Hollywood Writers Strike is Over - and about AI

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edwest4

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As reported in today's Variety, the strike is over. The final contract will still have to be ratified which will take from October 2nd thru the 9th. Since actors are still on strike, new material will start to appear with the late-night talk shows which require new comedic/political material. Focusing on AI, some rules have been established. From the article:

"Per the guild’s agreement:


  • AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the MBA, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights.

  • A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.

  • The Company must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material.

  • The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law."
 
This should slow down adoption of AI by about 15 minutes. Especially once people realize that AI doesn't go on strike while writters will set projects back by half a year from time to time.
 
Orionblamblam said:
This should slow down adoption of AI by about 15 minutes. Especially once people realize that AI doesn't go on strike while writters will set projects back by half a year from time to time.
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Have you ever dealt with Hollywood? The company I work for has. I've read contracts. The language is very precise. Miss one "and" or "but" and you are suddenly not going to get money for this or that. It is clear, from the above, that the current rule is NO AI, unless the people in charge, the money men, agree to it. It's mostly about money, on both sides. Writers aren't stupid. They don't want to be replaced by a program. Hollywood isn't stupid. Aside from wringing every dollar out of a deal, they KNOW that audiences care about real, actual, living people. Sure, you can produce a concert and the only things on stage could be a microphone and tape recorder. Will YOU, or anyone, pay money to see that?

This magical thinking where AI - which bears no resemblance to human intelligence - will suddenly replace human beings, is exactly that. Trust me, Hollywood is desperate to cut people, meaning costs. Wall Street is too. But people want to see photos of real, actual people called celebrities. For whatever reason. Hollywood bean counters have worked through all of the scenarios, and all of this is set in stone.
 
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Hollywood is the past. Most of the "media" I and a lot of people consume these days is produced by rank amateurs.

Like it or not, TikTok and the like will likely dominate the entertainment of the future. And I'm pretty sure AI will be able to do stupid dances as well as anybody soon enough.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Hollywood is the past. Most of the "media" I and a lot of people consume these days is produced by rank amateurs.

Like it or not, TikTok and the like will likely dominate the entertainment of the future. And I'm pretty sure AI will be able to do stupid dances as well as anybody soon enough.
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I work in the media. The hype surrounding TikTok is hype. They, meaning people with money, know that other people will watch a man with a monkey and musical instrument on a street corner and will watch it on TikTok or wherever. Or on a Nickelodeon in a saloon. Hollywood is the past. Hollywood deals are set 100% in the past. We're currently talking with Hollywood now. Hollywood today has NOT changed. Not one bit. It's about people who are desperate to cheat other people out of an additional 1% in exchange for a fiction they are telling you: "You and/or your company will be famous." Really? The odds are very low that we - or anyone - will become an overnight success if we sign a bad deal.

Your "rank amateurs" comment makes about as much sense as me spending 50 or 100 dollars on a book produced by a rank amateur. And now: "Luftwaffe Unknown Projects" by a Rank Amateur. Amazon description: Bob Nobody has produced a book about Luftwaffe stuff. Buy it.

I don't think so.
 
edwest4 said:
I don't think so.
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I just spent more than half an hour watching videos people made of parrots solving puzzles to get seeds. Half an hour that Hollywood didn't get. Several hours of youTube today will likely be filled with people bitching about current events/politics, dash cams of cars doing things cars aren't supposed to, body cam footage of criminals getting arrested. My TV stands a good chance of *not* getting turned on once.

And, of course, cat videos.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWIcxPuPtfA
 
Orionblamblam said:
I just spent more than half an hour watching videos people made of parrots solving puzzles to get seeds. Half an hour that Hollywood didn't get. Several hours of youTube today will likely be filled with people bitching about current events/politics, dash cams of cars doing things cars aren't supposed to, body cam footage of criminals getting arrested. My TV stands a good chance of *not* getting turned on once.

