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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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The Hollywood actors guild is on a strike. They are joining the Hollywood writers' strike, which has been ongoing for a few months. I did not know this, but apparently Fran Drescher (the loudly nasal woman from "The Nanny") is the president of the union.

Is this strike a big deal? Well, for one, it's the biggest strike for over 60 years. But what caught my eye was her rationalisation. You can read a summary of the demands.

A key demand has been surrounding generative AI. Actors do not want companies to create their own AI replicas of actors, nor to use generated voices and faces.

One possibility could be the actors raising the AI bogeyman as a cover to demand better pay. And to be sure, they are asking for a fairer split from the streaming model. Yet the AI demands are not directly linked to compensation per se, but rather asks about blanket bans. This does suggest that AI fears are genuine and real. Given very rapid progress in the generative field in recent years, perhaps they are right to be so.

Whenever I've read about jobs displacement from AI, invariably experts have opined that "the creative stuff will go last". Clearly the people who know their trade best are disagreeing with the experts. I'm not sure if this means that actors are paranoid or if we should disregard the expert consensus. Either way, I suspect we may see more and more of these kinds of Luddite strikes in the future, but perhaps not from those who people expected it from.

In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.

As we've seen in recent years, so-called professional scriptwriters have been putting out utter shit on the big screen and prestige TV that fans of the work would often (and do!) write superior takes for free, on the internet. The only thing that separates the two are gatekeeping and connections in the notoriously nepotistic and corrupt Hollywood system.

SAG and SAW fundamentally rely on the studio system for their collective bargaining to make any sense. As soon as photorealistic 3D generative animation gets off the ground, there will be no corporate giants for them to leech off. They see a future where automated scabs run them out of business, and I can't blame them. The mediocre products they produce can in no way compete.

I think you are right about the quality of the average Hollywood screenplay, but I don't think it's even correlated with the "sit down and write a whole script for this concept" skill of the individuals involved. What is required from a screenwriter to produce an excellent movie is the skill set to get an excellent script onto the screen through the gauntlet of executives, producers, directors, and actors who all have a stake in the final product, which your average fanfic writer would be completely incapable of. An LLM may or may not fare better.

What you've said is likely true, but sinecures are rife throughout all economies and will be extracted in due course. I'm not blaming SAG or anyone else, because these are people that have invested their lives (5+ years) into their position and you can understand why they will fight and burn out. Wait until AI hits the lawyers..

In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.

Man, as a reader, I have to disagree. AI can write individual paragraphs much better than most writers, but when it comes to themes, character growth, plot, and simple internal consistency between chapters, I find AI sorely lacking. Maybe I'm overestimating your average competently-written fanfic though.

I think that's mostly the short context window. AI can't keep the details straight because it has anterograde amnesia and forgets what it was talking about after a few thousand words.

Right now we are in the centaur stage where a competent fanfic writer stitching together ChatGPT-4 paragraphs and correcting the AI when necessary could produce a better product, or at least be much more prolific at creating an equivalent product.

When ChatGPT-5 is available and it has a context window large enough to fit entire novels, which will surely happen in the next ten years, that won't be true anymore.

For sure. I'd be interested in seeing what the costs for larger context windows will look like. Claude already has a 100k context window, but it's pretty expensive. GPT-4 also has a 32K context window that's even more so. It seems that as the models get stronger they get significantly more expensive to build and operate too.

I think we will soon run into two fundamental constraints:

  1. We will run out of external data to feed the AI, meaning further training will yield diminishing returns
  2. AI-produced text will mingle with human-produced text in somewhat undetectable ways, lowering the quality of any affected data.

In my opinion - as a writer myself - is that right now, AI is approximately at the level of your average competently-written fanfiction, which is a big problem for Hollywood because they write below that level.

Half the reason I wrote a 83k word online web serial is to serve as future evidence that I'm a good writer without AI enhancement, for whatever little street cred that's worth.

I'm incorrigibly lazy, so I've regularly tried my hand at making GPT-4 write fiction both for personal consumption and to do my work for me, and have been disappointed every single time. I haven't even seen any prompt engineering trick that raises the bar to something I would enjoy reading at length.

Of course, it beats the average human by a longshot, just look at the kind of dross people produce in high school literature classes or sort by new in /r/WritingPrompts.

I'd say that a GPT-4 written TV show wouldn't appeal to me only because my standards for what's worth watching are already above the level of an average show, not that most people seem to be as discerning!

Half the reason I wrote a 83k word online web serial is to serve as future evidence that I'm a good writer without AI enhancement, for whatever little street cred that's worth.

And hey, if you turn out to be right, your perspective, values, and ideas might become a much larger part of the agglomerate superintelligence's personality.

Thanks, albeit it only makes me about 0.5% happier about potentially being turned into a paperclip haha.

I'd much rather be kept around and asked myself, since I doubt I'd have a lot better to do than chat with a superintelligence!

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