Reminds me of how elevators originally had operators, until everyone realized how wasteful and silly it is to have someone whose sole job is to press elevator buttons. As AI improves, we will come to feel the same about writers.
Elevator operators were replaced by very complex computers with many redundant censors.
You had elevator operators for safety not convenience...
Similarly you seem to have the common misconception that the purpose of a writer is to churn out random text which can be replaced with LLM vs building a coherent story and guiding it through the creative process in support of the other people involved.
The writers strike was primarily about streaming having terrible residuals and while they were striking they took back the inputs into AI from studios which makes sense given writing has always been for a particular project.
In the future, script production and revision will still occur via committee, but the actual writing will not be done by humans.
If you can't get started doing grunt work writing you have to get started somewhere.
But at this very moment, AI generating anything suitable for something other than SEO blogspam isn't possible anyway. It might be right around the corner, or it might be "right around the corner" like self-driving cars were in 2015.
LLM's spit out derivative nonsense. Highly convincing nonsense, but derivative nonetheless. Any true originality in the output still comes from the human engineering the prompt.
Basically, LLM's know how to follow the rules, color within the lines. A real artist understands those rules well enough to break them and create something novel.
Attempts to rigorously study the relative creativity of LLMs have already found them more creative than average humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-40858-3
They're only getting better, fast.
If you're not convinced, what GPT4-level (text or multimodal) or Midjourney-level (imagery) models have you tried, and how much?
I think filmmakers like Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere All at Once) are where Hollywood should be focusing their attention, and their sweep at the Oscars this year has me cautiously hopeful that at least a few people in power are paying attention.
This is what I see as the problem. Hollywood needs to stop relying so heavily on derivative goop and give actual creatives more leeway in creating something original.
You can only ride old IPs for so long before people lose interest and stop buying tickets, as Hollywood has been learning recently. You need people coming up with fresh novel ideas if you ever want to come up with the next big thing.
Some executive asking Chat-GPT to spit out a new Marvel movie script isn't going to do that.
This idea that AI cannot be creative but humans can is something that begs for a test; and that test needs to be applied against humans, as well. If AI can pass it at least as often as humans can, then AI is at least as creative as humans; within the bounds of that test.
As it happens, an AI has recently passed such a test[0].
0: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/14/1079465/ai-just-...
I don't see why you couldn't have an AI do the same, by training it towards a particular aberration in output until that became something it understood well.
That doesn't seem like the right cause, since it's the people who seem most concerned with seriousness and economic efficiency who still have elevator operators today.
“Stores trying to make their customers feel like a wealthy person” are a special case. It might be economically efficient (i.e. profitable) for them to spend money on things associated with extravagance and wealth, in order to more effectively create an image in their customers’ minds and thus attract more customers. But those circumstances don’t apply to the vast majority of elevator owners.
So what exactly is your point?
There's no purpose to many forms of media if it doesn't have a human author (besides making money, of course). You're describing content "grey goo" here. I'm not sure why anyone should feel positively about such a development.