Who will lose their first role when an AI actor acts in a movie? - Lao Dong Newspaper

TEXT START: AI has not replaced stars, but when technology can create crowds, passersby or characters appear for a few seconds, a part of the actors may lose their roles.

The Dissection

The article identifies the first visible casualties correctly: extras, crowd performers, minor speaking parts, and some stunt work. It also notices the more important damage—that these jobs are the entry ramp into the profession.

But it frames the event as a gradual substitution inside filmmaking rather than the opening move of a production-system rewrite. The real subject is not whether an AI character can convincingly cross the background. It is whether producers will continue paying for human presence when synthetic bodies reduce casting, scheduling, transport, wardrobe, makeup, safety, and coordination costs simultaneously.

The Core Fallacy

The central error is treating the first roles eliminated as the boundary of the threat. They are only the cheapest test cases.

The article assumes that valuable human qualities—emotion, personality, physical credibility, and audience connection—will remain attached to human labor. That confuses present capability with a permanent economic moat. Once AI can generate acceptable performance, the decisive variable becomes cost, control, speed, editability, and ownership. “Human + AI” then means AI-controlled production with humans retained where legally required, commercially useful, or difficult to replicate—not a stable partnership between equal labor forces.

The article also mistakes role importance for employment protection. A minor character can be narratively essential and still be economically synthesized. Story function does not guarantee human ownership of the work that performs it.

Hidden Assumptions

• Producers will preserve human extras because the profession needs an entry ladder.
• Consent rules and labor agreements will remain strong enough to block substitution rather than merely regulate digital scanning.
• Main actors are protected by “real emotions” instead of by brand power, audience ownership, distribution leverage, and contractual control.
• AI limitations will remain durable rather than being temporary engineering gaps.
• Synthetic performers will need to imitate humans instead of eventually becoming cheaper, more controllable performance assets in their own right.
• Eliminating low-level work will not damage the labor pipeline that develops future directors, actors, stunt performers, and crew.
• Human participation will remain economically necessary simply because audiences value authenticity.

These assumptions are institutional and cultural lag defenses. They can delay deployment. They cannot defeat the competitive pressure to replace expensive, irregular, legally complicated human inputs with controllable synthetic ones.

Social Function

The text is a partial truth serving as transition management and ideological anesthesia.

It admits the first amputations while presenting them as limited to disposable labor. It then relocates hope to “creativity,” “real emotion,” and a human-plus-AI model. That narrative preserves the idea that the profession remains fundamentally intact while its bottom rung is removed. In reality, destroying the bottom rung destroys the training and selection mechanism for the tiers above it.

The article is useful as an early-warning document, but its optimism is structural rather than evidentiary. It treats current limits and negotiated protections as if they were permanent defenses.

The Verdict

The first role lost is probably the extra’s. The first institution lost is the career ladder.

This is not merely the automation of background acting. It is the beginning of productive-participation collapse inside screen production: fewer human bodies, fewer entry points, fewer learning opportunities, and greater concentration of value around owners of AI systems, recognizable intellectual property, and distribution. The stars may survive longer, but mainly as sovereign brands or controlled assets—not as proof that acting remains a broadly accessible profession.