Justine Bateman's Fight Against Generative AI in Hollywood
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It really makes it hard for me to support her position when this is what she opens with. AI makes people feel like artists too, but that's evil and greedy because they're not artists and they can never be!
I get wanting to protect people who choose to make art their livelihoods, but the idea that AI is bad because it empowers others to feel creative? That is maybe the worst possible argument against it.
>In the days after the Sudowrite pile-on, those who had been helping to test its novel generator huddled on the Sudowrite Slack, feeling attacked. The outrage by published authors struck them as classist and exclusionary, maybe even ableist. Elizabeth Ann West, an author on Sudowrite’s payroll at the time who also makes a living writing Pride and Prejudice spinoffs, wrote, “Well I am PROUD to be a criminal against the arts if it means now everyone, of all abilities, can write the book they’ve always dreamed of writing.” It reminded me of something Sims had told me. “Storytelling is really important,” he’d said. “This is an opportunity for us all to become storytellers.” The words had stuck with me. They suggested a democratization of creative freedom.
https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-viral-ai-writer-chat...
I snorted air out of my nose when I read the argument of "AI democratizes art" since from my perspective everyone can learn art without AI. But finally I started understanding what it means.
AI democratizes art. Not away from artists, but away from people who think like Justine Bateman.
They're going to gatekeep the hell out of Hollywood. I'm okay with fighting, hard, against AI in the context of cloning/deepfaking. But generative AI in itself (I realize there are other concerns there, but on a different tangent)?
And while it's a little ad hominem, and she's certainly a better actress than I... Justine Bateman? Family Ties? And then what, a few extras/cameos on a few shows? The absolute steaming turd that was the American version of Men Behaving Badly? I'm not sure she should be gatekeeping the definition of "gifted artist".
When AIs can be emancipated, this whole argument changes. But until then it's people trying to have their cake and eat it, too (greed, as you say).
For example, trees terraform the ecosystem they live in.
Hollywood unions will "win" the current round of fighting simply because AI is still in its infancy and pretty much useless for scriptwriting, generative audio/video and similar tasks. The moment it crosses that threshold, no amount of campaigning or lobbying is going to help. Audiences ultimately care about the final product, not the details behind how it is made.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-finals-uses-ai-text-to-speech-be...
It lets them add voice lines to the game almost immediately at very little cost. There's some debate over how good the results are but personally I wouldn't have been able to tell it was AI generated if I didn't know ahead of time (here's the game's trailer for reference).
Hell, TikTok videos are full of text-to-speech voiceovers, it's built into their platform.
That being said, that trailer of the announcers does seem like much better quality voices.
The Luddites may have failed in their day, but there's a good case to be made that they were right:
https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-f...
No, I really don't want to spend a week's salary on a T-shirt.
> Really it was a political fight over who was going to use the spoils of profits from machinery.
Ok, take the counter-factual at its face and ask the question: if the Luddites got their way and they (the weavers, etc.) shared in the spoils of automation, what exactly would their contribution have been? If all of the weaving is automated then what the heck does a weaver do? Own shares in the company? Do they just get promoted to vice president by virtue of having formerly been employed as a weaver? How will their input be more valuable compared to that of a more qualified person hired for the role?
> Adam Smith is arguing if we all behave with high degree of self interest, that will actually improve the economy in the long run. This was the first beginnings of the real embrace of free-market capitalism.
Said as though this is either wrong or detrimental when free market economies have time and again proven that they lift more people out of poverty than any other type of economy.
> [The Luddites] tried to bargain with the factory owners [arguing for minimum prices, a textile tax to support workers pensions, or phased introduction of new machines]
Excellent, price fixing, that has always worked perfectly in the past and never had any unintended and severe consequences. Which workers exactly are the beneficiaries of this textile tax, the people replaced by automation? Does the tax end after they are employed in a different career or after they die of old age? How slow would progress have been if we put legal limits on the deployment of new technology? Would anyone even bother to invent new methods if they couldn't use them?
> producing crappier goods
God forbid that poor people should be able to afford a second pair of pants.
> I think there is one big difference: a lot of the jobs that are going to be outsourced are actually not working class at all. They are healthily middle-to-upper class, and often white collar.
Hmm, hang on a second...
> The truth is that the Luddites were the skilled, middle-class workers of their time.
You need to pick one, working class or middle class.
> So the real conversation for anyone seriously trying to grapple with this is how to share the profits.
