Actors attempt to imitate humans. “Good acting” is convincing; the audience believes the actor is giving a reasonable response to the portrayed situation.

But the audience is also trying to imitate the actors to some degree. Like you point out, humans imitate. For some subset of the population, I’d imagine the majority of social situations they are exposed to, and the responses to situations they observe, are portrayed by actors.

At what point are actors defining the social responses that they then try to imitate? In other words, at what point does acting beget acting and how much of our daily social interactions actually are driven by actors? And is this world of actors creating artificial social responses substantially different than bots doing the same?