As Actors Strike for AI Protections, Netflix Lists $900k AI Job
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
How many actors could Adam Sandler's $250M Netflix deal pay for?
[1] https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/essential-guide-sag-rates#:~:t....
These aren't independent college movies or something you're making for your youtube channel.
WTF is this comment.
Jaylen Brown will be making $304 MILLION over 5 years for the Boston Celtics as the highest paid NBA player.
Wealth inequality from predominantly ads-based (tv-deals) business models is a cancer to our society.
[1]: https://frontofficesports.com/saudi-arabia-reportedly-offers...
Those athletes are paid that much because the fans (customers) value them that much.
Why not? It clearly shows that there is a screw loose. Or put differently: it reminds us of the fundamental truth that in society, people without power get as little as is available to keep them alive and sometimes less, and people with power (in this case, the power of a good negotiating position) get as much as is available to pay them.
The world doesn't _have_ to work this way. There is no reason we need to be okay with it. Poorer people could be paid more and rich people paid less and things would basically work the same way.
Because it's not productive.
Yell and shake your fist at cloud all you want, it's not going to change.
Anyone who can create returns greater than their cost of capital creates value. A screw isn't loose. If you can figure out how to add value to the world, then you get endless riches.
> "People without power get as little as is available to keep them alive"
Consider using less hyperbole in your worldview. Today has the highest living standards of any time.
And yet the suicide rate keeps ticking upward. All is not well in Paradise Earth.
It doesn't change the fact that wealth inequality doesn't need to be this unequal. You are choosing that system, over another which is less unequal, when you defend it. I can't imagine why! It's the same system, but better, with happier people, and the only difference is the rules of the game--which we get to choose.
We literally have an obesity problem among America’s poorest people. Which speaks to having a decently high standard compared to the past, where being poor literally meant you starved to death. Similarly, hospitals will never turn you away in this country. Meaning you can show up at the emergency room and have life saving surgery and the worst case is you’ll get a bill in the mail, instead of dying in the streets (there are countries where this still happens).
I’m not saying it’s perfect, I think the biggest problem has to do with mentally ill and drug addicted homeless, who don’t have the mental capacity to take care of themselves. But I do agree with GP that the conversation has more nuance.
For the purposes of criticizing power structures that allow structural inequality I don't... care? The floor is not sufficiently high right now, because tremendous swathes of people are in true poverty, aka existence that denies them dignity and self-determination, because living in this world is so expensive that they can't escape the trap of poverty. So yes, I feel totally fine saying that soccer players or whomever make way too much money, and I'd be the first to agree that the inequality is fine when it is. But we're not even close.
Doesn't matter. Humans assess their position relative to other humans, not on an absolute scale. Homo economicus does not exist. If you don't include psychology, your model of the world is very incomplete.
This is wildly false - it's nowhere near a "fundamental truth", this is just the (incredibly warped and distorted) way that you personally see the world.
Apparently it upsets author of the article that AI PM makes 900k.
How do you solve this? People want to pay attention, advertisers want a piece. They have $enough_profit_to_pay_for_ads, so they do.
Advertisers want to swap what they care about with their ads. In fact, last time I watched television, programming was more ad than TV.
To hell with advertisers.
Mbape or any footballer for that matter isn't being replaced by the close to free option by clubs.
The actors union even offered a legitimate compromise where their likeness could be used once royalties are paid.
This is completely fair and mature approach. Netflix and co get to pump out more content faster and cheaper while the portraits of actors are paying the owner of that likeness.
Unfortunately the entire reason for the strike is studios will rarely, unless you are very top talent, deviate from the minimums. They would often try to go even lower, if they could. Hence the strike is to raise the minimums.
There’s 160,000 members of SAG. There’s maybe only 50 household-name celebrities acting in any one year? Those 50 are not representative of everyone who acts at all.
Actors are the ones looking for a gig, often any gig, but when they have a choice, the highest paying gig. And believe me, every actor and writer in Hollywood wishes studios would invest more in mid-budget B movie not based on any cinematic universe: those are what paid many people’s bills.
