Bruce Willis, now famous for aphasia wiping out his ability to communicate and to act, has a new source of income:
Bruce Willis Signs Deal to Get Deepfaked Into Future Movies
The same company that bought the rights has previously added a Deepfaked Willis to TV commercials for a Russian phone company (before The War, of course). The results are… minimal:
It seems that the new agreement is based on “Die Hard” and The Fifth Element” era Bruce Willis… back when he had hair. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Well… it’s an inevitable thing, so it’s probably a good thing that we’re getting a precedent of a *living* actor signing up for this while they can do so willingly, and get paid for it. Soon there will probably be money to be made for regular folks to sit in a scanner and go through a range of motions and emotions and sell their Deepfake rights for X amount and Y royalties. Just the way it’s gonna be, I suppose, along with AI-created entirely original “human” actors. One presumed benefit will be a mangling of “celebrity culture,” since celebrities won’t be real people anymore. Some might argue that political campaigns will be able to Deepfake support from digital celebrities… but considering how consistently *stupid* celebrities are about politics anyway, it could hardly be worse. Will anyone *really* care what Marilyn Monrobot has to say about the 2028 Presidential campaign?
Of course, the article includes hand-wringing:
That doesn’t bode well.
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While this should help Willis and his family earn extra cash, it’s an ominous precedent. With an already golden legacy and a filmography dense with classics like “Die Hard,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Sixth Sense,” is this really how Willis should be drawing out the end of his career?
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But for the sake of both actors and moviegoers: let’s not have our stars replaced by lifeless reconstructions.
Meh. To my knowledge, there are no Deepfaked actors in “The Rings Of Power,” and Amazon spent a *billion* dollars to crank out a lifeless reconstruction of a psuedo-Tolkein story. So a sequel to “The Fifth Element” with a Deepfaked Bruce Willis? At this point I’d be far more likely to be concerned about a crappilly written story than a bad digital actor.
