.

I don't see how that tracks.

If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped.

Oh! You seem to be inferring that the hobbyist or VFX artist in this case has a fundamental right to the fruits of an AI-cloned actor's labor, with or without their consent. I cannot agree with that. By that reasoning, enforcing laws against fraud, forgery, and identity theft is exerting power over the would-be forger or identity thief by preventing them from assuming the victim's identity and draining their savings.

Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people's bodies.

I do not see it primarily as an intellectual property issue (though there are definitely significant ethical issues related to IP in LLMs/plagiarism engines). I see it as an identity and labor issue. The studios and producers are pushing for the tech because they want to exploit people. VFX artists included.

Obviously that's not what you mean. I guess

Oh, it very much is. By taking away an artist or creative worker's very identity and reselling it, those marketing and leveraging these models are alienating these workers from their labor and their own means of production. Intellectual workers and creatives are still workers; cut one and we all bleed.

Not only that, those selling access to the myself are literally participating in rent-seeking for an amalgam of creative workers' stolen labor. Are IP laws fucked? Absolutely. Do they and identity protection laws and systems need to be overhauled to be able to handle modern challenges and technology? Yup. Does supporting corpos in their exploitation of fellow workers because a tiny percentage of them are disgustingly wealthy help anyone but the ultra-wealthy? Nope.

I'm just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.

Is this a "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a bad guy" bit of ad hominem here? Because I'd really like to see how "workers should be compensated fairly for their labor, not have it stolen and leveraged to exploit other workers" is in any way in line with conservatism.

SAG-AFTRA ...is fundamentally a conservative organization. It's no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US.

This is not a statement that meshes with facts. Political contributions from members are so far blue that it's not even close. And that's including the 2008 spike from old rich racists. At worst, there are a lot of neo-libs but there's also a fair number of soc-dems. I've never met any member who felt favorably towards Ronnie the Union-busting shitbag. Beyond that, I've yet to meet a SAG-AFTRA member that is anti-union, while finding someone who is pro-union as a member of a trades union is nearly as rare as finding a unicorn.

They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That's what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.

There is unjust hierarchy in play, yes. Voice and video game talent, especially, have and continue to be treated as less-thans and where the union should be doing around-the-clock membership drives throughout an industry and pressuring studios to sign union contracts for more productions, they instead, generally, do about fuck-all and are happy to make concessions that "real" screen actors would never face.

I get the feeling that maybe this is less about intellectual property and more about bucket-crabbing and potentially about justification of support of tech that is based upon ethically compromised foundations and is being leveraged as an ethically-devoid weapon against labor, not to the workers' benefit. If you consider yourself a leftist and/or pro-labor, I'd recommend some serious self-reflection because it seems like you have a bit of a hatred for a whole segment of laborers.

Also, to be clear, hobbyists aren't the problematic group in all of this at all. It's the producers and studios leveraging technology to exploit. However, sometimes we all have to do things that we would rather not or give up things that we want because doing otherwise causes measureable harm to others.