Hello,
This blogged was created by me; Alpay Gumrukcu, for collecting my ideas and researches in one place for myself and my instructers to be able to see the progress of my Thesis Project at Parsons New School for Design Masters degree in Design and Technology.
I believe that movies have been a very important audio, visual communication pipeline in our lives. If we were to look at our history in all cultures, we will see that we were informed about aliens, wars, history, all kinds of interesting issues always by movies.
Sometimes, we agree sometimes we don’t but for about $10 we have that amazing luxury to see a 2 hours of highly concentrated information treasure, imagination and labour.
For a long time in the history before probably I can say internet; actors were one of the most important pieces of movies. They were so much important that, sometimes their names were used to explain a manner or a situation in some cultures.
For example, “making clark” expression in turkish which means acting like Clark Gable to attract women.
My thesis project that I am thinking about is the last 10-15 years of movie making and the weakening importance of celebrities and actors.
Development of technology has changed alot in movie making as well. Instead of seing famous celebrities, highly developed virtual character animation techniques have been changing our general movie understanding.
In my thesis, I would like to investigate, observe and research about this new way of acting and using computer generated actors and the ways to create them. After this first process, I would also like to dive in the consequences of this issue in a future spectrum in movie making business and acting sector.
You may find a detailed bibliography on bibliography page or simply click this link to reach there.
A.
Alpay Gumrukcu
Hi Alpay. I had a few comments for you after presentations, but I figured I’d post them here instead of taking up more time in class.
Are you familiar with the idea of a Turing Test? If not, that would be a good thing to look up. It’s basically a test where you communicate with somebody in another room through messages, and judging by their response you have to try guessing if they’re a real human or a computer. What’s interesting about these tests is that with some simple rules for response, you can go a long way to fooling somebody. Even if it’s not possible for machines to have really AI yet and think, it’s easy to make them ACT like they think and are intelligent.
A lot of chat rooms have chatbots, automated programs that act as a participant in the chat and reply to certain things people say in the chat room. Sometimes people can spend half an hour talking to a chatbot and not realize they’re not a real person! That’s something to think about for your project: if computers are going to replace actors, do they need real AI or can they fake it?
If you have the patience for philosophical science fiction, check out Isaac Asimov. He wrote a bunch of short stories and a few novels about robots. Of course, they’re not really about robots—they’re about what it means to be human. Useful stuff.
Thank you Noam,
This is great. I tried this method with a couple of well known websites such as apple.com and gettyimages.com. On their websites they have this function called online chat for FAQ.
I had some simple questions and instead of calling or looking up their website FAQ sections I wanted to test this option to see whether they are bots or real human beings. They were real human beings. I think at this moment noone wants to risk their sympathy by using a robot. It is still ugly.
I think the AI is a way later process. 3D and virtual characters are just a first iteration/prototype for how it will look in terms of visuality. Because ofcourse technical problems should be resolved but there is also a visual aspect of AI and pixel based prototypes are the first step which is cheaper to produce and a great platform with a lot of open sources and free labour.
Maybe for AI the greatest example is the Deep Blue. The computer who beated Garry Kasparov in the near past.
A.