I would If I could 38: Guarding dead artists from AI

This is how good the AI is now. Many people are who alive are now licensing their likeness to AI companies for such movies, TV series and many a times they look way better lit, produced than the physical production which also heavily use CGI. Compared the lighting, look & feel of this with things like silo series which are poorly lit, barely see anything and most of it is always in the dark and most of it is out of focus where even on a giant screen the only thing we get to see in focus is a face or an object with 90% of the screen being out of focus. This is done to hide the low quality props, low quality CGI and hide their budgetary concerns. AI has no such limits.

This also carries a huge downside. Anyone is now free to use the likeness of dead actors like sean connery who was THE james bond for majority of the life span of the 007 movies. They could even make adult movies. Before someone else does it, starts to exploit it and exploit the dead celebrities and their likeness.

solution 1: NPO by the govt

Most of it requires govt's power to enforce it, so it is a win win for the govt to get money to fund the education of the children. Government forms an NPO where they declare dead artists like Dr. Rajkumar, ambarish, vishnu vardhan as asset of a geography. Let us call it IA (Immortal Artist). Lata mangeshkar is national asset, while Dr. Rajkumar and others are assets of karnataka. So any likeness of them can be licensed from the such NPOs of such state or nation. The license is post production, per second payment. May be 1INR per second of lata mangeshkar's vocals. 1INR per second appearance of dev anand. Unless there is a fixed rule of to whom should the profit go to and where it should go to, leaving it to bureacracy will result in incompetence and corruption. So, the money shall always go to the education of girls from the schools from the birth place of the celebrity. Hugh jackman from town X in australia. After this death, any likeness to him in any content will be paid per second to the govt which then goes to the education of the girl from schools of his town. 

solution 2: NPO by the pvt

If we go via this route, then there will be a lot of money minded opportunists who want to exploit this where even though it says NPO/NGO, they pay themselves such a hefty salary and bonuses that it barely reaches those who need it. So it has to be global, like UN. Where 20% of all earnings are retained for legal expenses. 20% for opex. 60% goes to the benefices.  

Pricing model 

Each artist's likeness should be limited to 100 minutes of exposure/usage per year and studios can bid and book them for only 1 year. The bidding ensures that hoarders dont just buy it at a flat rate or destroy the IP. This scarcity also ensures that there is no over exposure which negatively affects the artist's demand. The scarcity also allows the studios to expand their targeting of artists. 

Approval model 

If we let humans have a go at it who may have their own political or other moral reasons and it might leak into their decisions to allow/approve usage of an IA in a project. Lobbying, bribing might become a thing too. So, to avoid this we can have an AI which is trained once & locked forever to study an artist's selection of roles through out his life and also their public interviews while they were alive and it will score a project/movie/content from 1 to 10. 10 being the most likely possibility that the artist would have agreed to be cast in this role, 1 being the least likely to agree to do such a role. This AI is opensource & accessible to studios where they can query their project & get suggestions on artists where based on IA's history of roles they picked & why they picked, it will give a score for each artist a studio demands or suggests artists for each role with a score of 7 to 10. 

 

Global NPO model 

It should mostly consist of engineers, especially programmers who can freely run and maintain such a project. Reduced capex & opex significantly. Gradually it should include at least 1 or 2 engineers from each country especially from countries who produce more bankable artists than others. Ideally at least 1 per country is fine and when someone retires after they are x-10 where x being the average lifespan of a person in their country, the other board members can elect someone else from their country where the retiring member won't have a say in it. Each board member will suggest 1 different name, everyone else will vote, whoever gets the most vote, becomes the new member of the board.