When you see the face of a familiar actor on screen,
you probably assume that somewhere, some time, the actual human being presented
to you via technology was really in a studio in front of a camera, speaking the
lines you hear. It is only when we
remember that motion pictures are designed to produce illusions that we realize
the words we hear may be another actor's voice-over, the background may be
green-screened in, and even the actor's face could have been digitally
retouched, or even created from scratch with sophisticated software. Thinking about these things distracts
from the enjoyment of the movie, so usually we don't. But if you saw a person looking, moving, and sounding
exactly like Humphrey Bogart acting in a movie made in 2015, say, it would be
hard to ignore the little detail that Bogart died in 1957.
The 1994 film "Forrest Gump" digitally
placed the live actor Tom Hanks in archival footage of famous deceased persons
such as John F. Kennedy, but what I'm talking about is the reverse: hauling John F. Kennedy out of the
grave to make him play a role in, say, a new Judd Apatow comedy. And here's where we get into some
ethical qualms.
In a recent New
Yorker article, the digital exploits of University of Southern California
computer scientist Paul Debevec are described, from his early work reverse-aging
Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008) to his
current attempts to preserve holographic versions of Holocaust survivors for
use in a permanent museum display.
If the latter project is successful, visitors will be able to pose
questions and a three-dimensional representation of the person, accurate down
to such details as shadows that fall naturally according to the room lighting
prevailing at the time, will answer the questions via artificial-intelligence
technology. In effect, Debevec will
have resurrected the dead, although to a strictly circumscribed sort of life.
For the last few decades, progress in
digitally-enabled technologies that initially depend on huge amounts of
computer processing have followed a consistent path. First, a new technique is developed at great expense, often
paid for by the military or government agencies, and demonstrated in a limited
way. Next comes commercialization,
with large institutions and corporations being first in line to use it. And finally, advances in hardware and
software lower the cost enough to make it affordable to a reasonably large
number of average citizens.
Debevec fully intends for his super-accurate simulation and illumination
technology to follow this well-worn path, so we ought to give at least a little
consideration to its ethical implications.
The fact that Debevec is labeled a scientist obscures
the reality of what he is doing when he takes Angelina Jolie's picture from
hundreds of different angles to make a digital clone of her to perform a film stunt
too dangerous for stunt doubles to do:
he is being an artist. And
the ethical rules for artists doing art are different from the rules for
scientists doing science. From
what little I know about the way art is regarded in Western cultures today,
there aren't any ethical rules that are generally observed, unless you count legal strictures such as bans
on child pornography and copyright laws.
I suspect if Judd Apatow tried to make a digital clone of John F.
Kennedy to do the kind of disreputable things that actors in his films
typically do, he might hear from the Kennedy estate via a process server. But the legal treatment of public
figures differs from the way the rights of a private citizen are treated. Courts have held that as long as the
image of a public figure is not being used for commercial exploitation, it is
okay to portray it in a work of art.
After death, a person's estate can still control the use of the person's
image for commercial purposes, and this would undoubtedly include a
Debevec-style holographic image.
So when Debevec was asked if he had considered resurrecting Marilyn
Monroe, for instance, he said that Monroe's estate was unwilling, and so he
dropped the idea.
On the other hand, when ConAgra, the firm that makes
Orville Redenbacher popcorn, approached Debevec to simulate the recently
deceased popcorn king for a TV commercial, Debevec readily agreed. So, two years after Redenbacher died in
2005, viewers saw a digital version of Redenbacher, still promoting his
popcorn. But when critics started referring
to "Orville Deadenbacher, the popcorn zombie" the ad
disappeared. This was not a
violation of ethics so much as it was a violation of good taste, and I'm not
talking about popcorn.
Highly realistic holographic images of people, alive
or dead, are simply the latest advance in a sequence that began 40,000 years
ago, when someone blew paint through a stencil onto the wall of the Cave of El
Castillo in northern Spain to form the earliest known cave paintings. Sculpture, portraits in oils,
photography, motion pictures, and CGI (computer-generated images) followed, and
it is only our inordinate addiction to novelty that makes us think there is
something fundamentally different in Debevec's hyper-realistic representations
of the human form. Art is one of
the most notable activities that separates humans—the only rational animal—from
other animals, and the fact that Debevec's form of art involves rationality of
a scientific and technological kind does not make it any less an art form. And art can be put to both the holiest
and the most debauched of uses.
As our power to create increasingly realistic-looking
digital human forms grows and the technology to do this spreads, we can only
hope that artists will rediscover that truth, beauty, and goodness are their
true subjects. Most of the art
world refuses to acknowledge this fact, which is the real basis for the ethics
of art. But no amount of
technological advance will change that situation. That change cannot take place in server rooms, or in the
theories of computer scientists.
That change can take place only in the heart.
Sources: The article "Pixel Perfect: the
scientist behind the digital cloning of actors" appeared in The New Yorker's Apr. 28, 2014 issue on
pp. 32-38. I referred to http://www.onlineartrights.org/issues/depictions-real-people/depictions-real-people,
and the Wikipedia articles on Orville Redenbacher and cave painting.