And, of course, cat videos.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWIcxPuPtfA
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I can go outside right now and get a video of me playing with a cat - and Hollywood gets nothing. You don't realize that the internet is just like the phone company in the late 1950s. They will publish a thick phone directory and let you have it, for free, Why? So you use their phone more - a lot more. Inside the phone directory - "suggestions" about how your telephone can make your life easier. Do you think the makers of cell phones, laptops and personal computers do NOT want you to use their devices more? That device makers, and those who vacuum data about you and SELL IT, aren't making a buck? Your monthly cell phone payment is going into someone's pocket somewhere, not to mention what you paid for the phone.

Is today MoDeRn? Heck no. Isn't it great that instead of a thick phone book I now have a thick pile of log-ins and passwords? This isn't progress.
 
The march to the bottom? Sure. Hollywood has "the future" all worked out, and it ain't a march to crap.

"Hey Bob. You see that Star Wars thing online?"

'Yeah, it was real bad.'


Your "dream" of the future?

cointelegraph.com

The Author’s Guild launches class-action lawsuit against OpenAI

The court documents filed by the Author’s Guild said the AI algorithms are the heart of OpenAI's “massive commercial enterprise” and are “systematic theft on a mass scale.”
cointelegraph.com cointelegraph.com

www.nytimes.com

Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI

The suit, filed with the Authors Guild, accuses the A.I. company of infringing on authors’ copyrights, claiming it used their books to train its ChatGPT chatbot.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

 
It's really bad news, I expected all those guys to try to find another job more suited to their level of intelligence. Now they will come back with more kidnappings, murderous children, murderous wives, murderous dolls, murderous old women and all kinds of nasty characters. No one will stop them from doing so as long as the film can be shot with the light off.:(
 
Justo Miranda said:
It's really bad news, I expected all those guys to try to find another job more suited to their level of intelligence. Now they will come back with more kidnappings, murderous children, murderous wives, murderous dolls, murderous old women and all kinds of nasty characters. No one will stop them from doing so as long as the film can be shot with the light off.:(
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Don't forget... exciting new adventures with old heroes and cultural icons re-written to be petty villains and/or dolts,venerable tales re-written For A Modern Audience.
 
Justo Miranda said:
It's really bad news, I expected all those guys to try to find another job more suited to their level of intelligence. Now they will come back with more kidnappings, murderous children, murderous wives, murderous dolls, murderous old women and all kinds of nasty characters. No one will stop them from doing so as long as the film can be shot with the light off.:(
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i'd rather watch that than "videos people made of parrots solving puzzles"
 
Justo Miranda said:
It's really bad news, I expected all those guys to try to find another job more suited to their level of intelligence. Now they will come back with more kidnappings, murderous children, murderous wives, murderous dolls, murderous old women and all kinds of nasty characters. No one will stop them from doing so as long as the film can be shot with the light off.:(
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Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. These days it's really a universal pervasive motto in politics, education, entertainment, philosophy, soft and even hard sciences, lifestyles, etc.. I'm looking at you, internet/smart ubiquitous devices/corporations/conglomerates/"social" media...
 
zevets said:
i'd rather watch that than "videos people made of parrots solving puzzles"
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To each their own. The point is that modern tech has opened the floor to *anybody* to produce "content." Most of it is indeed garbage.... but when you have an *ocean* of garbage with innumerable little islands of entertainment, people are going to have more options. And as AI gets better, not only will AI-produced stuff made by people who put in a great deal of effort to make a short video get better, so will AI produced stuff to *your* specific desires. Soon enough "I want season 20 of 'Stargate SG-1' with Kate Upton as an optionally-clad Hathor" will be produced on demand, with the humor, plot twists, color palette and even the rate at which the blinky lights flash will be made by the AI that sits in your own hand-held device. *Other* people will watch it and think it trash, but it will be precisely tailored for *you.*

Besides, don't knock puzzle-solving parrots until you've tried.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5YyTHyaNpo
 
