My day job is a TV writer. Like the rest of the entertainment industry in the Writers Guild of America, I am on strike. We’ve already heard many reasons, such as shorter writing schedules leading to lower salaries, significantly lower balances being paid for reruns, and more and more common requests for free work. I guess.
But I wanted to talk about other things. technical stuff. about artificial intelligence.
The term “artificial intelligence” is great PR. For better or worse, we’re led to believe that the same ChatGPT with silly answers will soon become a marvel of self-aware technology. Within a few years, you’ll be able to make perfect art, perfect music, and perfect movies. Hollywood producers are already drooling over scenarios where users can tell a computer to generate the perfect movie deepfaking themselves.
you know what? Maybe one day we’ll get there. don’t know. Machine learning programs are advanced. They can be expensive and require a lot of human input and maintenance to work, but someday in a few years artificial intelligence will be able to create a show as good as The Suite Life on Deck. It is certainly possible to become
The point is, it’s not there yet. And we probably won’t be there in the near future. So creators don’t have to worry, right? What’s the big problem with AI if you think it won’t take her job for 20 years?
Because AI could make creative work even worse.
Let’s start from the beginning. A big part of the creative process is credit. Clearly, credits can often determine salary and future employment opportunities. They can determine eligibility for awards. Those are the ones listed on IMDb. You get credit for writing the music for the movie, writing the words for the movie, and narrating the movie. It’s on your resume. why? because you created it. Like Angela Bassett, you did that thing.
In show business, there’s something called a “punch-up.” I apologize if these quotes are condescending, as you’ve probably heard them. don’t know. When you punch something, you’re usually brought in for a small sum to do everything from adding jokes to helping fix the story. This work is not credited. You’re basically here to help as a freelancer.
It’s fun. It’s a good side job. But for the vast majority of people, it’s not a reliable job that can pay all the bills.
Switch to artificial intelligence. So far, I can definitely put out something like a script, and I can definitely make something like a song. But they are mostly confusing and not very good. Newspaper editors are proposing to start using AI reporters, but reminding human employees that ChatGPT can add mistakes and blatant factual errors. In other words, artificial intelligence can do creative work, but it does very little of it. Even if there was a YouTube video titled Why Artificial Intelligence Will Change Anime Forever! A feature clip of AI-created or assisted content, the scene is just awful. Costumes blur and change. Hairstyles change on the fly. Eye colors seem to bounce across the spectrum. Hands grow and lose fingers. you can see it that’s not good. If you really want it to be a complete cartoon for streamers, you’ll need to hire an animator to revise it.
Part of the System Shock 2 cover featuring a cybernetic woman connected to a cord.
Side note: I respect that many people want to use AI to help them create more by themselves without having to attend a production design boot camp. I mean, they don’t have the resources to make their own movies, but with machine learning programs, they’re more accessible. I respect that. But when companies use the same technology, or, let’s be honest, more expensive and more advanced technology, the playing field is still not level. I said democratize. They helped! But there’s a reason companies have much more expensive cameras.
The biggest reason we look at AI content today is the novelty that it was created by AI. It’s goofy, detached and weird, funny and fun…but you can’t fill an entire streaming service with it.
The thing is, businesses can still use it. They can still use crappy AI if they want.
Imagine a very near future where companies use AI to create massive amounts of content. Everything from music, writing, narration, to designing creatures. What comes out is not very good. But that’s not the only problem.
Another problem is that these companies only hire writers, artists, and musicians to “liven up” their productions. smooth it out. Make that movie soundtrack really soar in some (say, many) places that don’t do much! If you just fix everything instead of creating it, you can probably pay less to the artists.They are just there to help!
Instead of involving humans in creating work and getting credit for it, the creative industry may try to use AI as a loophole. They’ll write terrible sci-fi scripts that no one wants to make, hire skilled people to completely rewrite them, and use legal workarounds to withhold credit (or greatly emasculate them). Not to mention the payout rate. Even if you do a ton of work, it’s not your job.
Punching up and script tweaking can go from a decent freelance job to your only job. It takes a long time to modify drafts of scripts written by humans, even if they were written by humans. Correcting a draft of a script written by a computer doing its best to auto-fill prompt bullet points takes just as much, if not more, time than writing on a blank page. It takes the same amount of work, but fewer humans are paid in the process, and the result is more likely to be worse than better. Even the most seasoned screenwriters can be paid much lower rates if they’re just “coming to help”.
Our union wants to prevent this. For now, what I’m describing is a little radical and a little dystopian. Yes. That doesn’t negate the fact that AI is the originator of creative work and therefore allows companies to omit some of the most expensive parts of the process.
Isn’t this just business? of course. All business decisions are “just business.” But our strike itself is also a business decision. Don’t assume that you, the consumer, will take over what the big companies are saving you. it’s not. come. you weren’t born this morning
What we are proposing is that I am only speaking as a union member, not as a representative, but artificial intelligence should not be part of the creative process that is currently the work of humans. In other words, you can’t come up with a story, create materials, create materials, and rewrite materials. Again, the suggestions are more complex and nuanced than that, but those are the basics. At the very least, people should be credited for every part of the creative process.
Businesses don’t want this. They are not very supportive of our proposal.
Such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is a powerful tool. You can use it in various ways. If I was dying of regret, I think an AI chatbot would be my only friend. Anything is fine. But the magic that AI might have in the decades to come, we don’t have right now. It just creates crappy content that humans have to remake while screwing up in every possible way.
I can almost respect a bleak future that will be replaced by robots. Most of me is replaceable anyway. A stupid dog can do most things better than I can.
But the future we are facing is not one in which people are completely replaced. rather it is decreasing. they were demoted. You’re paying more and more to enjoy those products, but the people who actually make them are getting less and less paid. Trying to do something before it gets worse later.
