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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.
It's either lawfare or holding out for UBI, and for the first few unfortunates to get the axe, lawfare is likely a better deal.
I'm sure that even banning cloned appearances or voices won't matter, since they can just make Legally Distinct™ versions, and there will be people who are willing to defect and cash out.
If lawyers and doctors were smarter, they'd get right on it too, at least by demanding regulators put massive burdens of evidence to prove that models perform better than humans do. Far easier to pull off today, when the models are still deficient in key areas, versus in 2 to 3 years when it becomes rather obvious they're on par or better. (Obvious, not that they already aren't in most ways that matter)
A radiologist friend of mine was pretty gungho on AI when ChatGPT came out, but he's pretty rapidly soured on it and is motivated to want a lot more regulation of that sort. People have been talking about automating away radiologists for decades at this point, but This Time is Different. Really.
I have little doubt that it is technologically possible to train an AI to make most major radiological diagnosis with average or above-average accuracy. The main obstacle is medical privacy laws restricting the data. HIPAA may be the most destructive statute ever enacted by the United States congress. The fact that it passed the senate 100-0 is perhaps the greatest indictment against democracy that exists.
Buried in this statement is the assumption that only the United States is capable of performing cutting edge medical research.
* which is probably true
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I think that’s a bit much. The intent of the law was to prevent things like your medical records being used against you at work. Like you have a genetic risk for a disease and thus become effectively unemployable because your medical history or genetic data would put you in a high risk pool that would make your boss’s insurance rates go up. And had it been properly written, I don’t think it would be a problem for AI radiology at all.
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I am not claiming that ChatGPT 3.5, which was the SOTA at the time of release and what he almost certainly used, is better than most doctors. I would say it's surprisingly good, about on par with a bright med student in say their third year, which is still plenty useful.
I have on the other hand, become well acquainted with GPT-4, which is where I make that case. Leaving aside my subjective impression, not only did it pass the USMLE, it did so with a 95th percentile score. That's not just a begrudging pass, it's stunning.
Given that the whole point of the USMLE is to comprehensively test the capabilities of a doctor, while also gating entry into residencies, I struggle to see how that isn't overwhelming evidence in its favor. If I sat the USMLE right now, even fresh as I am from an equivalent UK examination with an even lower pass rate, I couldn't do that, and if I could, it would represent at least half a year of constant studying. Since I and tens of thousands of others who aren't 95th percentile are allowed to practise as is..
Further, while GPT-4 has multimodal capabilities, being able to look at image files and understand them, such capabilities are not currently publicly available. I struggle to see how a radiologist would be making proper use of it, let alone when they almost certainly used the older and weaker 3.5, since half their job is looking for weird blobs in an image and translating them to a legible diagnosis or at least a list of findings.
Yes. It is different this time, and we have receipts to show it. Besides, I'm not the same people who were claiming that would be the case as early as two decades ago, if only because I was too busy memorizing multiplication tables.
At least your friend is smart enough to ask for regulation, if only for the wrong reasons. I'd do the same, but only because it's convenient for me, not because I actually think it's worse at the job.
Oh, yes. To be explicit, the souring is out of his fear of its capabilities (rather, what it's clearly tracking toward), not contempt at a lack of them. He's shifted to questions about HIPAA and big tech companies controlling data, importance of bedside manner (hilarious if you knew him), etc.
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