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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.
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.
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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