Fortnite Got Permission for AI Darth Vader: Why is SAG Upset?

0:00On this episode of The Noise, talking about using AI to bring back actors from the past. More renewed interest in IMAX and upcoming films. And some AI tools you might have been sleeping on. Let's get into it.

0:14What's up, Addy? Hey, welcome back, Joey. Good to be here. So I got the Google Ultra, whatever thing it's called, for their trial,$125 a month. I knew you would. To access VO3. Yeah, so I messed around with that all weekend and Flow. I will say Flow, as a product, I mean, it's the only way to access the VO3 models, but as a product was still a bit confusing because it's like you get the subscription and then it's like you could use VO3, you can use Imogen, their AI model, and you could use Gemini. But they're all sort of separate products on separate pages. With Flow, if I wanted to make an image, it was kind of buried.

0:46And then I would make the image if I wanted to do the first frame thing. And then I couldn't find them again. It was like, I'm like, where are the images I generated? The video stuff was pretty streamlined. The image stuff, I kept losing where my generated images were going. As a UI developer at Google, who do you think it was built for? I mean, it's built for creators. It is like a forward-facing creator project, like consumer-facing product. Yeah. I mean, maybe I'm just missing something or imaging it somewhere else. But I don't know. A couple things can work out. But for the video part, pretty straightforward.

1:18The credits are expensive. I'm almost through all my credits. VO3 and VO2, same credit use we talked about in the last episode with the API, the same cost. VO2 fast is a tenth of the cost and pretty good. And so I was actually using that a lot. And one of the kind of tricks I was doing was I would run a prompt through VO2 fast. If it was something that kind of seemed like it followed the idea that I was trying to do, then I would bump it up and try it out on VO3. Yeah, that totally makes sense. That's probably how they wanted to have it used anyway. At least for now until the cost comes down. And then there's some other kind of just different things because VO3 is only text to video.

1:54But then if you want to do images, it's VO2 fast. It was a little bit confusing of like what features work with what specific models. I can't imagine how many GPUs they have to spin up to generate a single image somewhere. Because how quickly is it coming back to you? Like a couple minutes? The V2 Fast is pretty quickly, maybe 30 seconds. That's insane. The VO3 is, yeah, maybe a minute or a minute and a half. But that's still, I mean, if you look at it, generating on a single GPU on somebody's computer, even if you have like a 50-90, like a 20-second video would be like hours. So they're like splitting that across, I don't know, hundreds of GPUs, perhaps.

2:32Yeah. Per user. Yeah. Yeah. Times however many users are out there. Yeah. Yeah. That should have got better. Yeah. More efficient. But yeah. And some of the stuff was, you know, really good, like we've seen. It definitely is the best with like realistic stuff or stuff that looks very contemporary. Yeah. Stuff that looks like something you would see on YouTube. It's very good at that. Unsurprisingly. So maybe it's dialed in for YouTube. Who would have thought? It's as if it was trained on a lot of YouTube data. I want to do a quick shout out to two of our viewers that wrote us two amazing reviews.

3:03We thank you, Snoozer City and Teasebag. Teasebag's from Australia. Snoozer City here in the US. Yeah, cool. Thank you for the review. And if you want to shout out too, we have a five-star review. We only shout out five-star reviews. Preferably five stars. Yes. On Apple Podcast or Spotify. Thank you. All right. So let's open our first story. A collection of a couple things on our radar. One is Fortnite was releasing an AI chatbot talkable character. He could talk with Darth Vader being voiced by James Earl Jones, the famous actor who was the originator of the Darth Vader voice, who has also sadly passed away.

3:41So they did make a deal with his estate and to get permission to create this, use his voice to create this AI character, AI chatbot character, so he can have a conversation with Darth Vader. That's cool. And then SAG-AFTRA has filed a lawsuit against Epic Games for its use of AI and Darth Vader's voice. Yeah, see, I'm a little bit confused, scratching my head here, because I'm sure a company as big as Epic Games and a production as big as Fortnite would take the initiative to get the correct licensing from Star Wars and perhaps also the correct rights from James Earl Jones estate. That what they had to deal with as a state, you know, it's between the two of them.