As Union members, actors have a contract with studios that they negotiate every 3 years. Every three years since the last strike in 1960 they’ve reached a deal (and the result of that strike was the creation of revenue sharing for cable and film tv with actors and writers, which they are now hoping to apply to streaming).
No deal? Fine, studios have the right not to sign. But actors have the right to withhold their work. Eventually a deal will be reached.
Directors are not on strike, as they are the closest of the unions with studios and have never been on strike in the history of their union.
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make, this year Hollywood is on track to exceed its pre-covid performance at the Box Office worldwide and domestically. Netflix/etc are growing more than ever.
It seems like all signs point to this sector being on the up and up.
Actors here are just collectively using that power to withhold their work in order to negotiate a better deal, as is their right. They’re not asking for sympathy, they’re demanding studios meet them at the negotiating table. If they’re wrong about how important they are, then studios will continue to disregard their demands until SAG eventually folds— my guess, though, is that actors know they’re more important en masse to studios than studios are to them, or else studios would’ve refused to exclusively work with SAG along ago.
After all, most actors are very used to having second jobs to make ends meet. They can work other jobs or more hours or whatever else they want to do during the strike. Studios are the ones with corporate 9-5 employees who won’t have anything productive to do or show their shareholders the longer the strike goes on.
Life imitates art imitates life...
The LHC recently had a leak and had to shut down, so we should return to some semblance of normality before it restarts next year and things go off the rails again.
It's misleading at best, actively dishonest at worst.
For the same reason why people pay for Netflix right now instead of pirating: convenience.
On the other hand, I was always interested in AI, but this listing really scratched my curiosity. What would be the proper roadmap for someone who wants to learn AI?
"... The overall market range for roles in this area of Netflix is typically $300,000 - $900,000.
This market range is based on total compensation (vs. only base salary), which is in line with our compensation philosophy..."
Now companies are forced to disclose salary ranges in California. Some tech companies combat this by publishing unhelpfully broad salary ranges. Some people MIGHT make that much, but the vast majority still won't (not that it detracts from tech workers making a pretty penny).
Actors protesting AI protections remind me of factory workers protesting against automation setting in.
These strikes are not for the stars.
They're for the rank and file actors who make up the vast majority of the union. The ones who might appear in straight-to-video shows or maybe be a short-term character who doesn't even have a name. I know a guy who is an actor out in LA. He works at a Universal Studios theme park for his day job, but he's also appeared in the opening scene in 1923.... a character who was shot by one of the leads but who didn't even have a name. He was also a character in the Pam and Tommy Lee show, played a part in a short-lived live action Scooby Doo show (along with his wife), etc.
People like that aren't rolling in the dough. They're not getting a ton of residual checks. And the power of unions say that people like that get a voice too. Besides, automation of this sort rarely makes lives better for anyone than at the top.
Adding AI to this equation does not make the media cheaper for me. It just means fewer paychecks get cut for actors, and the money ends up getting deposited into the accounts of the executives who "saved the company money." Sorry, but I'd rather just not use AI if that's the case.
And in hindsight: rightly so. Automation and outsourcing gutted the middle class in the US to the benefit of a handful of folks that didn't need anymore money. What's the end-game of automating every human job away if the spoils of that automation aren't shared widely?
What statistics can we look at that shows that the middle class is smaller and less well off than before (“gutted”)?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
He was upper-middle-management at a huge company when he was forced into retirement by the "professional" managers who had come in and filled everyone's work-days with meetings and had no fucking clue how any of the actual work got done. Between pension and savings, they were millionaires by then, back when that still kinda halfway meant something, so it was fine. I grew up with everydamnthing I could want, really.
Follow the same life course—put in the same amount of effort, make the same sorts of mistakes—today and you'll work until you can't anymore, and be destitute when you do. And probably not have a family. Assuming you don't succumb to depression and OD on opioids in your 40s, or end up in prison.
I doubt my kids will own a home. Like, ever. And they're pretty damn bright. Unless they go full off-the-grid in the middle of nowhere or something.
The future looks pretty fucking feudal.
It's definitely worse now than it was decades back.
