She cant get sick or be late to the set, and her hair and makeup needs are minimal: Her name is Erica, and Hollywood is hoping that a sophisticated robot can be its next big star. The synthetic actor has been cast in b, a $70 million science-fiction movie which producer Sam Khoze describes as a James Bond meets Mission Impossible story with heart.

Scribe Tarek Zohdy (1st Born), says, the story is about scientists who create an AI robot named Erica who quickly realize the danger of this top-secret program that is trying to perfect a human through a non-human form.

Variety caught up with the filmmakers Zohdy and Khoze to discuss b the $70 million film that plans to finish shooting next year, after a director and human star have been brought on.

Tarek Zohdy: The producers, Sam Khoze and Anoush Sadegh, in association with professors Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kohei Ogawa of the University of Osaka and Telecommunication Research Institute, took on the task of training Erica to act.

We wanted to create a story, and we wanted to do it in a revolutionary way. A robot doesnt have life experiences so they created this persona about those experiences, and we taught her how to act.

We found her to be the most capable of performing as an actor. Erica has the ability for natural interaction with people by integrating various technologies such as voice recognition, human tracking, and natural motion generation. She is almost human. Visually, her human-like appearance made her the best-known candidate to play this character in the movie.

We are artists and, we are artists of color who are able to do something with our art. We want to have a very diverse cast and as a diverse filmmaking group, I think that is essential.

Sam Khoze: We went through several rewrites. VFX Supervisor Eric Pham ( Sin City) joined us later to help develop the final version of the story . Its a really beautiful story because, at its heart, Ericas father who spent his life developing her wants her to serve humanity and change the way people look at AI and robots.

Khoze: It took about two years. Shes 23-years old. She has experience. She goes to the museums once a month to meet people, so shes a fun robot.

Khoze: When we started this project in 2018, we had a director who wasnt comfortable with having VFX in the movie.

We went off and started researching and we found Ericas creator. We started training her and shes been performing flawlessly. Shes probably the closest AI ever made to be an artist. We wanted to experiment to see if she would learn acting. And we basically started to training her and she performs flawlessly and very well.

We dont want to replace actors with AI, but its an interesting opportunity for the entertainment industry to look at AI and robots in Hollywood.

By creating her, weve learned shes fully capable of communicating with people and interacting.

What does that mean? Weve created this algorithm to digitally preserve people. So, if an actor doesnt want to risk their life, this allows you to create a digital version of that human being, and she has her own personality without anyone needs to program her. So now were using this algorithm to bring actors to set using this AI technology.

Visit link:

Hollywood Is Banking That a Robot Named Erica Can Be the Next Movie Star - Variety