Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

[Yistaan]

That would never work, not to a degree that audiences would find satisfying. It takes human talent to create an effective performance. Even the most advanced "computer animation" is animated by humans using computers as their medium. And of course voice work is always done by real actors. Only the most arrogant director would think they were sufficiently skilled in every aspect of filmmaking that they could do it all themselves without collaborating with experts specializing in all the different aspects of film production. Of course, there are directors that arrogant, but their output without collaborators probably wouldn't be very good (as seen by comparing the Star Wars prequels, where George Lucas assumed he could write and direct them nearly all by himself, with the original trilogy, where he had the better sense to trust his collaborators more than his ego).

We already have computer generated faces of people who don't exist that I couldn't tell were fake: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/tech/ai-fake-faces/index.html . I honestly think full fledged movies without actors (not saying it's a good idea, but the tech for it will eventually be here) will come at some point.

Such a thing would likely be commonplace by the time of Star Trek. We already had Vic Fontaine on DS9 who was completely hologenerated.

Just wait until he stumbles onto an old Nick Fury comic.

That's Nick Fury Sr., Nick Fury's father . Future generations will look at Nick Fury Sr. in the Marvel Universe the way we look at Jay Garrick and Alan Scott in the DC universe.

 

[Christopher]

We already have computer generated faces of people who don't exist that I couldn't tell were fake:

A face is not a performance. Even the most lifelike computer-animated character is still voiced by a live actor and has their performance shaped by human animators. It takes multiple living, talented human artists to create a single convincing computer-generated character. "Computer-generated" doesn't mean that the computer creates it -- it just means that a computer is the tool that the human artists use to create it.

Such a thing would likely be commonplace by the time of Star Trek. We already had Vic Fontaine on DS9 who was completely hologenerated.

But the holodeck program was created by a human being, Bashir's friend Felix. And he may have used live actors as the templates for his characters. Remember how the Mirror Vic Fontaine was a flesh-and-blood person in "The Emperor's New Cloak"? Maybe he was the Mirror doppelganger of an actor whom Felix hired to play the character, to provide the basic repertoire of performance elements that the computer selects from to create the interactive responses, and to sing the songs in order to give them a human touch.

After all, why wouldn't they? As I already pointed out, the Federation is a post-scarcity society where people don't have to work for a living but are still able to practice their skills for the love of the art. And surely that would still include actors, artists, etc. Just because a computer theoretically can do the same work as a human artist, that doesn't mean that human artists would somehow cease to exist. There would still be plenty of actors and artists and the like who'd be available to work, so why not use them? Too many people speculating about future progress confuse "This can be done" for "This must be done."

 

[Yistaan]

After all, why wouldn't they?

Because some writers and directors just don't want to work with actors. There are fights on movie sets all the time. Look at the filming of 'The Abyss', and how Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio called out James Cameron on his treatment of the actors.

Even in a moneyless society, if some directors can choose to avoid situations like this they would.

And some directors would totally want their work to represent only their vision and work with no one else's. I'm not saying these solely computer generated movies will be hits, but I think in the universe of Star Trek it would be inevitable they will exist.

 

[Christopher]

I'm not saying these solely computer generated movies will be hits, but I think in the universe of Star Trek it would be inevitable they will exist.

And I'm saying that they would exist but probably wouldn't be very popular, so we're just emphasizing different parts of the same point.

 

[JD]

That would never work, not to a degree that audiences would find satisfying. It takes human talent to create an effective performance. Even the most advanced "computer animation" is animated by humans using computers as their medium. And of course voice work is always done by real actors. Only the most arrogant director would think they were sufficiently skilled in every aspect of filmmaking that they could do it all themselves without collaborating with experts specializing in all the different aspects of film production. Of course, there are directors that arrogant, but their output without collaborators probably wouldn't be very good (as seen by comparing the Star Wars prequels, where George Lucas assumed he could write and direct them nearly all by himself, with the original trilogy, where he had the better sense to trust his collaborators more than his ego).

And after all, the Federation is a society where people don't have to work for basic subsistence and are free to work in pursuit of their dreams and fulfill their best potentials, right? Surely that includes people like actors, set designers, composers, etc. -- people who would want to do that work because they loved it. The talent would be there to draw on, so why not draw on it?

