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Notes -
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.
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!
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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