Orionblamblam said:
To each their own. The point is that modern tech has opened the floor to *anybody* to produce "content." Most of it is indeed garbage.... but when you have an *ocean* of garbage with innumerable little islands of entertainment, people are going to have more options. And as AI gets better, not only will AI-produced stuff made by people who put in a great deal of effort to make a short video get better, so will AI produced stuff to *your* specific desires. Soon enough "I want season 20 of 'Stargate SG-1' with Kate Upton as an optionally-clad Hathor" will be produced on demand, with the humor, plot twists, color palette and even the rate at which the blinky lights flash will be made by the AI that sits in your own hand-held device. *Other* people will watch it and think it trash, but it will be precisely tailored for *you.*

Besides, don't knock puzzle-solving parrots until you've tried.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5YyTHyaNpo
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A box of cereal has "content." Nothing else. Let's compare AI to the monstrous ocean of badly written ebooks. Many of which fall under the Junkety Junk-Junk category. AI will similarly gum up the works. And there are still 24 hours in a day. Try going through a haystack the size of the Moon hoping to find something good.

"tailored for you"? Based on what? Having helped build worlds, I/we have discovered a simple fact: most people don't know what they want. Using a formula is still assuming things, and based on very little input. Who was waiting for the original Star Wars to come out? I recall seeing some early pre-release art and couldn't decide if I liked it.
 
edwest4 said:
A box of cereal has "content." Nothing else. Let's compare AI to the monstrous ocean of badly written ebooks. Many of which fall under the Junkety Junk-Junk category. AI will similarly gum up the works. And there are still 24 hours in a day. Try going through a haystack the size of the Moon hoping to find something good.
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Exactly the point I've been raising for years. The rise of self-publishing has greatly increased the number of "published" authors, but it's a factor of... ten? A hundred? The rise of AI means that the number of "authors" will go exponential. AI titles will outnumber human titles by a thousand, a million, a billion *per* *day.* Humans will simply not be able to compete.

edwest4 said:
"tailored for you"? Based on what? Having helped build worlds, I/we have discovered a simple fact: most people don't know what they want. Using a formula is still assuming things, and based on very little input. Who was waiting for the original Star Wars to come out? I recall seeing some early pre-release art and couldn't decide if I liked it.
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Your whole life is available to google and Amazon... and right now your phone (probably) isn't directly analyzing your attention and emotional state. Soon your device will watch your pupil dilation and detect heart rate and respiration and, as far as I know, directly read your brain waves or something.

Additionally: AI will not only tailor product to *you,* over your life as you grow up AI will tailor *you* to product. This is not new; it's how society has always worked. But AI will be scary good at it.
 
Let's focus on the meaning of "published author." It does NOT mean you are a "professional writer," it means your ebook is on Amazon or wherever. I decided to visit a Print on Demand site. It allowed me to see a few pages of a new fantasy book. The writer was able to cram every mistake a beginning writer usually makes into those few pages. There was an associated forum where the author wrote: "Why isn't my book selling?" My point is, most people who self-publish expect to make money, with some expecting to make a lot of money.

Hollywood could care less if a bunch of people produce crap. BUT, if that crap production begins to interfere with them making money then various things will happen. If AI can get all that private data from you then some will file "invasion of privacy" lawsuits. And if AI can produce "billions per day" then you can't see a fraction of it in your lifetime. Aside from 24 hours in a day not changing, there's still eating, sleeping, taking a shower and working.
 
edwest4 said:
If AI can get all that private data from you then some will file "invasion of privacy" lawsuits.
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You'd think, but here we are *today* with virtually everything you do being tracked by various government agencies and corporate interests. Everything you buy, everything you watch, every dollar you spend via credit cards, PayPal, money transfers, etc. is tracked and logged. Every time you step outside in places like London, you are watched by a multitude of machines and an unknown number of humans via cameras. Your phone is GPS tracked whenever it's on... and sometimes when it's off.

It is a common trope of someone expressing surprise that "I mentioned Subject X, and a few minutes later an ad related to Subject X popped up on my screen." That's where we are *now.*

We have become accustomed to a level of privacy intrusion that would have caused a revolution a few generations ago. A few generatiosn from now, the TVs from 1984 that wacthed you 24/7 will seem oddly private, because they are only monitored *sometimes.* Huxley and Orwell didn't include omniscient AI in their futures.

edwest4 said:
And if AI can produce "billions per day" then you can't see a fraction of it in your lifetime. Aside from 24 hours in a day not changing, there's still eating, sleeping, taking a shower and working.
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Yes? That's the point I've been making. AI will soon enough be able to flood the market with *adequate* product so that no human could dream of competing. Writers strikes only accelerate that process, but regardless, it's inevitable.
 
