Hollywood writers, slamming 'gig economy,' go on strike
apnews.com
apnews.com
So, uh, with the writers on strike, who's going to write these new stories?
Do you honestly think the writers are the ones driving the garbage that gets released?
If you only know about the 10 superhero movies that says more about your limited tastes than it does about the moviemaking industry.
You really think ChatGPT is capable of just plug-n-play? It'll be interesting to see the results of it. I'm rooting for it's failure if it's tried for many reasons but one especially because workers are continued to be treated as trash in this country and it'll get worse with yet another unregulated and half baked technological alternative.
I feel like the ratio of good to bad shows is heavily skewed towards bad.
Yes, there are more good shows out lately than there were in the past, but I think it's basically because of the volume of shows that are being pushed out at all times nowadays.
Looking at it from the perspective of Netflix, Disney, etc... They are being critically panned these days. Netflix in particular is a joke with how many shows they are producing that they cancel after one season.
Now it's unfair to lay that all at the feet of the writers, but arguably only stuff written by some top % of writers are taking off.
So why would they want to raise the pay of all writers when a large majority of them are writing stuff that gets cancelled?
Every show gets canceled eventually, except Jeopardy and The Simpsons I guess. The studio still owns the IP and can re-release, reboot for as long as human life exists.
Industry never wants to raise wages for anyone! A handful of companies own all TV & film media, meaning it’s even harder for folks to negotiate. That’s why unions and strikes are necessary.
But this isn't just "I don't like these shows", it's "no one likes these shows, sometimes they are cancelled before the first season even finishes airing"
I think they would be in a better bargaining position if more shows weren't getting absolutely trashed by both critics and audiences over their writing, that's all.
What it seems like you are really asking for is that no or not many shows are canceled, or they all or most shows appeal to you / everyone. I don’t think that has been possible since the invention of cable, or certainly since the invention of YouTube.
There is too much content out there to waste time on content you don’t like. Honestly it’s a huge win for basically everyone.
Additionally every new show is competing against every show you’ve ever liked (including canceled shows) since they’re no longer relegated to reruns and syndication. You can probably get the whole series on DVD for a way lower price (I remember when each season of X Files was like $80 on DVD) or on a streaming service.
There are still new “mass appeal” shows and movies —- they are often panned as being broad, formulaic slop but they still do crazy numbers. Maybe it’s not actually hard to make content that appeals to most people, but maybe that’s not most content creators’ intention.
More training data, better models :)
On the other hand, it seems a brief renaissance of quality sci-fi TV followed that strike. Though that could be the tax incentives Vancouver offered and the abundance of sci-fi writers who cut their teeth on Stargate.
And, even more bizarrely, their audiences don't seem to care about quality either.
Only if there is zero human interaction beyond prompting. And even that is just the Cooyright Office’s opinion of the law, not necessarily the actual law. [0]
[0] Which would normally be significant, because of Chevron deference, but with the increasing expectation that the Supreme Court will toss Chevron deference in a current case...
From the Demands Document : https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/member_info/contra...
Kind of depends how hard the studios want to fight on this, but I get the sense that they can just take foreign series and dub them for a while.
As for ChatGPT: ChatGPT is not competent at writing substance. ChatGPT excels at superficial basic structure; the kind you learn on the first day of high school English. Those who have tried using ChatGPT to write fiction have discovered that every story follows the same simple pattern, and it always skips over the most important part of the story (i.e., the part that writers would actually need help with) to skip straight to the conclusion where everybody lives happily ever after.
So ChatGPT might help a student with the bones of their creative writing assignment. But it and its LLM ilk will never be a force in Hollywood; that would require a better type of AI that is actually capable of substantive understanding.
I very recently tried to get ChatGPT to generate Fritz Leiber style stories, and it would always end with some trite moral or a "bad" character having a change of heart, even after repeatedly asking it to not do that.
It's a really good tool for brainstorming, though.