A Good Use for Artificial Intelligence?

In the 1967 film, To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an idealistic high school teacher who guided rowdy teen-agers living in a London East end slum.

Not surprisingly, for something so experimental, Artificial Intelligence (AI) doesn’t always do a good job.
According to Google: “Food Network developed a skill for Alexa-enabled devices, providing show information, schedules, and featured recipes.”
(That sentence doesn’t even make sense!)
However, as a result of AI, the recipes (and episodes) have become much harder to locate on the Food Network.
Also, the recipe PDFs are sometimes maddeningly incomplete because of formatting problems!
AI obviously needs a lot of oversight!

In another context, could AI do a better job than human H.R. personnel, to hire skilled professionals, than it does in monitoring websites like the Food Network?

In the United States, it’s estimated that black people earn (on average) at least 16% less during their lifetimes than white people do.
All ethic varieties of women earn (on average), 18% less than all ethnic varieties of men.

During the 1960’s, Bahamian-American actor Sidney Poitier starred in films in which he portrayed a police detective (In the Heat of the Night); a physician (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner); and an educator (To Sir, With Love).
A section in the book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks (published in 1973), by Donald Bogle, calls Poitier a “Hero for an Integrationist Age,” and notes:

In all his films he is educated and intelligent. He spoke proper English, dressed conservatively, and had the best of table manners. For the mass white audience, Sidney Poitier was a black man who had met their standards. [Italics mine.]

Sidney Poitier films, up until the 1970’s,* were propaganda.
The studio goal was to convince Middle America to accept black men as policemen, teachers, and doctors, just as long as they weren’t too black.

In the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep played demanding Miranda Priestly (left), editor of one of the world’s most prestigious fashion magazines.

Stanley Tucci played Nigel (right), the magazine Art Director.

As early as the 1940s (when the majority of women still were stuck in low level jobs, or kept as “mere housewives”), movie audiences began to see movies in which actresses portrayed powerful business women.
The list includes Mildred Pierce (1945), Working Girl (1988), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and The Proposal (2009).
In all of these films, the lead actress is a skilled female business woman.
However, these high-power women are always portrayed as far from successful in their private lives.

These films were movie studio propaganda.
The goal was to convince Middle America that it’s impossible to earn success as a business woman, and also be a successful wife and mother.

In the 2024 television comedy, St. Denis Medical, Joyce (the Executive Director of the hospital) is played by Wendi McLendon-Covy.

In the current TV comedy, St. Denis Medical, the focus is placed on female characters unable to enjoy a good life-work balance, more than on male medical professionals having this problem.
Wendi McLendon-Covey plays Joyce, the driven hospital executive director whose only female “friends” are drug company reps.
Allison Tolman plays Alex, who struggles with combining life as a workaholic supervising nurse, with being a wife and mother.
At one point in the storyline, Alex refuses her husband’s wish to have another child, and they opt for a vasectomy.

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m not judging St Denis Medical.
I love this mockumentary series, and I’m looking forward to the second season.
I’m not criticizing the show. I’m merely pointing out a viewpoint about social “norms.”

For a long time, Big Business has decreed that “alpha” men (micro-managers, screamers, attention hogs) were “ideal” managers.
Women have often imitated their alpha male mentors.
In recent years, this trend has shifted a bit.
Business books like Blind Spots, and Dare to Lead, offer the “new” theory that a “softer” form of management (empathetic, cooperative, emotionally intelligent) is a much more successful strategy in dealing with people.

I just finished Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass (2025) by Ramin Setoodeh.
It’s very clear, in this book, that the people who “won” were the candidates who pleased Donald Trump best.
It wasn’t a matter of how good their ideas were, or how skilled they were as business people.
It was just a matter of how much Mr. Trump liked them.

During the fourth season, Trump attempted to persuade the first black male winner (Randal Pinkett) to “share his victory” with a white female contestant.
To Trump’s immense surprise, the black Rhodes scholar refused to accept Mr. Trump’s “script change.” Despite winning the prize, and later working for Trump for a year, Pinkett was never wholly in Trump’s good graces again (because he had acted against the “Big Man’s” wishes).

In Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier played a tough wagon master named Buck.

Poitier also directed the 1972 film.

