That is a model that has been vetted that it won’t lead to immediate law suits because it is just Tom Cruise or that can be programmed to do what is needed. Sometimes you want a model that is like Keanu and became a gun nut after The Matrix and shoots 3 gun in his spare time. And sometimes you want that Korean Boy Band actor who is going to flinch every time a blank goes off because that is the character.

We are talking about a completely different ecosystem here.

These generative ‘models’ either fall into the buckets of:

• A very small basket of completely closed, relatively inflexible corporate APIs.

• Or a still-small basket of open models folks build these skeletal frameworks around, or maybe loras or adapters.

All these AI startups like to pretend they’re doing something special when, underneath, they’re really just prompting ChatGPT with a wrapper, or hosting a Flux finetune or whatever.

In other words, they are NOT pretraining Thom Cruz from scratch. The pool of usable frontier models is very small.

And… it won’t end well if Aki Ross 2.0’s underlying model was also used to train Project Melodee 2.0 and people realize her face when she is eating that cake that represents the last vestiges of her innocence is REALLY similar to the face that Melodee make when she is doing DVDA.

At which point the agency helps to avoid situations where “Well… you are contracted and mr tarantino wants you to drive that car while he jacks it to your feet. And you wouldn’t want to be problematic, would you?”.

Again, you’re treating these ‘models’ like a diverse group of humanity, and like every company’s training from scratch, when that’s not how the software’s set up.

It makes no economic sense to treat them like people with their associated complications. They’re software suites, they’re tools, more like different flavors Davinci Resolve or whatever studios use these days, that can each produce an infinite spectrum of humans depictions, basically for free. A closer analog would be video game development, with the cost of voice acting and animation stripped out; the only thing that makes The Master Chief, Commander Shepard, or a particular incarnation of Lara Croft ‘unique’ is the copyright, recognition, and software suite they built them into.

EDIT:

To add to this, I think its extremely dangerous and unhealthy to anthropomorphize them.

In fact, this might be what the agencies are trying to do. ‘Humanizing’ them like theyre individual, sentient things makes them appear less like Lara Croft selling a Snickers bar. It may be optics for the customers (like ad makers hiring actors/actresses) more than anything.