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I’m glad more and more workers are realizing the power they have over the industries they’re working in.
Without the workers, the businesses have nothing. We really need to have a serious revolution before they replace all jobs with AI robots.
Wow it’s almost like people’s tolerance for ruthless exploitation isn’t infinite. Hollywood’s disgusting parasitic grifters can get fucked.
incredibly based. fuck the execs. fucking parasites
Hollywood is dead anyway. They just make superhero movies for china now
They’ve been making alternate versions of every movie for china since 2008. Especially disney. Disney is such a cuck to china that they declared all the winnie the pooh characters as public domain to appease Ping.
Fake news, these are all crisis actors. They didn’t even try I’ve seen many of these people in movies!
These crisis actors can literally be anyone, it could be you, it could even be gasp me!
Good to see some solidarity. I wish it happened more. I’d have thought that the spread internet, allowing easy and covert communication, would have caused a proliferation in the number and efficacy of labor unions, but alas.
The Internet has done a ton of that, around the world. But the news focuses on negative stories because, psychologically, humans are much more compelled by negative stories
we’ve had generations of Americans come and go without the need* of unions, I think the positive communication aspects are outweighed by the negative culture ones
*unions are good for everyone, by need I mean the effects of neoliberalism hadn’t kneecapped the (white) working class until 2008
we’ve had generations of Americans come and go without the need* of unions,
Thanks to the work of the unions formed by the generations before them.
Is $25,000 per annum a living wage LA? To think that these are getting so little is nuts.
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“Low income”, as defined by the state, is anything below $70,650 in Los Angeles county.
Not even close
Good question! I looked up the poverty line in LA specifically. And here are the results:
Persons in Family Household - Poverty Guideline (annually): 1 person - $14,580 / 2 persons - $19,720 / 3 persons - $24,860
This is a very quick look for an answer. I don’t fully understand the results.
The long and short of it is $25,000/year is over the poverty line for a single person household but barely over the poverty line for a 2 person household. It is the poverty line for a household of 3 or more people.
It is unclear how this factors in housing, and if it includes owning property and renting. A 3 person household is generally considered to be two adults and a child or dependant. Livable, depends on what you considered livable. If owning a house and starting a family is part of having a libable life, I would say they are probably not earning a livable wage.
Source: Californial Department of Public Health https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DOA/Pages/OA_ADAP_Federal_Poverty_Guideline_Chart.aspx
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Good to see actors, many whom get just the base for their work, stand up for what they deserve.
I’ve been “striking” for a long time now, against junk TV in general. There’s an occasional awesome show that delivers but 95% of it is low-effort junk TV like dating, survival, cooking and other shows like it.
I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.
lol only 30%?
jokes but i agree… i remember going to visit some relatives and sat and watched tv with them… i too was so shocked at how they’d sit idly thru commercials jarring into their show, slapping them in the face…
i can’t stand it. just about anything i watch, when i watch, is commercial free
You forgot animated sitcom that either lasts 6 episodes or 16 seasons
Hey now! Some of us like the cooking shows lol
low-effort junk TV like dating, survival, cooking and other shows like it.
… in other words, exactly the shows that don’t use actors or writers
Huh. When you put it that way…
“Women and men, let no one miss today! Death to the machines!”
- Metropolis
This is the best possible outcome. No one wants that AI generated shit while actors and behind the scenes people make starvation wages.
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So if we’re going to have AI replacing Actors, Animators, VAs, Writers and everything there’s going to be a lot less people to pay and ticket prices will go down by 90% right?
The whole population will benefit from AI and not just people who already make way too much money like it happened with pretty much every other technological innovation right?
Just like WallStreet, the ultimate goal is to also replace audiences entirely with AI sentient viewers. That way they can create millions of viewers who will be pre-primed to want to watch the same pieces of media several hundred times. They can even view the movie at 500% speed so they can do so in a shorter timespan than meat viewers. OpenAI will be the first company to offer culturally insensitive and politically neutral 100% synthetic audiences to feed your Hollywood releases. For just cents per 1 million viewers/hour you too can release a blockbuster. This includes Twitch and YouTube audiences!
The whole population will benefit from AI and not just people who already make way too much money like it happened with pretty much every other technological innovation right?
Humanity benefited from the invention of the printing press. Humanity benefited from the industrial revolution. Humanity benefited from the invention of computers. Humanity will benefit from AI too, greatly so. This is not what is up for debate. Some people made fortunes from it, but does that matter when you compare it to how much good it brought about?
Did it really benefit that much from it though? We can now be infinitely more productive while working, but are still required to work the same work week and have the same purchasing power, if not less in some countries. And the products made with that work cost pretty much the same, even though it costs much less to produce them.
