Dean Emily Roxworthy at the grand opening and ribbon-cutting of the USC School of Dramatic Arts Drama Center held at the USC University Park Campus on March 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. She believes an AI Institute for actors can give them critical skills they would otherwise lack. Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images For most of its short modern existence, AI has been seen as an enemy of actors — a dinger of their craft if not swiper of their jobs — as synthetic media is prompted instead of performed. USC wants to switch all that up. The university’s School of Dramatic Arts has just launched an “Institute For Actor-Driven Innovation” that administrators hope will give performers a chance to benefit from, instead of lose to, the rise of artificial intelligence. “Up until now actors have really been on the wrong end of these changes,” Emily Roxworthy, dean of the USC School of Dramatic Arts, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “We want to do something about that.” At the outset the institute will focus just on helping students understand the rudiments of AI. USC will work with Adobe on educational events like one scheduled for later this month (the company is a sponsor of the institute) as well as build lab spaces and “student think tanks where they can be given equipment and guidance,” according to Roxworthy. Eventually, though, AI will be presented as something acting students could use to augment their craft and careers. Roxworthy envisions a host of use cases, from reading with legendary scene partners (resurrected Olivier, anyone?), to getting advice on setting up a production company, to receiving notes from A-listers who would not otherwise be available, to even having AI serve as a de facto representation for the many students not yet signed, in a kind of twist on the term AI agent. “They can have somebody — or something, I suppose — that is combing breakdowns for them and really looking out for them in a way that representatives would,” Roxworthy says. Actors who need to know how to control their likeness might also be part of a joint class with the law school. (Roxworthy called the institute “admittedly a really ambitious undertaking.”) The institute will be run day-to-day by Tomm Polos, who currently serves as a chair at USC in “creator arts,” which explores the influencer economy from an academic standpoint, and also moonlights as the hype man for the Dodgers. “Actors have always been master navigators of uncertainty, ambiguity, and the full range of human experience,” Polos said in a statement. “In a world increasingly shaped by AI, those capacities are not relics of the past; they are the most vital competencies of the future. USC-IAI is here to put those competencies to work,” he said, using the institute’s acronym.
Roxworthy is no stranger to tech in the arts. Having developed a diversity-training arts program called Workplace Interactive Theatre, she also created an educational video game prototype which puts players in a WWII-era Japanese-American internment camp. USC’s institute again underscores the slippery — at times dual — nature of AI in creative realms. While many artists have expressed skepticism on both labor and craft grounds, those in charge of creative organizations have tended to welcome the tech, for reasons of either optics or belief. The biggest tech-entertainment companies like Netflix and Amazon are making tools available to their filmmakers. And now academic institutions re increasingly becoming boosters too. Last week NYU’s own Tisch School of the Arts said it had made a deal with Runway AI to give away the video-generation company’s tools to its students. Now USC — a leading arts schools on the other coast — is following suit in its own way. What fruits the initiative will bear remain to be seen. It could yield new kinds of creativity and a generation trained as never before. Or it could water down skills before students even have a chance to practice them in the real world. Roxworthy, for her part, said she sees such training as only beneficial for when Trojans graduate into the industry. “We can make a creative space that allows the acting students and other artists to engage with AI and other new technologies in a way that’s thoughtful and on their own terms,” she said. “Right now we have a lot of fear-based responses to AI, and for good reason,” the dean added. “We’re not here to proselytize and say it’s something students should adopt. But they should understand it.”
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