I wonder how being an actor in an interactive holodrama would work? The program would need an almost infinite number of actions from the character in order to respond to whatever the person playing the program does.

We already have computer generated faces of people who don't exist that I couldn't tell were fake: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/tech/ai-fake-faces/index.html . I honestly think full fledged movies without actors (not saying it's a good idea, but the tech for it will eventually be here) will come at some point.

They're already doing CGI face replacements in movies like with Tarkin in Rogue One, but there's always an actor who provides the basis for the performance, in the case of Tarkin it was Guy Henry. Then of course there's Andy Serkis, who at this point has probably provided more motion capture performances than any other actor.

 

[Yistaan]

They're already doing CGI face replacements in movies like with Tarkin in Rogue One, but there's always an actor who provides the basis for the performance, in the case of Tarkin it was Guy Henry. Then of course there's Andy Serkis, who at this point has probably provided more motion capture performances than any other actor.

In Star Trek no such actor would be necessary. No actor is behind the instantly generated holograms like the Dixon Hill goons.

 

[Christopher]

I wonder how being an actor in an interactive holodrama would work? The program would need an almost infinite number of actions from the character in order to respond to whatever the person playing the program does.

Not really. Just enough of a range of samples to extrapolate from. We're all capable of only a finite number of facial expressions, body movements, vocal intonations, and so on, so a computer would just need a reasonable-sized catalog of possibilities to build performances out of. Remember how in Mission: Impossible III, Ethan Hunt made the bad guy read a sample text from a card so they could program the voice synthesizer to mimic his voice? The idea was that the text on the card included all the basic phonemes needed to construct every possible word. You needed that real-life baseline data as the raw material that the computer would then piece together to create a convincing synthetic voice. This would be the same principle, only more complex.

And of course, a lot of the content of any holodeck game, like any MMORPG today, would be preprogrammed dialogue and interactions, so much of it could be directly recorded from live performances. The player's interaction with the characters might just cause the computer to select one of several possible preprogrammed reaction sequences, and it would only have to synthesize a reaction from scratch if the stimulus didn't lead to one of those possibilities. We saw something like this in Picard's Dixon Hill games, where the characters would pretty much just ignore any player statements or actions that didn't fit their preprogrammed scripts, or would just go "Huh?" and then resume doing what they were programmed to do -- again, much like computer game characters in real life.

They're already doing CGI face replacements in movies like with Tarkin in Rogue One, but there's always an actor who provides the basis for the performance, in the case of Tarkin it was Guy Henry. Then of course there's Andy Serkis, who at this point has probably provided more motion capture performances than any other actor.

Although in both cases, the performance capture alone is not enough, and it takes the work of multiple skilled animators to add convincing texture and life to the performance. One example I've heard them use in talking about Henry as Tarkin was that he didn't move his mouth quite the same way as Peter Cushing when pronouncing a certain sound, so the animators had to tweak his performance-captured mouth movements to look more like Cushing's -- fine details like that, stuff that non-animators would never think of.

Serkis is the best-known performance-capture actor, but probably not the most prolific; that's probably someone who does background characters, who might "play" numerous different supporting roles in a single movie. Let's say Serkis has probably played more leatured performance-capture roles than anyone else.

 

[Shamrock Holmes]

i think it probably depends on the level of realism and interactivity required of the holocharacters.

For instance, the Flotter characters, being relatively simplistic "archetypes" could easily be more "pure CG" than say Michael Sullivan from the Fair Haven program or the bar patrons and staff of Sandrines, at least the latter of which are sometimes based on real people.

 

[JD]

In Star Trek no such actor would be necessary. No actor is behind the instantly generated holograms like the Dixon Hill goons.

Do we know that for a fact?

 

[Yistaan]

Do we know that for a fact?

It would depend if Picard is basing his holoprograms on the actual Dixon Hill novels themselves or on movie adaptations.

A holodeck version of Faramir from Lord of the Rings would look and act very different depending if the computer was told to base it solely off of the books, or on Peter Jackson's movies (in which case it would be channeling David Wenham).