Very rarely a technological innovation actually ended up improving common people’s quality of life, and the ones that did were due to being improving of the end product in nature.
AI doesn’t improve the end product (rather, currently it worsens it), it just improves the efficiency. And like with the Industrial Revolution, people will get paid the same, will have to work the same amount of time, and their end products will cost the same. CEOs will benefit from it and no one else, if history says anything.
You probably don’t know history.
Just from a quick Google search. Skip to the end if you want raw hour comparison.
I’ll gladly accept a huge AI implementation if it means cutting even 20% of current working hours while keeping the same salary, but I’m really skeptical on that.
That’s not what I’m debating. What about healthcare? What about acces to education? What about infant death rates? What about travel? What about not having to worry about starvation? Clean water directly into your home? Hot water too? Electricity? Have these not improved the quality of life greatly? You must not know history if you think your average peasant was living a better life preindustrialisation.
I’m not sure what work you’re doing at the moment but you seem pretty burned out by it. Maybe it’s time for a change
Bro you are waaaaayyyyy overly optimistic on who AI is gonna benefit :) . It won’t be the 99% in the end.
That was sarcasm, I thought the “Right? Right?” was enough to give it away lol
So your argument isn’t against AI, it’s against studios. Or your argument is against us, and our complacency when it comes to corporate or profit overreach.
I don’t see how you could take that as an argument against AI in general. Stanley Yelnatz wasn’t wrong for looking for the shorter shovel.
Sure, just like my gripe is mainly with school shooters rather than with guns, and with crazy billionaires rather than with social media.
But since you can’t realistically regulate the users to a healthy level, you have to regulate the tool. Because, just like those other two things, the benefit it brings to regular people is minuscule compared to the harm it can do.
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Whole lot of the bigger establishments have been going through the ringer lately
I don’t care how fast AI can pump out “high quality content” because I refuse to consume any of it. I really hope the strikes are successful.
honestly we need legislation that protects artists who use their art as a means to live
No we don’t. They can do something else.
It’s called the free market, baby.
Blue collar workers have been finding new ways to make money ever since the industrial revolution. Don’t be a Luddite.
If these people still want to make art, nobody is stopping them. They just have to get a real job too, like everyone else.
It’s okay. I think they can survive and still lead a higher quality of life than the vast majority of people on the planet.
You sound like a copypasta genertor
That is one way to view it. However due to everyone, in including blue collar workers, having their lively hoods threatened by AI we need to ask the question if were okay, as a society, for there to be more jobs eliminated than created. Are we okay with the current ways and (some would say the illusion of) the free market controlling everything? Are we okay with letting people suffer needlessly? Would you be okay with looking into the eyes of someone you know and saying “too bad that’s the free market baby!” Because it’s starting with the arts but it’s not stopping there. It’s only a matter of time before it will not need many warm bodies to do things. The knowledge works are next on the list and it won’t be long after that where manual labors will be impacted. This is all WAY before we even hit AGI.
I’m not saying that AI taking jobs is a bad thing. I think it is an amazing thing but we need to start embracing it as an opportunity for things to be more Star Trek and less dystopian hellscape. That means changing this mindset that a lot of us have and start asking ourselves how do we want the world to look in 100 or even 500 years from now.
HTH
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I saw a great strike sign- “I refuse to memorize lines written by a machine.”
But why? I feel like people are twisting their arguments against AI. Or they are being twisted against.
Why does an actor care where there lines come from? We live in a world where The Room was written and released, but AI content is going to be the end of media? People aren’t that special. Our thoights aren’t that special. We don’t have souls. We’re just thinking machines, and nothing we create is more unique than something that we created creates.
I do too hope the strikes are successful. That said, you’ve likely already been consuming generative technology for some time now. Disney alone has nearly a decade of research into it already. Advanced VFX applications use all sorts of generative tech too. When I was working in LA we referenced public data all the time. I know it’s gotten a huge spotlight on it given private AI capitalizing/evangelizing it all but the very real threat of digital scabs taking people’s jobs needs the biggest spotlight right now. I do think the tables will turn if nothing good can come out of Hollywood and those artists begin weaponizing that same tech against the execs. I see what studios are doing as no different than impersonation & identity theft by using this tech to limit working hours to skirt union protections.
I hope there is some kind of “label” that comes out of this like the Surgeon General’s cigarette warning. “This movie is 87% AI generated” so I won’t have to bother thinking about whether to skip it. Fuck lazy & greedy movie makers. They’d giveup their immortal soul for $3.50
If it is high quality, why do you care how it was produced?
