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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)
Is there actually an issue here? Doctors and Lawyers are already 2 of the relatively few fields that are legally regulated. A person with a government license must sign off on all significant practice of either and they are legally responsible if they make any bad decisions, regardless of whether they came from their own brains, a magazine article, or the most recent LLM. So even in the "worst case" what would they do to these fields besides make it easier for the licensees, who would probably get paid well for just reading the output, making sure it isn't insane, and signing off on it? I don't think there'd be much push for change until the general public says something like, hey, why do we have to pay this guy so much just to rubber-stamp this AI output.
Yes, we do have more legal protection than most other professions.
My concern is that will likely still not be enough, at least outside the US (faster at the least). Both the UK and India have such a massive underserviced demand for more healthcare such that if the cost of meeting it with automation was deregulation, then both have already committed to it. The former has midlevels, the later homeopathic and ayurvedic quacks.
And doctors in the US are still expensive, so if hospitals decide to cut down on our numbers while retaining the very senior or the absolute best, then it's little consolation to the 90% of who become unemployable if the remaining 10% are making bank supervising or rubberstamping AI.
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