Orionblamblam said:
You'd think, but here we are *today* with virtually everything you do being tracked by various government agencies and corporate interests. Everything you buy, everything you watch, every dollar you spend via credit cards, PayPal, money transfers, etc. is tracked and logged. Every time you step outside in places like London, you are watched by a multitude of machines and an unknown number of humans via cameras. Your phone is GPS tracked whenever it's on... and sometimes when it's off.

It is a common trope of someone expressing surprise that "I mentioned Subject X, and a few minutes later an ad related to Subject X popped up on my screen." That's where we are *now.*

We have become accustomed to a level of privacy intrusion that would have caused a revolution a few generations ago. A few generatiosn from now, the TVs from 1984 that wacthed you 24/7 will seem oddly private, because they are only monitored *sometimes.* Huxley and Orwell didn't include omniscient AI in their futures.


Yes? That's the point I've been making. AI will soon enough be able to flood the market with *adequate* product so that no human could dream of competing. Writers strikes only accelerate that process, but regardless, it's inevitable.
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It's inevitable? Wrong.

Death and taxes are inevitable. AI, like the Metaverse, will be quietly abandoned after it is sued out of existence.
 
edwest4 said:
It's inevitable? Wrong.

Death and taxes are inevitable. AI, like the Metaverse, will be quietly abandoned after it is sued out of existence.
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You think you're going to sue the Chinese Communist Party to get them to stop using such an immensely powerful tool? Good luck with that.

AI continues to grow even without the CCP. The number of AI apps continues to grow. You're not going to sue them all. You might get some, but others will simply learn from *those* examples and skate on by, learning from every available scrap of information. if the US Government made AI illegal by pain of death, AI would simply be raised to perfection in, say, Honduras and slipped across the border carried in flash drives by millions of "migrants."

You can't stop the signal, Mal.
 
"immensely powerful"? Pfffft. I don't think so. It's a toy that was created by stealing copyright material. And the copyright owners are going to destroy the monster. Copyright is global.
 
edwest4 said:
"immensely powerful"? Pfffft. I don't think so. It's a toy that was created by stealing copyright material.
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If it's a toy that's not powerful, the writers guild, and the actors, wouldn't be worried about it.

edwest4 said:
And the copyright owners are going to destroy the monster. Copyright is global.
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"Copyright is global?" Yeah. That's why I keep finding my (and other) books hosted on Russian, Chinese, Indian, etc. websites. Because every movie or TV show you can't legal find is avialble on some foreign pirating site. Because the *rule* *of* *law* is most assuredly *not* global.
 
Orionblamblam said:
To each their own. The point is that modern tech has opened the floor to *anybody* to produce "content." Most of it is indeed garbage.... but when you have an *ocean* of garbage with innumerable little islands of entertainment, people are going to have more options. And as AI gets better, not only will AI-produced stuff made by people who put in a great deal of effort to make a short video get better, so will AI produced stuff to *your* specific desires. Soon enough "I want season 20 of 'Stargate SG-1' with Kate Upton as an optionally-clad Hathor" will be produced on demand, with the humor, plot twists, color palette and even the rate at which the blinky lights flash will be made by the AI that sits in your own hand-held device. *Other* people will watch it and think it trash, but it will be precisely tailored for *you.*

Besides, don't knock puzzle-solving parrots until you've tried.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5YyTHyaNpo
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That may be the end of the woke dictatorship
 
Justo Miranda said:
That may be the end of the woke dictatorship
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Keep in mind that influence will go both ways. A "mature" entertainment-AI will be able to spit out exactly the movie you want, per your prompts and based on what it knows you like. That puts you in control. But whoever controls the AI will be able to have it slip whatever messaging they want into it, hidden to lesser or greater degrees.