If we don't see another wave of reforms soon—which is sure to require labor action!—a whole bunch of folks are in for another rough time (stretching to entire lives, as it did last time) which will not automatically get better through capitalism pixie dust or whatever.
The last time we saw a huge shift in human participation in the economy, it sucked absolute ass until a bunch of workers screamed and bled and died to make it somewhat better. That's what'll happen again if we don't catch it early. "It'll get better on its own, because markets" is magical thinking.
I want to believe there's something better than, "Stop the world, I want to get off."
What is the compelling alternative to this somewhat unrestricted growth we have currently going on? I know there's lots of "if only we just..."s, but what's the implementation plan? How do we install socialism on hardware that was built to run capitalism and seems to be running super well, except for all the pollution it causes?
I support the artists and writers, the creatives and creators, hell, I even support the social media influencers, but this strike is a stopgap, if that. What's our plan? What can we offer the capitalists to get them on board with it, other than the guillotine option?
Is that all we really have to offer? I have to believe we have more than, "be nicer to people, or we'll kill you".
I do not support writers and creatives who profit from intellectual 'property', they are themselves a part of the problem. I reject the notion that workers are free from blame for their participation in the system.
A good first step to solving much of society's problems, including this is to nuke the financial sector from orbit, companies like Netflix and Universal will then go bankrupt and their employees will be forced to do something that is more beneficial for society, instead of contributing to the useless glut of for-profit entertainment.
Furthermore, transhumanists should be persecuted for their anti-human beliefs especially for creating human likeness, until their beliefs are erradicated.
None of these are easy solutions, but if solutions were easy we would not have reached this point.
Space exploration.
Could the explanation possibly be that people generally settle on it being worth spending a certain percentage of their income on a home? If that were the case, no matter if people in general are becoming more or less well off or if homes are getting more or less expensive, the percentage of their income that people spend on them may hover around the same area.
I’m not sure you will be able to do the same with just computers: there have been many efforts to create digital characters, but always with a talented actor to voice and incarnate them: Smaug by Benedict Cumberbatch and too many to list by Andy Serkis. I can’t think that it’s an accident people pick talented actors to do so—and I doubt AI will be able to reproduce that talent well soon.
Crowd simulation (what a lot of the actual debate with SAG is about)? Definitely.
For example, you can use George Washington's picture in a logo without paying any money to the Washington estate.
Wikipedia cites a California case from 2008 which held that Marilyn Monroe's likeness is no longer protected.
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268691
I sympathise with the strike, but I think it's misguided to think they can win against AI. If AI ever gets good enough to replace writers or actors, then someone will make a ton of money doing that. Maybe in Hollywood this will be blocked by unions, but someone somewhere will not have these restrictions.
Maybe, but I think SAG more than anyone else knows this, which is why their union rules are so strict. "Global Rule 1" is their rule that states that, if you are a SAG member, you are not allowed to work anywhere in the world without a SAG-approved contract. Similarly, if you are not a SAG member but work during a strike, SAG permanently bars you from joining the union.
Sure, you can argue that some other place in some corner of the world may start up to get around these rules, but that's a very, very tall order to then import those movies into places like the US without a huge amount of backlash.
Filmmaking is still mostly a relationship business, and even with AI actors and writers it's hard to see that changing.
I'm not sure about that. The power that Hollywood once had to create and promote stars is fading. This is why we see them endlessly trying to milk sequels and franchises, and why very old movie stars like Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford are still hot.
If people still want to watch Tom Cruise in an action movie in 20 years, they will have to rely on AI. Whether it will be Hollywood providing that experience or not remains to be seen.
What they're not realizing is we'll soon be at the point where AI-generated actors are created out of whole cloth - they won't resemble any existing people.
Eventually (in 20 years let's say), people won't care.
Get on the train or don't.
Additionally, AI could always be more improved for the script-writing use case.
Actors need a unique combination of assets: they need to have the right looks, the right voice and the right skills. That makes them expensive.
But with AI, we can combine one person's likeness with another person's voice and another person's acting, and use this to create new virtual actors.
