Artificial intelligence can clone actor, not life

Chinese actress Qi Wei has introduced Han Qingxia, her official digital avatar, who will star in an artificial intelligence-generated interactive comic drama.

Han is not simply a digital copy of Qi. She has her own name, appearance and story. In other words, Qi has not just lent her face to a machine but created a character capable of performing without her being physically present.

A similar experiment is underway in the United Kingdom, where Particle6, an AI film company, has announced a feature film, Misaligned, starring Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated performer. Hong Kong actor Lawrence Ng, meanwhile, has authorized the use of his likeness to recreate his younger self for an AI film.

These developments point to a change that is easy to underestimate. For more than a century, acting required a body. Now, it may require only the rights to one.

For producers, the appeal is obvious. A digital performer doesn’t have to catch a flight to the set or make room in an already crowded calendar. The character is always available, can be altered at will and can return whenever the story demands it. In an industry that is constantly under pressure to produce more while spending less, the temptation is hard to resist.

This is where digital performers may find an easy foothold: short dramas, AI animation and the other corners of entertainment built on speed and volume. When producers are expected to keep churning out new stories, having a performer who is always available and never ages is an offer that is difficult to ignore.

The people most vulnerable may not be celebrities. They may be the actors who have not yet become them.

For generations, young actors have worked their way into the profession through small parts — a waiter with a line or two, a neighbor who appears briefly in the background, an extra who spends a day on set for a few seconds on screen. None of these jobs is glamorous, but they give aspiring actors their first chance, teach them the rhythms of a set and help them find a place in the industry.

If digital characters take over such work, something more important than a few paychecks could disappear. The industry could lose not just a pool of entry-level jobs, but also one of the pathways through which its next generation learns the craft.

Yet, AI may also give established actors a new way to extend their careers.

A digital likeness can turn an actor’s face and voice into valuable commercial assets. An actor can be working on one production while an authorized digital version appears in another. A performer can play a younger version of himself decades later. In time, a digital character could continue appearing even after the actor has retired.

There is a certain poignancy to that possibility. Cinema has always preserved people against the passage of time. We watch old films to see actors as they once were. AI could allow those younger faces and familiar voices to return not just in old movies, but in new ones.

But that possibility comes with a price: control. Once a face and voice become digital assets, they can be copied as easily as they can be licensed. Actors will need much clearer rights over how their likeness is used, how long consent lasts, how they are compensated and whether a digital version can be repurposed for something the original individual never agreed to.

But the more difficult question relates to art. If an AI performer can look convincing, deliver every line and reproduce every emotion, why should audiences care whether the actor is human? Because a convincing performance is not necessarily a meaningful one.

What human actors bring to a role is not simply technique. It is the accumulation of a life: memories, disappointments, fears, habits and experiences that may surface in a pause or a gesture that was never written into the script.

The small imperfections of a human performance can be precisely what make it believable.

This does not mean human actors will defeat digital ones. They may not need to. The entertainment industry is large enough to accommodate both. Digital performers may flourish where speed, scale and low costs matter — particularly on phones and in short-form entertainment. Human actors may be reserved for work in which audiences want emotional complexity and the feeling of encountering another person.

That could create an uncomfortable new hierarchy. Digital actors may become the default choice for much of everyday entertainment, while human performers become concentrated in roles that demand something harder to manufacture.

The paradox is that AI may make genuine human presence more valuable precisely because it makes imitation so easy.

When any face can be generated, a real face carries a history. When any voice can be reproduced, a human voice carries a life behind it. And when a machine can produce the perfect reaction, an actor’s unexpected hesitation may suddenly feel like an artistic choice.

The future of acting, then, may not be a battle between humans and machines. It may instead be a negotiation over what we still want from a person on screen.

AI can give a character another face, another body and, perhaps, another lifetime. But it cannot give that character the one thing a human actor has always brought with them: a life that actually happened.

Chen Gang is the deputy dean of the School of Arts and Communication, Beijing Normal University; and Qin Panbo is a film producer.

The views don’t necessarily reflect those of China Daily.