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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Not really. Ironically the kind of people who frequent this forum will be the ones to end labor once and for all.

Unions are only helpful with leverage. For now labor has inherent leverage as capital production fundamentally requires some labor. As AI increases productivity of certain individuals the amount (of people) of productive labor will become less, thus making unions ineffective.

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It's not clear that AI will be a productivity boost for writers of any more magnitude than the move from the typewriter to the computer word processor. It can improve productivity, but only marginally so, and without need to replace writers altogether. An AI is about as useful for screenwriting a complex show as a spell checker.

The kinds of productivity boosts that studios and streaming houses have already gotten from writers are much simpler and timeless - hire less writers per show, for shorter term contracts, don't pay them residuals based on the show's long-term success, and keep them in the dark about the value of their work by hiding viewership data so that they won't know when they do have leverage individually.

I don't know how you could possibly compare AI with the typewriter to word processor evolution.

I'm just talking about it for screenwriting specifically. It can improve productivity like GitHub copilot can for coders, which is to say, incremental improvement (vs firing the software engineering department and replacing it entirely by GitHub copilot)

Wild! And when it doesn't happen this way, are you -- presumably on the "productive" side -- gonna go Galt?

It will eventually happen, and it already is happening.

> Ironically the kind of people who frequent this forum will be the ones to end labor once and for all.

you are labor.

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