I haven't followed this close enough to know, but I assume that writers will use AI heavily. It's a great tool for brainstorming and creating drafts.
Yeah, from a high level that is the question. Will the writers use AI or will the studios? Is AI a tool to make the writers more efficient or is it a tool the studios will use to replace writers. The writers generally have no problem with the former, but they wanted protection from the latter.
They will do it the very first second they think that they can get away with it without major consequences (such as profit loss from bad AI writing).
For example, a writer will often write a treatment of a movie which is effectively a short summary of a movie that is done before writing a script. Sometimes different writers will do the treatment and screenplay. This is generally the distinction you might see in "Story By" and "Written By" credits in movies (although these distinctions can and often are a lot more complicated). One likely goal of the studios is for an AI to write the treatment and then hand that off to a writer to turn it into a screenplay. That is one of the most practical ways AI can be used since treatments aren't an end product themselves and the AI's flaws can be corrected by humans when translating the treatment into a script. However, that is still effectively replacing writers by taking away one of their clearly defined jobs and in turn one of their paychecks.
If a studio thinks AI can genuinely do a better job than human writers, that studio has the right to replace those human writers with AI. The human writers likewise have the right to refuse to work with any studio that does so. The fact that no studio has even hinted at taking this route during a 5-month-long strike suggests that no one believes AI would actually do a better job than WGA members.
Eventually, given enough investment, yes it could.
Because in context of the current generation of "AI" , i.e the ChatGPT cohort, all that it's doing is "given a very large number of examples of this text, generate one more that fits the prompt". It's nothing without the training data. And the training data is the output of people's jobs.
If you called it "distributed plagiarism" would that make the problem with the idea that AI replaces the need for the writers more apparent? It can not, but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution, as it's further from the end product.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/chatgpt-stocastic-parrot/
https://apnews.com/article/openai-lawsuit-authors-grisham-ge...
The same applies to the DALL-E cohort of image generators:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-letter-urges-publishe...
so do you not claim that a student learning off textbooks or teachers are also doing "distributed plagiarism"?
> but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution
assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee, or was using material that was publicly available to be learnt off, the contribution is already paid for.
There's no possibility of a royalty payment with AI generated content.
No, these are not the same. A student has mental faculties that ChatGPT does not. The understanding-free predictive text processing of ChatGPT is the whole deal of that software. A student does not require 10 thousand textbooks as examples in order to understand a concept. Students do exhibit originality and reasoning that is not in the training data. You should not equate them.
> assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee
Why would you assume that, when the links provided make it clear that this did not happen?
If you removed all of humanities writing and language and raised a million ignoramuses it would be quite a while before you got Shakespeare v2 centuries at minimum.
Make the AI pay taxes, sleep 10 hours a night, and start off with thousands of dollars in student debt, then we'll talk.
If there was ever a company that needs to take that money invest it back into the kind of artists and work that made them such a powerhouse in the first place, it’s Disney. But, instead, they’ll pay out this money to some execs friend with a BS AI startup to procedurally generate another shitty Marvel or Star Wars thing.
Increases in efficiencies will still make people redundant. Automation means less people are needed. I dont think even the most optimistic executive thought you could get rid of writers entirely.
1) AI is used essentially to generate grift/chaff, like marketing material for your actual work, or self publish dumb get rich quick books
2) AI is utterly repulsive to the creative process as it cuts out the actual passion-building part, which is brainstorming and drafting— editing is usually the shittiest part of the job actually
The Artist's Oath:
AO0: I have used no AI
AO1: I have used AI in a research or teacher role
AO2: AI has been used for structural components, but not the art itself
AO3: AI has directly assisted in the creation process
AO4: AI generated this entirely from a prompt specifically engineered by a human
AO5: AI generated this entirely from a basic prompt
Slightly expanded thoughts and a few examples: https://cohan.dev/the-artist-oath/
The thinking is that once established creativity unions could specify at what level of AI they will accept, and for what compensation.
You could also stamp an [AO2] on the box/website as you would the content rating.
At the individual level as an artist you can specify the level you use for a work, and someone commissioning you could specify at what level of AI they'd accept.
The rating would be per-project, however the draft includes the addition of an asterisk [AO2*] indicates "and I've never used AI beyond this point in my art", and a + would indicate "however as soon as we reach sapience I welcome our new AI friends into the universe of creativity" :)
Would love to see what smarter people than I can come up with!
For the record I agree with you that current gen AI is just another tool to be used. I even use photoshop and digital art as my example when this comes up too :)
A lot of folks don't see it that way though, hence they are striking. Just want to bring about clarity as to what people want in a way everyone can have an easier reference point :)
E: also in fairness they do stamp the products they use in the realm of TV and movies. It's in the credits usually towards the end where you see all the Dolby, Arri, THX, etc logos. I'm almost certain I've seen the Blender logo in a a non-buck-bunny film somewhere at least.
Most people may also not care about the ingredients in their food, but that doesn't take away the right of others to know what's in their food. If you think it would make no difference, what's the harm? Not even giving people a choice while claiming to know what they want seems fishy to me.
And art isn't just product. It's human communication, it means different things to different people, and "who made it and why" is part of that. You don't have a right to my attention and respect just by producing (or stealing) the same output as someone I care about. The stuff that can be quantified is not the stuff that matters.
So while I doubt this is going to become a standard in how artists present their work, and certainly won't be accepted as any kind of "Artist's Oath", there is some merit in helping communicate the choices made during the creative process.
Chances are I've come at it from a far too technical standpoint for sure, it's not too far off looking like Geek Code haha
Also, it's doubtful the rating would carry through to the final product since it would be likely used for intermediate products used in the final movie/art creation, which is a different market than the end user viewer.