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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?