Ethics, Regulatory and Legal Considerations

Q1

"Your own startup company has been approached by a well renowned industry news site to discuss the regulatory, ethical and legal considerations when developing and marketing digital products. Provide a detailed, comprehensive answer (300 - 500 words) on the main points of consideration; bear in mind that your own professional reputation, the reputation of your company and potential future business may depend on how well structured your answer is"

The ethics of developing a marketing digital product comes properly into consideration depending on the subject matter of the project. Take digital resurrections for example. Do you think it is okay for Bruce lee to be digitally recreated in CGI to promote Johnnie Walker without his consent or the same with galaxy using Audrey Hepburn to promote chocolate 20 years after her death? These are very morally and legally dubious grounds but these cases were really the only ones to take digital resurrections to this level as in TV shows like the sopranos they would use old footage and try and composite that convincingly to make it blend it but they never went as far as full on digital reconstructions. Whilst these were all isolated cases and few and far between since 2016 where we saw actor Peter Cushing digitally resurrected as grand moff tarkin and whilst the result still fell into the uncanny valley for some others didn’t question the final result and this caused a very large backlash in 2016 as once again virtually bringing someone back from the dead and this had people worried that anyone could be next but John Knoll said that these effects wouldn’t become common place as they are very expensive and labor intensive. However at the time of writing this in 2022 i don’t think he could have foresaw how advance visual would get so quickly as films like blade runner was able to perfectly recreate Sean Young who played Rachel the original blade runner in 1982 in the 2017 sequel and Alita battle angel where they also recreated a human for a majority of the film However the biggest advancements was probably AI as that has opened a whole new possibility for what can be done as in 2020 Disney released the Mandalorian and in the final episode they show us a return of the Jedi era Luke Skywalker 40 years since return of the Jedi this was given Mark Hamill's consent and he was involved heavily in the process. If you look at the Luke Skywalker deepfake in December 2020 and now look at Luke Skywalker in February 2022 the latest result leave the original in the dust the improvements made at astounding so not only can this technology improve significantly in a very short amount of time it is also free to download and use so really if a movie studio want to de-age or resurrect someone all they would need is capable artists and the material to use on the deepfakes to do it. Nowhere is this more prevalent than Finding jack which is the first film to cast an AI actor. Go forwarding music, tv and film contracts will probably have to be renegotiated to include digital recreations of the actor many years into the future.