The AI will doubtless be linked online, so even though everyone is watchign entirely different things made just for them, all these shows might in a sense all be part of the "AI Cinematic Universe." So while someone is watching Star Trek and someone else is watching Scoobie Doo and some else is watching XYZ, etc. it turns out that a *lot* of them in one region include bad guys named Glorft. In some, Glorft is the universe-destroying supervillain; in others he's a dimwitted henchman, in that one Glorft is the name of a nasty STD, in some he's just an offhand reference, but in all of them the idea is put across that Glorft is some form of evil. Which is bad new for state House candidate Bob Glorft, who once mentioned the idea of legislation to reign in AI.
 
AI will take over the world. Give you what you want. Blah, blah, blah. Don't count your AIs before they hatch - if at all. Lawsuits are flying but the media won't talk about it beyond a single mention. OpenAI was hiring lawyers because they knew this could happen, and it has. So as AI sinks into the sunset, like the Metaverse, another idea to monetize everything will appear. After all, if you're a billionaire, why not go for another billion?
 
Orionblamblam said:
Keep in mind that influence will go both ways. A "mature" entertainment-AI will be able to spit out exactly the movie you want, per your prompts and based on what it knows you like. That puts you in control. But whoever controls the AI will be able to have it slip whatever messaging they want into it, hidden to lesser or greater degrees.

The AI will doubtless be linked online, so even though everyone is watchign entirely different things made just for them, all these shows might in a sense all be part of the "AI Cinematic Universe." So while someone is watching Star Trek and someone else is watching Scoobie Doo and some else is watching XYZ, etc. it turns out that a *lot* of them in one region include bad guys named Glorft. In some, Glorft is the universe-destroying supervillain; in others he's a dimwitted henchman, in that one Glorft is the name of a nasty STD, in some he's just an offhand reference, but in all of them the idea is put across that Glorft is some form of evil. Which is bad new for state House candidate Bob Glorft, who once mentioned the idea of legislation to reign in AI.
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Well, I think it will always be preferable to defend oneself against an intelligent enemy instead of the saturation strategy that now reigns in the media.
 
edwest4 said:
So as AI sinks into the sunset, like the Metaverse,
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Metaverse was *one* companies *one* project. AI is like "books." Are you going to be able to sue books out of existence because one publisher plagiarized? No. AI is here to last, at least until the next Carrington Event. It will change and evolve. The lawsuits are minor blips.
 
From an interview in today's Hollywood Reporter:

"When it comes to AI regulations, can you explain whether or not writers’ scripts can be used to train the technology?


"Keyser: Sure. Well, first of all, I would say there are two different kinds of AI protections that we negotiated here. First of all, we negotiated all kinds of protections for writers’ workflow going forward, in the way that AI can intersect with that, where we protected writers’ rights and their credits and their compensation and their separated rights, the ways in which AI is not literary material under the terms of the MBA. So that’s hugely important. Then we had to deal with the question of what happens when companies want to use our material to train AI. What we said there is this: First of all, the companies have, they claim, some ongoing copyright rights in using our material, and we claim certain contractual rights that limit that or would compensate us for that. What we’ve said is we are going to retain all of those rights, given the fact that no one yet knows what the world is going to look like or what that use might be, and that will be figured out in time in the instances in which the companies actually do want to use our material to train. In other words, instead of trying to negotiate beforehand a world we don’t understand, we retained every single right we have to negotiate for writers, and writers retain every single right they have both under the law and the MBA to protect themselves in circumstances of the companies using our material to train."

Full interview: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/b...tors-interview-strike-ending-deal-1235602325/
 
Orionblamblam said:
Metaverse was *one* companies *one* project. AI is like "books." Are you going to be able to sue books out of existence because one publisher plagiarized? No. AI is here to last, at least until the next Carrington Event. It will change and evolve. The lawsuits are minor blips.
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Hilarious. Disney had its own Metaverse project. Epic Games had its own Metaverse project.

It's the old "we want to find a way to print money" concept, except we're going to do it by vacuuming up/STEALING copyright works to "train" our device. You don't rob people like that. You just don't.
 
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