Essentially, the theme of The Apprentice TV show (2004-2017) was that American Big Business, is a land of dominance, with people at the top lording over others, and terrorizing their subordinates.
(The Apprentice shows us the way Donald Trump wishes to run this country, not as a public servant, but as a CEO from another era.)

The goal of DEI in American business was to train employees, and encourage diversity in the workplace.
However, the dirty little secret is that this “bottom-up approach” didn’t create much real change.
Where real change is needed is top-down.
How do you convince department heads, to evaluate people based solely on their skill sets: not their skin color, not their gender, who they know, or how “well” they dress?

What would happen if we used a well-programmed AI (not Grok!) to hire employees, and to evaluate the salaries at companies?
This AI would just use information about skill sets and education levels, and not consider gender, or ethnic heritage.
Would we soon discover that some people were badly underpaid, while others were vastly over paid?
Would it quickly become apparent that giant disparities are based on gender, and whether employees are non-white?

Think of AI as a tool for improving fairness.
AI could tell the company where it had made mistakes, and then the company would make adjustments accordingly.
It might be a problem (at first) to reduce the out of whack salaries of CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, and Vice Presidents, but regular productive employees would earn a lot more.
Perhaps, if AI was allowed to make all hiring and salary decisions, companies would make less mistakes, as the years went on.

In the “The Ultimate Computer” episode of the original Star Trek, William Marshall played Daystrom, a brilliant scientist who has created a computer that can make its’ own decisions.

Of course, it all boils down to how AI is programmed.
We’ve all learned from Elon Musk’s Grok, “The Ultimate Computer” (Season 2; episode 24) episode of Star Trek, and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), how AI can be extremely destructive, especially when Ai is programed too closely to a human personality.

*During the 1970’s, Sidney Poitier began to branch out from playing “perfect” role models. He starred in such films as Buck and the Preacher (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), and A Piece of the Action (1977).

Replacing the Real World

Photos of Guy Henry being morphed into Peter Cushing (as Grand Moff Tarkin) for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

In 2016, I watched a plasticized (CGI) version of Peter Cushing playing Governor Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—twenty-two years after the great Peter Cushing had died.
Actor Guy Henry was used for Cushing’s body and voice; but the CGI turning him into Cushing wasn’t perfect—especially with skin texture.
I’ve long been a fan of Peter Cushing so seeing a weird mixture of the two actors on the screen—neither Guy Henry, or Peter Cushing—was very sad.
Ever since Rogue One, I’ve been interested in the idea of film studios using an actor’s persona, years after the actor is able to perform.

I’m not sure how many directors and film studios would say (on the record) that they agree with Director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) that actors are “cattle.”
Actually, Hitchcock said that what he really meant was that actors should be willing to be “utilized and wholly integrated” into a director’s vision.
(He was also quoted as saying that “Walt Disney was smart for making his actors out of paper since he had the luxury to tear them up when he didn’t like them.”)
I’m sure that Hitchcock would have loved CGI, and I think the impulse to create performances using special effects, originates in this viewpoint—that actors are simply “tools,” rather than collaborators.

Actors dying during shoots has thrown a wrench into film productions.
In 1936, 26-year-old Jean Harlow was working on two films—Double Wedding and Saratoga—when she died from a gallbladder infection that became septic.
Double Wedding had just begun, so her footage was discarded, and the role was recast.
However, 90% of Saratoga had been filmed, so all Harlow’s remaining scenes were filmed using two actresses—one for her body (shot from the back), and another for her voice.
45-year-old Tyrone Powers had the title role in Solomon and Sheba (1959) when he had a heart attack—hours after a strenuous dueling scene (for which he did eight takes).
Yul Brynner was quickly offered the role of “Solomon.”
The Crow (1994) was about two weeks away from being finished, when young star Brandon Lee was accidentally shot on set.*
A body double (with Lee’s face digitally added), was used to complete the film.
Veteran actor Oliver Reed was filming The Gladiator (2000) when he died of a heart attack off set.
Director Ridley Scott altered the plot, and used a body double plus CGI, to complete filming.
According to IMDb, dealing with Reed’s death added about three million to the 100 million film budget.