Finding someone who merely looks good and is willing to sell their likeness will not be hard. Even that might not be necessary, since AI will soon be able to generate photorealistic human models that aren't based on anyone in particular.
What if I am a shareholder (I am, through ETFs) of Netflix and I disagree with this? Shouldn't I be allowed to discuss and criticize the action?
The second it affects them, now it's real, now it's "OH this shouldn't be legal". Those people lack empathy.
Borderline psychopathy in my opinion.
That is just 100% wrong. It is literally a major point of contention in the demands of SAG and big reason they went on strike.
Will the SAG put a cap on actor's compensation? What makes an AI job worth inherently less than acting?
I'm trying to encourage thinking a bit more about the circumstances at hand. Hot air criticism is useless an so is economistic (or, Luddite) bargaining. The issue is at the root of how our society is organized. In short, new technology should benefit all of society equally because all new technology stands on the shoulders of all working people and their ancestors.
AI generated performers seems like a good idea. You can see the impact the passage of time has had on shows, e.g. Stranger Things. Why should a franchise be limited by the ability of a star actor to continue looking the same age decade after decade and eventually have to stop because the actor has aged out or just flat out died?
This is a ridiculous non-solution that has never really worked in practice. At best, it might revise the legal/PR strategies of the corporations and enables even more dishonesty on the part of various nonprofits who ostensibly "support" a related cause. More often, it's simply a big fat waste of effort.
Historically, organizing labor to withhold labor power to win political power for working people is in fact the only strategy that has actually worked. This is not what the actor/writer guilds are doing, though. They are merely bargaining for economistic industry-specific measures, not the political interests of working people as a whole.
> As Actors Strike for AI Protections, Netflix Lists $900,000 AI Job
How are those even related?
Ok, get a good lawyer and write that into any future contracts.
Obviously this will only work for household name actors, but for everyone else it really doesn’t matter. We can already generate faces that are unique [1]. All that remains is deep fake tech getting good enough to take an image like this and apply it to a 1-3 minute scene in a film.
Think of any scene that has many people in it - a bar, a classroom, etc. The audience’s attention is is usually only focused on the main characters, but you still need a lot of other people in the scene to make it feel authentic.
This tech will replace those people.
The studios don’t want to sign such a contract. And so the actors are withholding their work until they do, among other conditions. Crossing the picket line, no matter how big an actor you are, will have you expelled from SAG, and when studios eventually sign whatever deal they do with SAG, any non-SAG actor will be barred from working with studios, based on the exclusivity contract that’s been in every deal since 1960.
One side will win. Based on history, it will be SAG.
We don’t need luddites to fight for creating artificial jobs.
Millions of people enjoying their content will disagree. And I'm not even talking about completely transforming content streaming industry.
I'm generally in solidarity with labor, but clauses in a labor contract limiting the use of AI in an industry seems kind of insane and unsustainable. Is there any historical analog in the US labor movement?
That's my understanding of why they're striking.
The problem is the writers have zero leverage. We just came out of a time of huge overspending on content where we all have thousands of hours we still haven't watched. Adding AI is on the rise and the writers may never get back what they had pre-strike. Similar thing happened last time which led to the rise in reality TV.
AI issues notwithstanding, I do think you make a valid point that over the past 10 years we just binged on a huge amount of content. For workers it's a double-edged sword. I read somewhere that there are actually a lot more members of the union (can't remember if it was writers or actors) than 5-6 years ago because there are just a lot more people working in the industry - a lot more content was being made. The downside is that with all this extra competition there is a glut of supply and thus prices (i.e. wages for actors and writers) have fallen pretty substantially.
And yeah, 0% rates made it dirt cheap for companies like Netflix to churn out a new series every single day in some cases. Studios other than Netflix and Amazon are probably happy for rising rates and the strikes to pause the insane amount of content spend that has occurred over the last decade. Obviously the writers and actors are going to get hit in this reset.
I’m willing to bet all my money that a savvy startup will log all your keystrokes and train an AI model on all the code you’ve ever written - for your employer or otherwise - and create an AI agent that can code just like you. You will no longer be needed.