But it’s not the high quality content that’s threatened by AI, it’s the mediocre gargabe. It’s the endless stream of poor quality TV shows and movies which are produced not as art, but as a means of steady predictibile income for the companies involved. That’s the industry aspect of the business. This side of the business consumes most of the talent in the industry. They all know it’s not good and they all hope they will get the funding to actually work on the things they know will be high quality. I think AI will allow them to do that.
Further more, this strike is not just about AI. I think this aspect is the one media outlets care most about and gets reported on more. The entertainment industry has suffered a major shift with streaming platforms and the movement of money from production studios to streaming platforms has left the employees behind. They’re getting less money from streaming platforms but still do the same work. That’s what the strike is about. The industry didn’t care for them when it changed.
To answer your question about quality: it matters because it’s not real. The act of producing something of quality is what makes us better people. It ties into motivation to be better. Computers automating repetition doesn’t hinder that (as much, it does affect learning curves). The notion that computers be used for an output that would normally require creativity is just throwing away the essense of creation, the end product is not the only thing that benefits us. There’s no objective to why it was created, an AI writing something that evokes emotion is a party trick. All it really does is promote consumption and demoralize innovation, and ironically it hides behind innovation as the end-goal of the project. It’s just dead. One of the most beautiful things within creating something of value is the very process of creating it, having the passion and desire to do so, and the will to bring it into existence. AI is a cursed attempt at trying to replicate this process, and by lifting that kind of burden from a human inhuman.
i refuse to believe AI can replace totally of the human part in the industry. Yeah some of the weak actors will be pushed out as they are not doing the job good enough, but it’s inevitable that one day technology is advanced that AI can actually replace human workforce. Like car manufacturing industry that have massive machines to assemble car parts, but also there are things only human can do. We don’t need crappy scriptwriters writing rubbish soap opera that my 10 year old daughter can write because they are no more generic than a AI churn out script. It’s like hiring a typewriter operator in 2023. Or rubbish actors that are like reading their script out with minimal effort and skills. It does not make sense.
typewriter operator in 2023
There’s this people called stenographers who are paid quite well, they can write hundreds of words per minute and essentially transcribe a conversation in real time. They are hired by courts to create records of the sessions, by journalists, parliaments and to transcribe subtitles for audiovisual media. They use this cool typewriter like machine called a stenotype that was invented in 1880. The thing is, they tried to replace them with speech recognition computers. They discovered they needed a human to sanitize input for the computer, essentially a person who can speak really fast and really mechanically, repeating what others said in the room, or what was said in the movie or whatever, into an oxygen-mask-like sound proof microphone. So, they still had to pay someone to be there. Many places decided they could just pay the stenographer and receive higher quality products despite the slightly higher costs. Then YouTube tried to use machine learning to auto-create closed captions. Before that they used a community contribution approach that depended on volunteers to take some time to transcribe the subs. That change to automation was such a fiasco that some big YouTube channels now advertise that they pay an actual company with humans to do the closed captions for their videos in the name of proper quality accessibility. Because automated closed caption tends to do interesting stuff and it’s even worse when they try to throw auto-translation into the mix.
The point is, people tend to not understand technology and how it relates to humans, specially techbros and techies who have the most skewed biases towards tech and little sociological understanding. Nothing can be accurately predicted in that realm, and most relations that result from the appearance of new technology are usually paradoxical to common sense.
I agree with you when it comes to AI in its current form - I wouldn’t even call it a party trick, just dumb luck. Machine learning through repetition will use existing ideas and tropes.
However you can provide the model with unique ideas, new tropes, characters, environments, and settings. The model in its current form could generate something nearly usable (script wise) and still be a valid piece of art with some cleaning up. Just because you save time doesn’t make an idea less “good”
In the future we could have near sentient AI that generates actual pieces of art far faster and better than a person can.
Lol, ok.
I can’t wait for you to like something then change your mind when you find out it’s made by AI.
Lol.
There’s no objective to why it was created, an AI writing something that evokes emotion is a party trick.
Then it’s not valuable. The question still stands: if something is truly valuable, does it matter how it was created? You are not answering this question, you are simply pointing out why AI in your opinion cannot produce art. My question is a bit “tongue in cheek”, of course. It cannot be truly answered without a specific example of creation. I’m asking it to prove a point: we’re dismissing something we don’t understand.
All it really does is promote consumption and demoralize innovation
I’d argue that this is what Hollywood already does. And as you rightly argued through your comment, it brings little artistic or creative value.
To me, it’s the same feeling as the teachers that wouldn’t accept papers written on a computer (after an age where we know how to write) because “it’s less honest”.
I’m not good at drawing. I would love to try to make a game. Anti-AI luddites are happy that I will never produce something because I am incabable of doing something that an AI could easily accomplish.