Before CGI, genre actors (like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) endured long, painful hours in make-up chairs—endangering their health, and (perhaps) making old age harder to endure.
Today, in the Avatar movies, “performance capture”—green dots on the actors’ facial muscles—is used to turn actors into the Na’vi race.
Buddy Ebsen was set to play the “Tinman” in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, but—after aluminum dust in the facial make-up made him seriously ill—he lost the role.

Kim Hunter in the make-up chair for the first Planet of the Ape film (from 1967).

Kim Hunter was so claustrophobic that she found the application of prosthetics intolerable.She needed a daily Valium to play intelligent ape “Zira” in 1968’s Planet of the Apes, 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

Alan Cummings, with a make-up artist, during filming of X-Men United. (The character "Nightcrawler" decorated his blue skin with “angelic tattoos.”)

In the early days of CGI (2003), Alan Cummings was “Nightcrawler” in X2: X-Men United.
Cummings still sat in a make-up chair for five hours per day.
However, removing the caustic blue facial makeup was painful, and injured his skin. 

Christian Bale in 2002 (before losing weight for 2004’s The Machinist), and after losing 63 pounds for the role.

Besides turning actors into fantastic creatures, CGI also changes the appearance of actors in less extreme ways—making them older, younger, weigh more, or weigh less.
Film franchises are filmed over long periods of time.
If special effect artists didn’t de-age or age the actors, the directors would need to recast.
Robert DeNiro gained sixty pounds to play an elderly “Jake LaMotta” in 1980’s Raging Bull.
Christian Bale lost sixty-three pounds for 2004’s The Machinist.
(A little CGI would have gone a long way in not forcing these actors to put on, or lose, so many dangerous pounds.) 

Old effects in original Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" on the left, and redone effects on the right.

Another issue about special effects is that they are always improving.
In 2006, Paramount redid all the special effects in the original Star Trek TV series—replacing star ship miniatures and painted backdrops with CGI.
The 79 episodes looked great for a while, but now  (in 2023) the revised effects look quaint.
Should artists update the effects in Star Trek every ten years, in order to keep up with the technology?
It’s unlikely that Paramount would make back the money.

Both the real and "reel" Barbara Jean Trenton (Ida Lupino) react to someone entering her private screening room in “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.”

Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of living on in the artificial world of movies (be they celluloid or digital).
In the 1959 Twilight Zone TV episode “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” Ida Lupino played “Barbara Jean Trenton”—a famous actress who chooses existence in her celluloid past.
In the 2013 film The Congress, a film studio buys Robin Wright’s acting persona, and uses the digital “Robin” for a science fiction franchise called Rebel Robot Robin.
(In a scene in The Congress, “Robin,” her lawyer, her agent, and the studio CEO debate whether her contract should allow science-fiction films.)
True to the Isaac Asimov books, the main character of Apple TV+ and Asimov’s Foundation (2021-2023) is a digital recreation—Dr. Hari Seldon (with Jared Harris playing both the real and digital, Dr. Seldon).
In this genre TV series, mathematician Dr. Seldon dies in the year 12,069, but 34 years after his death—and for generations after—his digitized recreation interacts with his followers.
(Season Two of Foundation will premiere on July 14th, 2023.)

In summary, I think it’s fine to use technology to modify actors, or use them in roles they’ve chosen...as long as it’s with their consent, and the limitations are spelled out.
Using CGI and performance capture saves performers from spending hours in make-up chairs, as well as makes unnecessary the health risks of putting on extra pounds, or dieting to starvation.
It’s also OK (with the consent of the heirs), to complete scenes in a movie, in the event that the actor is incapacitated.
(In that situation, I would hope that the heirs had final approval on the new scenes.)
However, I would draw the line with using digital images of an actor, to “create a role,” or to sell a product, after an actor has lost the ability to give consent.
Some actors may choose to sign contracts before they pass on, but I believe the wonderful Robin Williams had the right idea.
Williams made sure legally that his likeness could not be used until 1939—twenty-five years after his death.
100 years would be preferable.

*According to The Hollywood Book of Death, by James Robert Parish, “when the gun was reloaded after the close-up shot [of Brandon Lee], the metal tip had remained behind the gun’s cylinder. When the blank went off, it was speculated, the explosive force propelled the dummy tip through the gun barrel and lodged it in Brandon’s body near his spine.” (Brandon Lee was the only son of martial artist and film actor, Bruce Lee.)