I wonder how the WGA will change its tune when language models will write episodes of indistinguishable quality from human writers.
Sarcasm aside, the volume of scripts has never been the problem in Hollywood. Everybody and their mother has a screenplay. 99% of screenplays that are actually purchased aren't worth making. There are plenty of people who make a good living, outearning the average SV FAANG programmer, just churning out 1 or 2 C-movie scripts a year that they might spend a week or two writing.
And even the screenplays that get made aren't very good. One of my former clients made his fortune making D-movie action films, some of which you may have seen on cable or streaming. The entire portion of the screenplay dedicated to the gunfight at the end of one of his recent films was: "They have an epic fucking gunfight. Explosions everywhere. It's FUCKING AWESOME." (If you look up the screenplay for the movie adaptation of SWAT, the minutes-long fight at the beginning of the film is similarly scripted. By the way, that movie made $200m+.)
Genuinely, what will happen with writers when scripts will be a dime a dozen, because people are going to use these new technologies?
Thinking about these scenarios is the POINT of a union, making sure writers stay relevant for the long-term future. Failing to address them makes for a lot of broken dreams and missed opportunities.
An experienced writer could (and does) make an entire first draft of a script for a tv show in less than a day. Before your first job out of college you likely have 10+ scripts for movies or shows written for a portfolio. 99% of scripts written already will never see the light of day— and that includes the ones that get bought!
Hollywood does have genuine shortcomings, but I can guarantee you one is not the lack of scripts, nor even the lack of good scripts.
Do we prevent the lose of income to people by forming a collective bargaining group (guild, union, co-op—whatever you’d like) to prevent the job loss and maintain income? Do we tax the owners of businesses who are using large amounts of automation so that the profits are shared with larger society? Do we let the market figure out it out?
It’s an incredibly difficult and complicated question and I don’t have a good answer. But I do personally believe that the people who will be hit hardest will be average people: ourselves and our neighbors and we should consider how we want to react to that fact sooner rather than later.
Being nowhere close to this, it’s difficult to say. Maybe the creative field gets reduced to the guy who can put the right prompt into a script, voice-acting and moving-image combined model?
2. That's great advice for buggy horses who want to win the game of musical chairs, but when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing?
Didn't say they were. Was only addressing the comment about SWEs.
> when the number of jobs for SWEs will drop to ~200,000 in the country, what are the other million going to be doing
What they did after the dotcom crash - become the upper 15-20%, shift to another job in tech (project management, devops, etc) or switch entirely to another job like car sales, accounting, or greeting customers at Walmart.