Generative AI is now a potential killer, potentially forcing copyright holders to abandon libraries of scripts they’ve spent decades creating in exchange for promised profits that never arrive.
When it comes to generative AI and video, Silicon Valley only needs to hook one constituency: Hollywood executives. If the studio agrees, it’s at the mercy of the provider of that technology. It happened in journalism. It happened in music. Silicon Valley didn’t kill those industries, but it took control of their audience and squeezed a huge percentage of their potential profits. For studio executives, generative AI is like an intelligence test.
the best way Moving forward is for studios and writers to recognize four realities.
First, generative AI will eventually become a valuable tool in some creative areas, such as scripting, but only if the AI is built from the ground up for that task.
Second, today’s generative AI has flaws that make it unsuitable for serious work, especially in creative fields. A general-purpose AI like ChatGPT is trained on any content authors can steal on the internet. That is, the output is often nonsense masquerading as authoritative. The best they can do is mimic the training set. These AIs are never good at drafting screenplays, even for the most boilerplate programming, unless their training sets include huge libraries of Hollywood screenplays.
Third, Silicon Valley is the common enemy of studios and writers. It’s an illusion that studios can partner with AI companies to pressure writers without harming themselves. Silicon Valley is using potential pay cuts for writers as bait in traps targeting studio profits.
Fourth, there’s no reason Hollywood can’t create their own generative AI to compete with ChatGPT. Studios and writers control the intellectual property needed to create great AI. A generative AI trained on all scripts provided by a single studio or a collection of studios would produce scripts that are significantly better than ChatGPT.Will it produce Casablanca? no. But it has the potential to produce a good first draft of an Emmy show script. And it will protect Hollywood’s business model for the next generation.
Hollywood’s future looks even brighter if studios can create AI that they can control individually or collaboratively. Central to this fourth point is his legal strategy for piracy lawsuits against major generative AI companies. If copyright has any meaning, Hollywood must challenge Silicon Valley’s claim to “unauthorized innovation,” which has become a safe haven for violations of the law in areas ranging from consumer safety to public health to copyright.
Some might say that Hollywood doesn’t have the ability to “do technology.” It’s ridiculous. Pixar, Weta Digital, and the CGI special effects industry have shown that Hollywood can not only master technology, but innovate it.
There are many open source architectures for generative AI. The studio and his WGA can cheaply license and hire a handful of engineers to train their own AI. It will take years, but copyright litigation could buy up as much of the industry as it needs and even turn it into a huge profit center.
There are serious issues to be resolved between writers and studios. AI is part of the negotiations, but it is inherently different from the other issues on the agenda. The tech industry wants to use generative AI to profit from film and television in the same way it has done with other categories of media. The question is whether studios will repeat the mistakes of journalism and music.