 

[Christopher]

i think it probably depends on the level of realism and interactivity required of the holocharacters.

For instance, the Flotter characters, being relatively simplistic "archetypes" could easily be more "pure CG" than say Michael Sullivan from the Fair Haven program or the bar patrons and staff of Sandrines, at least the latter of which are sometimes based on real people.

I disagree. Since the Flotter characters are for children, that just makes it more important that they have a humanlike level of interactivity, both because children need human contact and social interaction as a vital part of their psychological health and development, and because children are a lot harder to fool than adults give them credit for.

And again, since the programs are basically telling predefined stories or game scenarios designed to lead to a finite number of possible paths and outcomes, it'd be easy enough to record actors performing all the potential variations, just as we do with computer games today.

It would depend if Picard is basing his holoprograms on the actual Dixon Hill novels themselves or on movie adaptations.

A holodeck version of Faramir from Lord of the Rings would look and act very different depending if the computer was told to base it solely off of the books, or on Peter Jackson's movies (in which case it would be channeling David Wenham).

How can you base an audiovisual program "solely off the books"? There's not enough information about the way anything looks or sounds. Somewhere along the line, there has to be some creativity applied, some decision-making process about casting or set and costume design or the like. Although I suppose it would be easier for a computer to do the extrapolation for something based on historically documented reality, like Dixon Hill, than for something set in a fantasy land where everything would have to be designed from scratch.

 

[Yistaan]

How can you base an audiovisual program "solely off the books"? There's not enough information about the way anything looks or sounds. Somewhere along the line, there has to be some creativity applied, some decision-making process about casting or set and costume design or the like. Although I suppose it would be easier for a computer to do the extrapolation for something based on historically documented reality, like Dixon Hill, than for something set in a fantasy land where everything would have to be designed from scratch.

The computer will make something up out of random as long as it does not outright contradict anything said about Faramir in the book. A director can then tell the computer to keep providing different voices, facial structures, etc. until s/he decides the one that they want. Or the director can just keep whatever the computer comes up with first, making the interpretation solely computer generated based on the book.

It's like how the computer generated Moriarty in TNG. In theory it could have provided tons of different Moriarty's, but Data asked for one and one showed up. That's that.

 

[Christopher]

The computer will make something up out of random

Which I still say is not a very good way to create. Again, why wouldn't holodeck programmers take advantage of the living talent that would be available? Surely holoprograms/novels would be as big an industry in the 24th century as movies, TV, and computer games are today, so surely there'd be thousands of talented creatives happy to work in the field. It makes no sense at all to assume that computers would do all the work just because they theoretically could. There's a reason that Starfleet uses living crews instead of robot probes. The people are there. They have skills they want to use. So the system is designed to give them that opportunity rather than mechanizing everything. Why should entertainment be any different?

It's like how the computer generated Moriarty in TNG. In theory it could have provided tons of different Moriarty's, but Data asked for one and one showed up. That's that.

We know from onscreen canon that holoprograms often have living designers. Felix created Bashir's secret agent and Vic Fontaine programs. Tom Paris and the Doctor (okay, an AI himself, but a sapient one) wrote holoprograms in Voyager. And Sherlock Holmes is the most frequently adapted literary character in history -- surely there would have been plenty of living people in the Federation who created Holmes holoprograms, so there are probably a bunch of different ones available in the ship's database. The computer did create the mental parameters for Moriarty, but his appearance and voice were probably drawn from the baseline Holmes program that the computer was using, and that baseline program probably had a human creator or creators.

 

[Yistaan]

Which I still say is not a very good way to create. Again, why wouldn't holodeck programmers take advantage of the living talent that would be available? Surely holoprograms/novels would be as big an industry in the 24th century as movies, TV, and computer games are today, so surely there'd be thousands of talented creatives happy to work in the field.

Computer games already use randomly generated material to make very good games. No Man's Sky is an excellent example of this.

Considering holodeck programs are basically 3d computer games, I see no reason why they wouldn't make use of randomly generated material.

In fact, randomly generated material is so useful an entire gameplay form revolves around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_gameplay .