4:20Yeah. And it's not anything new for actors to license their voice for AI voices. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a little bit head scratching here. Also, how else would you scale this up to the millions of users that Fortnite has, right? Like, is there going to be a voice actor behind every one of the reenactments and every one of the different permutations of the conversation? And you're talking about thousands of hours that a voice actor has to do in order to fill up this like tree of voice interactions. Are you saying to train the model? If you were to not use AI. And my guess is. Oh, like if you were to like bring an actor in the studio and have them record.

4:58Yeah, like how. Like how TomTom used to train. Exactly. That's how traditional video game voice decision trees are made is like you have every permutation of this conversation into like a string. of snippets of voice. And then, you know, as the user goes through each of the decision trees, you trigger different vocal outputs. Yeah. But we know even with that, it never sounded great or natural. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, I don't think there's any, as we talked about, the AI genius out of the bottle. So like that, it sounds way better. It's the right way to do it. Interactive, trainable. They had permission.

5:32I think from a statement from SAG, they said, a Fortnite signatory company chose to replace the work of human performers with AI. Unfortunately, they did so without providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms. Okay. As such, we have filed an unfair label practice charge against Lama Productions. Oh, okay, okay. So this was just like, yo, you didn't give us a heads up. You didn't tell us. Yeah, I was like, all right. All right, relax, dude. You know what it feels like to me, Joey? It feels a little bit more like they're taking a ceremonic stance, almost like a public stance against AI, Ask Mean Actors Guild, and it optically makes them look like, you know, they're protecting their guild members.

6:08But are they? Because, I mean, they had permission with the family. This is like a key, you know, use case. So it's like you have a family member, you know, they had an iconic voice, they had an iconic character. They have passed away and their family can still monetize and like live off the work that they did into the future. And this is just like a future. I mean, we're going to see a lot more of this too, that we talked about, like with the voice is one thing, but digital likeness, they're, you know, just like capturing their image and then being able to license that out in the future. Every one of those things you just said is going to touch with AI.

6:40Like, there's going to be a touch point. Yeah. So, I mean, it's like, do you need Stag's permission every single time you make a deal, especially with, I mean, weren't there even terms about this already ironed out in the last negotiation? Wasn't that part of the point of the last negotiation? I guess a guild and a union's main sort of source of power and influence is the ability to dictate terms, right? Yeah, right. And here, it feels like they didn't get to do that. So they're just pushing back here. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, that's the future trend. And it makes sense too. I mean, also, if you were an actor, why would you not want your family to be able to profit off of your image and likeness in the future after you're gone?

7:25And I was sure the use of AI would restructure the finances a little bit as well, right? Because now you're scaling up millions of hours versus one time likeness pass or whatever it is. So you're talking about whole different numbers. So that's probably what it is as well. Yeah, I mean, how do you figure out the monetary compensation for that? I don't know. Yep. And where do you draw the line? Yeah, is it like, okay, this Fortnite release with this specific Vader character is what you're licensing for, but if you do future updates, yeah, I don't know how the terms of that will be ironed out. Exactly, yeah.

7:55Other actor coming back that would not have been on my bingo card, Orson Welles. Wow. Okay. Nearly 40 years after his death, Orson Welles is back as a disembodied AI-generated voice in a location-based storytelling app, Story Rabbit. Orson Welles would not have been on my list of iconic voices if you're under the age of 50. 90. 90. So, just for our viewers who are young, Orson Welles wrote and broadcasted War of the Worlds, I think, pre-World War II, I believe, in the 30s? Probably. It was before TV. It was radio. Yeah. So, back then, radio was your only source of news. And Orson Welles broadcast that Earth was being invaded by aliens.

8:42And it came in such a way that people thought we really were being invaded by aliens. It was a big deal. He went viral before it was a thing. And also his other big claim to fame is he wrote, directed, starred in Citizen Kane. Yes. And everything else. And that then became AFI's number one film of all time. Supposedly the best movie ever made. Yeah, that's why I said AFI. I don't know if I would agree with that. It's a good, yeah, it's a solid historical film. I'm blanking, sorry to sidetrack, but I'm blanking here. I think there was a documentary or a mockumentary made about that production. Oh.

