As someone who grew up on Indiana Jones and Han Solo, I could only imagine how Troy Baker must have felt at The Game Awards. The veteran voice actor was presenting Best Performance with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle‘s executive producer Todd Howard, when Harrison Ford made a surprise (to the audience, at least) appearance to praise the new Indy game and hand out the award. Before he opened the envelope, Ford took a moment to praise Baker’s performance, saying, “I think this guy did a great job. If I had known he was so good, I would have done it myself.”
Thanks to a recent interview with Ford, we now know he wasn’t just being polite. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, the legendary actor said, “You don’t need artificial intelligence to steal my soul. You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent. [Baker] did a brilliant job, and it didn’t take AI to do it.”
What Humans Bring (And Will Always Bring) To The Table
Ford is absolutely correct. Baker is terrific in The Great Circle and is doing exactly what the role calls for. It’s a Harrison Ford impression, to be sure, but a really good one that is less notable for how he captures the sound of Ford’s voice, and more for how well he nails his cadence. I’ve heard a lot of Ford impressions over the years thanks to various Star Wars games, and Baker’s take feels like it has the most life.
What Ford is saying gets to a larger point beyond the specifics of Baker’s performance, though. AI is being used to replicate actors’ performances. Director Fede Alvarez, for example, used generative AI to bring Ian Holm back from the dead in Alien: Romulus.
But this kind of thing was happening before generative AI was ready for commercial use. Rogue One featured deep faked versions of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing, The Mandalorian made Mark Hamill young again, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny gave Ford a super smooth face in a flashback scene set during the original trilogy. This isn’t generative AI — and I don’t think it’s nearly as egregious — but it’s similarly turning to technology for a performance instead of relying on a person.
It isn’t just Disney franchise movies, either. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman de-aged Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino.
De-Aging Loses The Human Touch
These uses of digital de-aging, whether they use generative AI or not, tend to lose the heart and soul that makes a performance sing. The de-aged Hamill in The Mandalorian is a particularly egregious example. Disney had already found an actor who was a dead ringer for Mark Hamill circa 1983, but instead of using his face, they covered it with a sheen of CGI gloop. The performance strays deep into the uncanny valley.
De-aging and AI both treat a performance as a technical problem, not an artistic challenge. As both technologies improve, filmmakers will be able to coax increasingly believable reproductions from machines. But we don’t engage with art purely for verisimilitude. It’s more fun to see a comedian do a really great impression — James Austin Johnson’s recent take on Kamala Harris hosting a cooking competition comes to mind — than to listen to an AI deepfake of the same person because of the human element. Hearing a voice you recognize emerge from an unlikely face feels like a magic trick.
You might not like Solo: A Star Wars Story — it isn’t one of my favorites, either — but Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover’s charismatic performances as Han and Lando make an effective case for just… recasting a part. It’s fun to see new people inhabit a role, to see young actors attempt to evoke the essence of a screen icon. Sure, a computer will eventually be able to do it, and already kinda can. But where’s the fun in that? Technology has made it possible to summon the spirits of the dead, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to let them hold a seance.
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