Roguelikes are another enduring gameform based entirely on computer designed dungeons.

 

[Christopher]

Computer games already use randomly generated material to make very good games. No Man's Sky is an excellent example of this.

Yes, but it was still human programmers who did the work of making the games capable of doing that, who decided how that could be done and judged whether the results were good enough. The computer didn't invent the game -- it's just a tool that human beings designed to be capable of doing what they wanted it to do. Humans aren't removed from the creative process, they're just a step further back.

Considering holodeck programs are basically 3d computer games, I see no reason why they wouldn't make use of randomly generated material.

You're not paying attention. I've already talked about how they would do just that in the first paragraph of comment #1547 above. The point is that there's still a living creator involved in the process somewhere, providing the basic templates that the computer works from and designing the software that enables it to do so.


And for the fiftieth time, I'm not talking about whether it's possible for a computer to do these things -- I'm saying it's nonsensical to assume that human creativity would just inexplicably cease to exist as a result of it. That is utterly unrealistic. Humans need to create, as much as they need to explore.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

The same actress who played the daughter in Janeway’s Victorian holonovel also played the Doctor’s daughter in Real Life, so I’ve kinda leaned in to an idea that there are people who give the rights to their appearances (or something to that effect) for holoprogramers to use.

Like, we saw in DS9 that the holosuites Quark used couldn’t just whip up an exact visual match to her, as the computer didn’t have a full holoimage of her, so it just made me think that holodecks and holosuites have a set of default images for the characters in the programs. It’s like how games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age have a default appearance for the player character, that can be modified, while looking less polished than a prerendered character model. At least, that’s the example that comes to mind.

Some people have the skill to make their own characters, others use a series of “public domain” faces or something to create the characters in their programs.

 

[Christopher]

Some people have the skill to make their own characters, others use a series of “public domain” faces or something to create the characters in their programs.

Or they hire actors to provide the baseline performances, as I've been saying. Look at how many Trek fan films are out there. People like to get together and put on performances. In a post-scarcity economy, you wouldn't have to pay actors, so it'd probably be easy to find people you could recruit to help you create a holonovel with a real human touch rather than just programming.

Remember, in "11001001," Picard and Riker were amazed at how the Bynars' reprogramming allowed Minuet to act convincingly like a real person, which means that it wasn't normal for a purely computer-generated holodeck character to have that much authenticity. Therefore, it stands to reason that characters like the ones in "The Big Goodbye" must've been based on live human performers to at least some extent, to give them a verisimilitude that purely computer-created characters wouldn't have.

 

[Tim Thomason]

I don't know, the holodeck seems to be able to extrapolate pretty well if Booby Trap is any indication. Not to mention all the other holographic doubles of our characters, many times duplicated without their consent.

Acting is by no means dead in the Star Trek universe, it's just returned to its roots as live plays for small audiences to hone your skills.

 

[Christopher]

I don't know, the holodeck seems to be able to extrapolate pretty well if Booby Trap is any indication. Not to mention all the other holographic doubles of our characters, many times duplicated without their consent.

That's exactly my point. All those simulations were based on actual people. The Leah simulation was constructed based on recordings of her speeches and public appearances. The computer didn't create a nonexistent person entirely from first principles, but reworked the recorded appearance, speech patterns, body language, and mannerisms of a real, living person. Ditto for the other doubles. It's like the difference between synthesizing and sampling in music. Synthesized music is created from pure electronic tones, so it never has quite the same complexity and texture as real instruments and never sounds quite convincing, while samplers take recordings of actual instruments and merely rearrange the recorded sounds, so the result sounds far more lifelike.

So we know for a canonical fact, thanks to "Booby Trap" and "Meridian," that the best way to create a convincing holodeck character is to model it on the recorded-from-life appearance, voice, and behavior of a living person. What I'm saying is that it makes sense that holoprogram creators would hire live actors to provide those templates that the computer would work from to create its characters. The talent would be there, freely available and eager to have their faces and performances immortalized, so why wouldn't they take advantage of it in order to get a more authentic, lifelike result?

 

[Tuskin38]

Could the holodeck create a fictional character just from analyzing stories that have been written about them?

Or would it need a living example?