And it will be far easier to implement than an AI actor.
All of it will happen within 10 years. Which, as far as job security goes, isn’t a whole bunch of time.
1. I write very little code myself these days, and I'm pretty certain that LLMs are a very long way off from doing my type of science.
2. The type of code that LLMs can automate today is, to be frank, a waste of human capital anyways.
3. Good. Programming is a bottle neck for a lot of efforts that would substantially improve the human condition. Freezing software engineering at 2023 is weird and regressive.
I'm all for upending wage-based employment and huge parts of financial capitalism. Luddite labor movements aren't the way forward.
It's not like famous enough to be mass-recognisable actors are getting paid to be extras anyway, and why would you bother to copy someone unknown's likeness when you can just have your AI generate something new anyway? And I'm not convinced you'd want recognisable extras, it'd be distracting wouldn't it? And detract from who your actual stars are when they don't have more of a part?
If I'm a background actor, of course I want to get paid to be in multiple movies instead of just getting paid once to serve as AI training data.
Plus, many famous actors started out in bit background parts, and there is a valid fear this is "pulling up the ladder". Brad Pitt's first movie role was as an uncredited waiter in the 1987 film No Man's Land, for which he was almost fired trying to ad lib a line (i.e. to "upgrade" his part to a speaking role).
Actors will be involved in 99.9% of productions, and people will always be involved. Are they in union with those actors?
I don't think it's at all obvious a significant number of the rest would care never mind want to strike on their behalf. We're not even talking just about properly famous 'made it' actors, we're talking about anyone with a speaking part, or just more of an obvious or interactive role... It'd be like software engineers (from nobody in particular like me, to big recognisable names) striking over office cleaners' fear they're being replaced with Roombas.
That’s my understanding of the strike anyway.
But film companies were requesting jobs that included "we take a comprehensive copy of your likeness as an 'AI' whatever, and pay you for ONE DAY of work, and then instead of hiring you we just use that likeness in perpetuity, for the rest of time, and you don't get a dime for it"
That just doesn't make any sense IMO. It would be equivalent to a song writer training a LLM on just a single artist's songs and refusing to pay any sort of licensing or royalty.
Plus, this is exactly the type of thing that really union solidarity (or legislation) can prevent. AI still needs people as input. People can very rationally say they don't want to give it to them if it means it will destroy their livelihood.
> Am I the only one who genuinely doesn't "get" the AI component of the actor strike?
and that blaming "AI" for not being able to make a living as a working actor is kind of a red herring.
There are still people who shoe horses, of course, but not as many by probably a couple of orders of magnitude.
I don't want to seem callous toward actors in particular, but why are they more important than farriers? Hand weavers? People whose job was to pick up buckets of raw sewage from the backs of houses?
But parts of it are quite simple.
One thing they want: The actors want to be paid residuals for their likenesses.
Right now, if you want to make Breaking Bad, you have to pay Bryan Cranston for months of filming. He has to be on set, he has to hit marks, remember lines, sit for hair and makeup, etc. Everything that is involved in creating a filmed product.
What the studios want to do is pay an actor for a day's worth of work, scan them, perform some motion capture, do some voice work, then be able to use that digital representation in perpetuity. Feed that data into ActorGPT and get years of films and shows out of that data. And never have to pay that actor another cent.
Another thing they want: Be paid streaming residuals. Streaming has made things more complicated for everyone in a lot of ways. The old system was easy enough to grok. You made a show. You put it on air. Sponsors bought time during your show. You could sell a syndication deal and sell even more commercial time from your show. You could sell physical media of your show. You could track that data.
Then Netflix came along. I think originally, Netflix paid NBC/Universal a flat fee to be able to host The Office for a set number of years. There's effectively no residual on that. And the streaming model is a bit different. Most services don't have ads. And those that do, I don't think they're geared towards individual programs (yet). They're just sort of algorithmically inserted. So really, you're looking to where someone's $12.99 is going. What they're trying to do is determine what percentage of a streaming service's revenue should be paid back to the creators of the content. And what percentage of that percentage should everyone get.
But the various streaming services don't really release that data.