UNCLTRD ✖ How Food Became a Storyteller

Hope you're all enjoying this very British summer. This week, we're exploring a myriad of subjects including the uncanny valley, superfan-approved dress codes, and what Gen-Z REALLY thinks about alcohol. 

What does AI really mean for media?

A few weeks ago, the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) went on strike, joining the Writers Guild of America (WGA), taking to the picket lines to dispute shockingly disproportionate pay in the age of the streaming boom, job security, and more. The strikes have ground Hollywood to a halt, for good reason. 

There are dozens of other issues at play here, some not even publicly reported, yet one stuck out as perhaps the most interesting, or at least most dystopian. The media industry has been hit with the issue of AI, and the question of how it will integrate into television, movies, and streaming in general in the near future. A plan to scan actors' faces and utilise their likeness indefinitely, without proper compensation, has caused unrest within the actors and writers' unions. Most notably, the proposed plan is pushing the ultimate boundaries of the uncanny valley and digital literacy, with critics notably pointing out the eerie sense of inhumanity in digitally created or altered people.

It’s clear why an actor would be outraged by being asked to consider what is supposedly a 'groundbreaking proposal,' though this isn’t a totally new debate. Technology and media have always gone hand-in-hand, and the argument of digitally altering people for films has been discussed in the past. According to Cinemablend, martial artist and actor Jet Li had similar worries when casting for The Matrix sequels, claiming he was “afraid that his fighting style could be copied digitally if he had signed to star in the films.”