A New Star in the System

Some of the acting we can watch on screens these days is impressive and disturbing in equal measure. Realistic performances, emotional exchanges, and quite magic moments. Except it didn’t involve any actors. It’s a massive shift for the acting profession. They are the frontline of fiction films and tv, the visible face of audiovisual stories and, in many cases, the principal stakeholders in the potential success of a movie or series, owing to their looks, talent and fame. This is all being upended. Actors and models in fashion and advertising are already feeling it. Why would producers pay models thousands of dollars per working day, when they can build realistic AI characters for a few hundred or less, and keep them on the roster forever? It’s a brutal but salient question. And the advertising industry is answering it by experimenting with AI and offering it to clients. It’s a different scenario for actors and actresses in fiction film and tv, thanks to their audience appeal and the obvious fact that we love to see humans playing characters. But actors in fiction will also be impacted by an already moving wave of studios, production companies, tv channels and streamers adopting AI video and sound techniques in their workflows. So, a deeper question looms large: if a machine can act, where does that leave the human player?

It’s Not the First Plot Twist

Cinema itself once presented a similar disruption. At the time of its invention, the world had theatre. For centuries, the only way to see a story performed by actors was live. And most of it rested on the power of the spoken word. The first films, by contrast, were silent. They felt awkward and flat. Many stage actors rejected them. But as silent movies developed their own language and cinema audiences grew, theatre took a hit, and audiences dwindled. Silent films in the 1910s and 1920s were inexpensive, highly visual, and didn’t require literacy or indeed culture from the audience. This attracted broader, working-class crowds. And theatre lost its monopoly. With film, audiences could enjoy spectacle, stars, and new settings for a fraction of the price. Also, a performance only had to be done once. After that, it could be projected, duplicated, distributed, and sold. The actor’s work became reproducible. And yet, theatre survived and became more highbrow. As film took over mass entertainment, the stage catered for an elite audience of artists, intellectuals and unconditional patrons. Serious drama, experimental work, and political theatre became more prominent. And after WWII, live performances surged again.

Now we face the rise of AI film in the face of traditional film. From the actor’s perspective, the comparison with the theatre-to-film moment is ironic because, while traditional films still needed actors to perform at least once, AI films simply don’t. Everything you see and hear is computer-generated, yet it can feel as if you’re watching a Hollywood drama or a prime-time sitcom. This flips the script. And the fear is that actors will be replaced. But then, that assumes this is a fight for survival, which it isn’t. Just as cinema didn’t kill theatre, Netflix didn’t kill cinema, and YouTube didn’t kill TV, AI films won’t make actors irrelevant, because many of us will want to continue watching and following real performers, just like people in the early 20th Century enjoyed and supported live theatre, even at the peak of cinema. What it will do though is add yet more options and more complexity. There will be more competition and a more fragmented audience.

The Well of Life

So the question for actors, and indeed creatives in general, is not whether we’ll be replaced. It’s how we remain irreplaceable. What can you do that a machine can’t? The answer is simply in your humanity, in your life and in your very experience. No computer will ever truly feel and communicate your unique memories, your instinct, your pain, your courage, or your joy. It can replicate art and expression, but it can never draw it directly from the well of life which we all thirst for and drink from. This is your absolute value as an artist. In a strange way, AI forces us to become better humans, because it’s taking over our technical tasks, and leaving the essential work to us. So the introduction of AI will not end acting. It will remind us what acting is for, it will make actors more precious, and it will elevate their work. In all fields of artistic expression, we stay relevant not by fighting the AI tsunami, but by embodying that which cannot be washed away. We win by being human.