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Stars protest after AI actress gets agency interest: ‘What about living young women?’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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For the same reason they are "needed" for flesh and blood humans.
Studios need to know who is and isn't worth even spending the time for an interview on, let alone filming. For a human this might be avoiding complete flakes that waste casting time or, theoretically, avoiding something like Joaquin Phoenix pulling out of a movie at the very last minute because it was too gay (allegedly).
For an AI? That is a model that has been vetted that it won't lead to immediate law suits because it is just Tom Cruise or that can be programmed to do what is needed. Sometimes you want a model that is like Keanu and became a gun nut after The Matrix and shoots 3 gun in his spare time. And sometimes you want that Korean Boy Band actor who is going to flinch every time a blank goes off because that is the character.
On the talent side? What role you "choose" can completely derail your career. We all love industry darlings like the Twilight kids or Jennifer Lawrence who can do both big budget leading roles AND pick some of the quirkiest and most interesting indie films. But pick the wrong quirky role and you are "that chick who sucked a guy off" or get typecast into action movies and so forth.
And that is doubly true for AI models and their handlers/trainers. Everyone pretends they can spot generative AI because there are six fingers on that hand. But the reality is that different underlying algorithms/models will have characteristics in terms of what training data they weight and so forth. So two "actresses" generated with the same toolset WILL have similarities if you obsess over it enough. And... it won't end well if Aki Ross 2.0's underlying model was also used to train Project Melodee 2.0 and people realize her face when she is eating that cake that represents the last vestiges of her innocence is REALLY similar to the face that Melodee make when she is doing DVDA.
At which point the agency helps to avoid situations where "Well... you are contracted and mr tarantino wants you to drive that car while he jacks it to your feet. And you wouldn't want to be problematic, would you?".
And the last part being, funny enough, collective bargaining. An individual is gonna have a hard time saying no to that rock star director. Whereas said director is going to think twice about taking advantage of someone if it means they might get blocklisted by the same org that represents Thom Cruz.
There are obviously a LOT of issues with "AI Actors" and... I wish I believed it wasn't going to be a thing within the next 5 years. But the idea of having talent agencies to act as intermediaries still makes a LOT of sense.
We are talking about a completely different ecosystem here.
These generative 'models' either fall into the buckets of:
A very small basket of completely closed, relatively inflexible corporate APIs.
Or a still-small basket of open models folks build these skeletal frameworks around, or maybe loras or adapters.
All these AI startups like to pretend they're doing something special when, underneath, they're really just prompting ChatGPT with a wrapper, or hosting a Flux finetune or whatever.
In other words, they are NOT pretraining Thom Cruz from scratch. The pool of usable frontier models is very small.
Again, you're treating these 'models' like a diverse group of humanity, and like every company's training from scratch, when that's not how the software's set up.
It makes no economic sense to treat them like people with their associated complications. They're software suites, they're tools, more like different flavors Davinci Resolve or whatever studios use these days, that can each produce an infinite spectrum of humans depictions, basically for free. A closer analog would be video game development, with the cost of voice acting and animation stripped out; the only thing that makes The Master Chief, Commander Shepard, or a particular incarnation of Lara Croft 'unique' is the copyright, recognition, and software suite they built them into.
EDIT:
To add to this, I think its extremely dangerous and unhealthy to anthropomorphize them.
In fact, this might be what the agencies are trying to do. 'Humanizing' them like theyre individual, sentient things makes them appear less like Lara Croft selling a Snickers bar. It may be optics for the customers (like ad makers hiring actors/actresses) more than anything.
Okay, but there's no real evidence that what they're selling does any of this. It's a bland digital photocopy of human behavior, not a curious and complex human talent, with interests beyond following the commands of an experienced prompt engineer.
On these terms, its not really a "talent agency" so much as an "IP management firm". And the product they're selling is just a very high end NFT with all the associated problems.
"I love your actress, can I take a closer look at her?"
click-copy / click-paste
"Thanks, you're fired."