9:15Recently. Recently? yeah there was mank mank had that's right mank was structured around that entire story yeah it was about the uh the co-writer that's right slash who person who possibly wrote it all the netflix um yeah david fincher film yeah that was great that was great yeah and then another side fact uh orson wells's i think grandson simon wells uh he used to work at dreamworks with us i really he was a director for a couple of the films um so yeah his okay his yeah my grandfather's orson models. Yeah, it's like, wait, that's the same Wells? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't, I don't know, I just saw this, but I was just like, wait, Orson Welles?

9:54Yeah. I mean, you could pull back as far as there was voice recordings of an actor, right? Like any, as long as there's enough data. Yeah. I mean, exactly. I remember, there's another sort of tangent, but I remember a while ago before generative AI and that was the whole thing. And there were companies trying to work on voice replication. Yeah. And Roger Ebert. Yes. Was a kind of big contender and like pushing for that because he had throat cancer and lost his voice. Yeah. But also had thousands of hours of his voice recording, which at the time was kind of hard to come by. Yeah. So they were working on creating a digital replicate.

10:29I could totally see that. And before Rotten Tomatoes was a thing, he was the authority, him and Siskel. Yeah. Was the authority on movies, right? Yeah, movies, movies, reviews. They had the thumbs up, thumbs down. Like, if it was two thumbs up, you better go see it. I mean, they even had their own Muppets spoofing on them. Oh, really? Yeah, they were the two. Oh, I can't remember the name of them. But yeah, they're in the Muppet Vision show. But they're the two grumpy old guys in the balcony that would always like kind of crap on the Muppet show. Oh, that totally tracks. Okay, okay. Yeah, it's based on them, on the two of them.

10:58Awesome. Okay, and next story, going back to IMAX, which is always a fan favorite and our favorite too. So, because of the success of Sinners, there has been a renewed interest in IMAX. Yeah, I think I read somewhere, or maybe you sent me this article, that IMAX was on the brink of dead. I don't think I sent you that, but maybe. Yeah, like the company itself was struggling, and now it's just completely turned around. Yeah, there was one quote from a tweet. IMAX CCO Giovanni Dolce, until this year, I mean, y 'all said the success of Sinners and Interstellar. no exhibitor has called IMAX to install film projectors.

11:37That's the one. Now they're getting calls and they're installing 70 millimeter IMAX film projectors at about one to five locations over the next year. That's incredible. These are the big, yeah, bulky. And as we've talked about too, there were only 10 theaters in the world that were playing sinners in 70 millimeter IMAX. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, awesome to hear that. 70 millimeter is obviously a huge lift. So I mean, IMAX has been doing the digital projectors and the name licensing and the digital projectors, which are slightly bigger. Yeah, I saw Mission Impossible on the digital projector this weekend.

12:08The digital IMAX. Yeah, which is like a bigger screen than the one in the movie theater, but it's a lot easier to find those screens. Which theater did you go to? The Century City one. Oh yeah, that's a nice one. Yeah, thanks. And was it worth the extra fee in the IMAX? Yeah, I mean, it's a slightly different upcharge. It's worth it. It's not, I mean, look, it's not as big as the universal or the like true IMAX screens that I saw centers. Like the Irvine Spectrum ones. Yeah. You know, that would still be awesome, but that's like for so few screens and yeah it's just hard to track them to for sure that is a schlep in an event i mean we're taking a step back like right after we got out of the pandemic out of covid i think we all realized how important venues are and how important physical experiences are there was an uptick in obviously concerts and some of the biggest artists in the world but went back and announced big tours and you know taylor swift on top of that you saw the sphere come them being built being deployed you saw yeah cosme is like an entirely new format and now we're seeing imax and i don't think these trends will reverse themselves because you know i'm getting a little philosophical here we're more or less all all of us are working remotely we do more and more of our transactions online we buy stuff online so we are just reducing physical interactions as a humanity as a whole and we're filling that void with these like bigger than life experiences that you have to go to a venue for.