I’m looking for an interaction with the artists. I do not care what an AI produces… and I don’t care what a marketing team or boardroom of producers produces. I’m looking for an artist’s vision.
I’m looking for an interaction with the artists.
How exactly are you interacting with them while sitting on your couch looking at a screen?
This is an appeal to purity argument. You’ve invented some higher standard (that doesn’t really even make sense) with the purpose of excluding the thing you don’t like.
The audience responds en masse by tuning in, paying up, being changed, perpetuating the ideas back into the culture through the filter of their own personality, chatting about the thing, praising or criticizing the artist.
This is an appeal to purity argument. You’ve invented some higher standard
Nope. It has absolutely nothing to do with “purity.” It has to do with humans doing the ancient human thing of making art. Dancing, singing, telling stories. You’re bringing in the abstraction of purity.
Hollywood (in its crudest aspect) is already an AI algorithm for churning out trash. That’s why I tune out already. Because it is not humans telling each other stories. It is pure corporate manipulation. More AI in the hands of producer-goons just means more corporate manipulation and less humans telling each other stories.
AI in the hands of an artist is a tool for exploring and creating. AI in the hands of corporate goons is the total opposite.
Do you understand how art works at all?
That it’s an entirely subjective experience and to presume that someone’s enjoyment of it means that a human had to be involved in It’s creation is such a ridiculous response.
Have you ever seen the paintings that one chimpanzee made? They’re actually pretty nice in composition. Am I allowed to like the way they look even if no human made them?
So long as it’s not a glorified machine learning program designed to commit mass fraud and copyright infringement, then yes. Until then, go cry harder.
I’m going to think back to people like you in 15 years and smile at how naive you were.
Yeah. It’ll be nice if all the drivel in Hollywood were automated.
If you think you’re so good at what you do, then you can be what the AI learns from to improve.
Everyone else? Well, tough tamales. This is what progress looks like and blue collar workers have been feeling it ever since the industrial revolution.
You’re just not going to give up this crusade are you? Going to start comparing salaries of line workers to starving kids in Africa again?
What crusade?
These people don’t need more money, plain and simple.
It’ll be funny when we start watching stuff and can’t tell what is AI and what isn’t.
I fully expect people like you to like something and then hate it after you find out it was made by AI.
Lol.
It’s funny to me because all these people are saying exactly what everyone used to say about mobile phones, about the internet, about computers… I know so many people who railed against the internet saying they’d never use it and that computers only make things more difficult - now they’re all yelling on Facebook about how the evil corporations they work for aren’t letting them work from home lol
AI will keep getting better and the way people use it will continue to evolve, there will be truly great things made by obsessive outsiders which speak to people in ways nothing has… Just like with every minor technical or social Innovation in art. Many of the giants of the old era will vanish and many new greats will grow and start to stagnate into conformity…
I’m excited for the future and all the interesting things it brings, we can’t just stop creativity and progress because some affluent performers want guarantees of stability which just don’t exist in reality
because I refuse to consume any of it
I guarantee you already have and didn’t notice.
There’s a philosophical argument to be made for sure, and I’d probably even agree with you. But the reality is that the technology is here, and it’ll be used in pursuit of the almighty buck.
They’re fighting a losing battle, but I hope a side effect of it is that new people come in and change both the economics and artistry of Hollywood. Most Hollywood content sits in a very rigid box. It’s repetitive, unoriginal, and unappealing. People are encouraged to eat ramen for every meal in order to “make it”, simply because far too many of them try (which is partially the result of the “follow your dreams” narrative in America as well). The further down you are, the worse your compensation. Good ideas get missed or thrown out and relegated to dollar theatres all the time.
If this strike goes on long enough that it starts to flush people out, I’m ok with that. Sucks for the people who are going to lose their livelihoods, but for some of them that was an eventuality. Hopefully in the end creators will have more creative freedom and receive more proportional compensation.
They’re fighting a losing battle, but I hope a side effect of it is that new people come in and change both the economics and artistry of Hollywood. Most Hollywood content sits in a very rigid box. It’s repetitive, unoriginal, and unappealing.
My two cents is there’s a structural issue that’s converged to strictly Campbellian story-telling as the end-all-be-all structure. Sure, you’ll have something come out of HBO or AppleTV that breaks it, but AAA movies rarely break it.
The movie industry needs a bigger market for independent movies. Look at the videogames, the indies are holding the creativity among a similar crisis for the aaa titles as for the movies. We need an “EA Orginals” for the majors…
Indy game industry has exploded thanks to benevolent monopoly of Steam. There was a chance for indy cinema when Netflix started, but that’s long gone with every studio having their own streaming service.
Probably the best thing that can happen to the world right now…
/Bye Felicia
