Agatha Christie’s Within a Wall contrasts a well-made portrait of a beautiful woman with the more expressive imperfect sketch of another, revealing more of her soul than her skin and drape. A thoughtless painter’s labour, which gives no information other than facial features, has been a redundant and less sustainable medium since one and a half centuries ago when still photographs came. A painter has to offer what an algorithm of contemporary accuracy cannot execute. One invention crashes into a whole array of human jobs, but that pressure itself pushes our civilization forward by conditioning the individual either to think harder or to perish.
Once upon a time, one man could control and direct another’s thoughts and actions. Since the abolition of slavery, we have worked tirelessly towards machinery that would indulge our laziness. Robots have got us extra-terrestrial photographs and have performed fine surgeries unimaginable with coarse human hands. Artificial Intelligence can learn methods and perform them with endless perseverance. AI chatbots can do more than our computations: they can give advice, generate pictures, and more recently, act in films. Particle6 is an AI production company that has come up with an AI actress named Tilly Norwood. Norwood and her studio have shaken Hollywood.
While producers might look forward to a 90 per cent decrease in production cost, actors either remain indifferent, feel slightly bothered or are terribly insecure about their own professional futures. The Alfonso Gomez-Rejon movie The Current War shows Edison losing to Westinghouse on the bid for power supply at the Chicago World Fair 1892, whereby Edison’s DC technology was defeated in the competition for running the future world. Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison says, “I am working on something now, something so new that people will forget that my name was ever associated with electricity.” That invention evolved into modern cinema, a technology which was shaped as an art form and whose importance is much more than just utility. In ancient India, Sanjaya recited news from Kur ukshetra to Dhritarashtra, possibly by the aid of swift equestrians.
A live telecast has optimally fulfilled that purpose, yet motion pictures have also absorbed the appeal of drama, orchestra and fiction. Japanese filmmaker Yugo Sako decided that he could find no actor good enough to approximate the divine demeanour of Rama on screen. For that reason, he chose to have characters painted and the film made as an animé. A ‘cartoon’ on Sri Rama was not perceived well by Indian authorities at the time of the tug-of-war over Babri Masjid; that has not affected the film’s acclaim from the 24th International Indian Film Festival in 1993 to its release in 4K this year. While a devoted Sako was reluctant to have any mortal portraying his deity, contemporary portrayal by Arun Govil had indeed touched the Indian audience.
The human actor, his interpretation and realization, his perception and allegiance added their own essence to the role. But what more is that human touch than a brain composed of a dynamic network of innumerable neurons, which can theoretically be replicated in perfect detail in the future? A thought process is composed of a finite number of discrete steps. All our feelings of anger, hatred, love, trust or sorrow are simply executions of pre-defined algorithms run on appropriate stimuli. The laws of Freud and Manu, or instinct and society, have us all programmed accordingly. So, in theory, an AI brain can be at least as good as the natural ones of most of us. Star Networks is producing a new Mahabharata show, completely generated by AI.
In the week of the release of its first episode, it ranked second in Hotstar, partly because of its novelty. In the long run, we can compare it with Star’s previously distributed Mahabharata show, which was incredibly popular with its actors shooting to immediate fame. Even with his defeat, Edison was invited to Chicago by J. P. Morgan, because the craze for his autographs would give good publicity to the company. Popular adoration seldom relies on the ultimate verdict of victory. Che Guevara did not win the decisive war he fought, yet he won the hearts of the era’s American youth. Rajesh Khanna’s signature way of flirting with the lead actress, looking into the camera as if addressing the fans in the audience, was appreciated more because of the actor’s persona than acting skills. An actor is the first judge of a scrip t .
While sho o ting the Do oradarshan Mahabharata , scriptwriter Dr. Rahi Masoom Reza is said to have told actor Nitish Bharadwaj, “I knew I had written something. When you act, I see main kyá likha!’ There is doubt about such a rapport between a filmmaker and an AI actor, as there was between Bergman and Von Sydow, Kurosawa and Mifune, and Satyajit Ray and Soumitra Chatterjee. Anyway, AI will design its actors based on available data on thousands of actors, over prompts written by someone who has to know a bit of acting. But an actor does not necessarily elevate a film. Kishore Kumar once reportedly came to the studio with half his face made up, because he had got half the promised payment till then, ruining the day’s shooting. Such mischief is impossible by an AI actor who runs by the programmer’s command, unless it is set in a science fiction dystopia where robots take over human civilization.
(The writer is Research Scholar, Dept. of Mathematics, IIT Bhilai.)