13:33And it gives you a reason to go. Because it's like, yeah, going to a regular movie theater, it's like, yeah, I like the experience and stuff. But if it's just sort of like a drama, like not to knock them, but it's like, it's got to be kind of interesting for me to like, you know, we can dish out the money and go to the theater and do a whole thing. But like when it's an IMAX, it's big and it's like, there's no... It's a spectacle. ...replication of this at home. Yeah. It gives you more reason to go and to pay the premium for the ticket price. I mean, like in the 90s, you had a lot more mediocre movie theaters than the elite premium ones.

14:03I don't even think that was a concept yet. Right, right, right. There was barely any stadium seating. Yeah, I mean, there was like Cinerama Dome here in LA. Yeah, that's like an exception, but most of them were still like slanted theaters where, you know, if someone was in front of you, you're like trying to poke your head around and like the floor is sticky from like spilled soda. I think that was never cleaned up. Because that was the means to an end. That was the only way to consume that movie at that time, right? Now we have streaming and all these types of options. So either go big or go home.

14:33And then also what I thought was interesting. So the other kind of next big IMAX film coming out is the F1 film, which was shot digitally, but shot for IMAX. So like that's the other kind of, it's also got Brad Pitt on it. Got Brad Pitt, got fast moving cars. But yeah, after it came out, you know, that Christopher Nolan's Odyssey was going to be like entirely shot in IMAX. There was like a press update where it was like, by the way, the F1 film, it was not shot on IMAX, but the entire film is going to be displayed in the 190 aspect ratio, the full IMAX ratio. That's so Hollywood, right? That's like, wait, wait, wait.

15:07Just so you know. We are also displaying the entire movie in full IMAX ratio. Can I segue there for a bit? Did you hear that Tarantino approved the sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? And I think David Fincher's going to direct it. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah. That'd be cool. I wonder if it's going to be shot on film. I feel like it should be. It should be. Maybe it'll be on VistaVision, which is also the other update too. That's my favorite. Yeah, another also going back to the resurgence of film. VistaVision, which we've talked about before, 70 mil. No, I'm sorry. Not 70 mil.

15:40No. Fake 70 mil. 35. 35, but shot horizontally so you can get a lot more image onto the negative. Upcoming slate of films that are being shot on it. Wuthering Heights, 2026. Alejandro Iñárritu's upcoming film. Oh, duh. The Narnia. This one, yeah, I'm curious about this. This is also, you know, from Twitter, so it could also not be the most accurate, but the Narnia adaptation. They're rebooting Narnia? Yeah, Greta Gerwig, which I know it's a Netflix film, but she pushed them to do a IMAX release. With Vista Vision. That's why I see this on this thing. I'm like, I don't know how true this is because, yeah, I know that it is being shot for IMAX.

16:17I don't know if it's actually being shot with IMAX. And I know that it's getting an IMAX, like at least a two-week run, which is something like Netflix doesn't do theatrical releases, but this was like a kind of a controversial push because she had a Netflix deal. She would only do the Netflix deal if they guaranteed a theatrical IMAX release for like a two or four week run. I mean, I'm signing up for all of these films, especially the Inaritu one because his DP preferably is Emmanuel Lubisky. Chivo. Yeah, Chivo, yes. He did Children of Men as well as Revenant. Yes, yeah. And Revenant was shot with natural sunlight only.

16:50Yeah. That's crazy. and it looks so beautiful yeah all this stuff looks amazing yeah children of men I love that film in a very depressing way just makes you thankful for our society that we have today like dude I'm glad we don't live in that world yeah yeah so cool to see IMAX and just film back also this reminds me too of you know we're coming on the tail end we're recording this on Memorial Day the tail end of the weekend it's supposed to be a record breaking box office weekend with Lilo and Stitch and Mission Impossible. And Sinner's still doing pretty well. Right. And fourth film in the play that I'm forgetting on.

