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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.
Just because people call something "creative", doesn't mean it actually is.
If we restrict ourselves to the domain of cognitive tasks (ignoring the complexities introduced by physical labor), then I think the speed at which different tasks get automated by AI is a decent empirical index of how much creativity a task requires. Computers reached parity with top humans in Chess relatively early because Chess, although cognitively demanding, doesn't require much creativity. Conversely, AI has had relatively little impact on research-level mathematics (as far as I'm aware), which tracks with my intuition that it requires a great deal of creativity.
Of course, the question of what would count as "automation" of art is a complex one. GPT-4 can write coherent novels, but most people agree that they're boring and not worth reading.
Your use of the word "luddite" suggests that you have a negative emotional valence towards the Actors' Guild strike. But I'm not sure why. I think it's fine for employees to try to negotiate better terms with their employer. In general, people aren't obligated to provide labor to someone else, unless both parties can come to an agreement on acceptable terms (barring previously agreed upon contractual obligations).
It's unfortunate that Luddite has a negative connotation, but it seems useful to have a term to refer to people who are concerned about AI taking their jobs, to the point that they're willing to go on strike to enact a ban on AI. Can you suggest a more neutral term you would prefer?
I don't mind one way or the other. I was just pointing out that, as of right now, that term is typically used pejoratively. Maybe that could change in the future.
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