17:27Yeah. But all of that combined total should be a record weekend. And it reminds me of, you know, the comment from a few months ago of like Seth Rogen where it's like, it only takes one or two films to like change the conversation around. And now like IMAX is getting film called up to install 70 millimeter projectors. You know, like it's a good kickoff for the summer box office. I think we're having an excellent weekend. Here are the numbers. According to Box Office Mojo, Lilo and Stitch is currently sitting at 145 million. Mission Impossible at 63 Final Destination at 19 million and then Sinners is still tracking at 8.8 million so yeah that's a very healthy box office yeah and Sinners is like third or fourth week and it lost all its IMAX screen so yeah I mean this feels like I'm looking at box office from like 1998 it feels so healthy I thought you were going to say it too because you're like Final Destination Mission Impossible Relo and Stitch it does feel like 1998 absolutely somebody or i don't know if there's a room or not but apparently there's a final destination uh the screening some at some theater somewhere in the world and then the roof fell down onto the audience yeah luckily no one was hurt so we can laugh about it but that's crazy you know what's crazy to do i think uh a few months ago a roof collapsed at another theater and then i think someone was like that'd be crazy if this happen at like a final destination screening right well i think it's happening because theaters are just probably aren't investing in new buildings so these are old buildings don't have the money yeah and also you're rattling that building day in and day out with like dolby yeah or that uh regal um 40x or whatever it's called with the c vibrators i mean those those uh 20 hertz cycles are gonna move some walls around yeah very uh appropriate unintentional marketing um tactic And last, grouping a couple tools on each of our radar.

19:21All right, so yeah, first kind of tool that I saw under the radar. Well, not a new tool, because we talked about this before. Manus AI. This was the one that the sort of agentic AI tool that could scour the web and work for you and was in a private access. And reportedly, codes were selling for like thousands of dollars. Yes. It is publicly available now. Not anyone can sign up for it. So that's been out. But the update that they have now is they have an image generator built in. Huge. Yeah, this is interesting because it's not just generate images, but it's using the agent part to go around the web and then combine that into images.

19:55Yeah, it's a really interesting take on what we feel is an AI helper, AI assistant for us. ChatGPT does a really good job of combining an LLM with an image generation tool. However, you still have to kind of give it a nudge. Like, let's say you want ChatGPT to generate you a flyer. It's like a hybrid between an image generation model and an LLM. and very effective at combining the two. So the example here is like, if you wanna do a children's storybook, it'll not only generate the imagery for the book, but also fill in the dialogue bubbles and the overall text block. Yeah. Yeah, cool. And I saw it was like, if you've seen the ChatGPT examples where you give it a picture of your room and you're like, oh, you know, style this for me.

20:41Like, how many style this? You could kind of do that on Manus, but you could be like, style this with IKEA furniture. it'll go to ikea and look at what furniture is listed on the website and then make sure it only uses those kinds of images you have the skews and then you can go to ikea and so it's like oh here's a picture of your room styled with furniture and here's where you can buy it yeah that's very cool yeah and with chat gb i think you and i use chat gpt almost every day you know you still have to nudge it a little bit to give it uh an image that combines with text so like if you want to build a flyer first you have to go through the motion of building the text body of the flyer then you put it back into chat gpd and say okay now make me a flyer with this text and then they'll probably generate it here you could probably just say make me a flyer that does this and it'll be more effective at it yeah or like with this like logo from this brand and it can go find the logo and yeah yeah generate it so the image generation seems high quality enough for day-to-day tasks you know yeah i'm curious it wasn't quite clear if this is their image like their own image generator model if they're using their agent stuff and then just using like the chat probably for API or something.

21:46Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I would imagine, like this is what I was saying, is you're going from models to workflows to like a higher level of abstraction where you're just giving the AI system a task and they're figuring out which models, which workflows to use to give that back to you. Yeah. And yeah, that's the future of like with the agentic part where it really, because I feel like a lot of things kind of either get mixed up or confused where it's like workflow rules versus agentic. And like true agentic is like, It figures out itself what action it should take appropriately. You don't have to be like, if this, then this happens, or if this, then this.

22:20It's like, no, it just knows based on the context, like, what should I do? And just to tie into my visit to Microsoft Build conference last week, the entire emphasis was around agentic AI building. So Microsoft is not going to dictate what agentic AIs you use. They're giving you the tools as a company to build agents on the fly or even deploy agentic build abilities to your consumers. So they'll give you, you know, tools that make an AI safe and trustworthy. They'll give you tools to scale up an agent, control an agent, fine tune an agent and all that stuff. but i think that's that it feels really uh hard to kind of imagine a concept a world where ai agents do a lot of different tasks for us but i think it'll become more clear once we see like an ai agent that only books plane tickets an ai agent that only figures out your calendar and an ai agent that only takes reservations for high-end restaurants and so on yeah i mean dedicated agents but then also just the ai knowing like based on what you're saying like or if you're planning a trip it's like well i'll call up the you know you need airfare you need the car booking and it just knows to like do this yeah and those are like those simple most obvious examples we can think of like think about the two of us right like we're doing tons of research to do this podcast what if we had an agent that's just scouring the internet gathering stuff and then knowing our recommendations our preferences for the certain type of news yeah it's like skimming the stuff to the top.

23:52Like that's the kind of agentic behavior we need. And if a company gave us the ability to build that sort of agent with natural language and some of the tools that don't require coding. Yeah, that's where I saw there was a little bit of an update with Zapier and their agent tools. And I haven't dug into it, but it sounds like that's kind of what they're trying to build, where it's like using their vast network of APIs that they already call up and it's easy, but with an agent back end. So then, because yeah, I have Zap, which is like tons of flow trees or if then, or I've used another tool, Relay, which is also cool, but it's like a lot of like, if this, then this.

24:30Yeah, thinking of like the possibilities, which is like, in the future, it's like, you don't have to think of all of these flow trees. You just be like, if they do something like this, do this action, or it'll just even know to do it. I saw a really interesting article I think I sent to you, it was on Forbes, that Microsoft is betting on agentic deployments for companies as the future of its growth. And Google is betting on the consumer use of generative AI and AI agents for its growth. So like one is more enterprise oriented and all about customizing an agent. The other one is like kind of giving you the tools at a consumer level.

25:06Yeah. Like which one is going to win? Maybe both. Maybe we need both. Yeah. But it's a totally different take on two of the biggest tech industries. All right. And then, yeah, what is another one? Actually from Google. Oh, yes. alpha evolve alpha evolve okay so deep mind which is the sort of r &d arm and the ai arm of google they're always a couple steps ahead it i think as far as deploying new or better models they just get slapped on a lot because open ai anthropic and some of those other they just crystal ball i think usually but i think since ever since google io uh last week the a lot more got the spotlight yeah a lot more spotlight on google and a lot more awareness of deep mind yeah so So one of the challenges with building the next generation of AI models is actually coming up with the advanced algorithms and problem solving that, quite honestly, is reaching the capabilities of the human mind.

26:00So like, how do you harness super intelligence to build the next level of intelligence? So that's, I think this is along that term. Alpha Evolve is a coding agent, not like Replicator or some of the other coding agents. This is designed specifically for advanced algorithms. you're talking about very high-level math, right? Like PhD and beyond level math. These are going to be math to unlock how the next neural network is built with trillions of parameters, right? So they're building a tool set for them to build better tool sets. Okay. So is this like Matt Damon, AI and Goodwill Hunting? Like you just need your...

26:40That's probably, yeah. You just need your guy in the hall to solve your problems and it's awfully evolved as Matt Damon. Okay. Yeah, I mean, with AI, you know, one of the things I often mock, but it's unfortunately true, is the incredible amount of energy you need, the incredible amount of GPU you need just to be able to do what we're considering 1.0 version of AI, right? So in order to get to 2.0, it's like an exponential increase in the number of GPUs, the amount of energy we use. It doesn't have to be that way. there is advanced algorithms if you leverage correctly can give you efficiency and incredible scale how do you get to it so now they're deploying advanced algorithm coding agents that could perhaps do some trial and error and get it that way interesting yeah yeah all right this is at like the cutting edge me too and i'm just as you know i'm describing it in super loose and vague terms because I don't understand the math behind it.