Not by redistribution. Automation reduces cost of production and increases volume which means both that the company makes more profit but also that the goods and services can be sold at a lower price which benefits everyone. The massive difference this time is that this is software that anyone can, or will soon be able to, run. Everyone will eventually profit from this automation both through increased access to these services as well as through the ability to use this automation in your own business endeavors. If the author truly wants more people to be able to live like the weavers described as:
> had a fair amount of control to work from home. You controlled your own schedule. Some led fairly leisurely lives; working only four days a week was enough to make a pretty good living.
Then they should be advocating for universal access to this new technology because it will enable exactly that for those who seek it.
Technology also allows us to make more efficient use of the resources we have which is effectively the same as having more resources to use. Future technologies may literally provide access to more resources by extending our reach beyond the Earth or by allowing us to transmute abundant elements into rarer ones that we need.
Less technology is what limits us in the long run.
The thing that is discouraging to me is that the young buck who can bootstrap something based on fundamentals is going to get outgunned everytime by someone who is better positioned.
After all, we have the technological capability to easily copy and send around the world infinite copies of digital media. But copyright still exists, and while one could argue that modern tech has been a big blow to the movie making business, lots of movies are still made and they make money, despite the technological capability that makes marginal copies cost $0.
To clarify, I'm not stating an opinion about whether copyright is "good" or "bad" or overbroad in some way (pllllleeeeaaassseee don't make this a debate about pros/cons of copyright). But I am making the argument that copyright was essentially invented to protect against technological changes making creators obsolete, and the body of copyright law largely worked in that regard.
The AI argument is part of the usual problem - creative and original interesting new work isn't rewarded because it isn't guaranteed to make easy money.
In fact if given the chance, some of it would. A lot of modern(ish) classics barely made it through the gatekeeping, which suggests an even larger of likely classics didn't.
Ai will lock that down further, so there will be less and less chance of a product that isn't homogenised, risk-free, market-tested, lifeless, corporate anti-culture.
Existing production houses can also use this to improve their output as well of course but they'll have to actually take a risk on doing something new rather than Avengers 1-100
This is only true with the additional proviso “on the battlefield”, which also demonstrates that the consideration was pragmatic based on the utilities of the available alternatives, not ethical.
Japan made frequent use of mustard gas and Lewiste against the Chinese.
Germany used poison gas to slaughter millions of people in concentration camps. They also used chemical weapons in the Black Sea battles against the Soviets, killing thousands. (The canonical reason given by the OSS for the Nazis not using chemical warfare against U.S. and British forces is that Nazi army logistics in continental Europe relied heavily on horse-drawn transports, and chemical warfare would have inflicted more damage to their own logistical capabilities than to Allied forces.)
I really don't want to watch AI scripted and filmed movies. I really really don't. Even if it got so good I couldn't tell if it was real or Memorex.
I agree with you. I want to watch stuff that was created by an artist, created to say something, a piece that has meaning to be communicated and for me to receive.
And AI generated media is definitely not that. It's a pablum that is bespoke generated for mt core demographic to get me to stay on-channel and be potentially influenced by implicit and explicit advertising to buy the licensed merchandise. Which is why I don't want it.
But also, most of the stuff that Hollywood makes even without AI is this soulless machine for selling T-shirts of Grogu from Star Wars wearing an American NFL team jersey. That's a real thing I've seen, on a person, in the wild. Someone bought that.
My one hope for AI generated media is that it will release real, living people from making that sort of garbage. It will become a fire hose of junk all compartmentalized into one place: the big, existing production companies. And I will then have a much easier time identifying and ignoring it.
Modernism is a conservative ideology that says that everything has a place and is going towards a plan. Post-modernism is a radical ideology that deconstructs modernist ideals and demonstrates their inherent hypocrisy or inequity, declaring the system absurd in the process. Post-postmodernism acknowledges the problems of modernism, but in turn criticizes post-modernism for becoming nihilistic in response.
The modernist creates a lemonade stand. The post-modernist destroys the lemonade stand because the stand (can only exist in a capitalist system of exploitation|is blocking development of a highrise|whatever politics today justifies destruction of some kids). The post-postmodernist dries the crying children's eyes and shows them how to pick up the pieces of the smashed lemonade stand and make a sick cosplay costume out of it.
Reminds me of a dinner I had with my wife where she ate fried calamari for the first time. I told her it's salmon and she said she loved it. She hated it after I told her it's actually squid.
Of course she didn't turn back time and replace her delight with disgust at point of contact.
2) IF there are many people like you, the media and institutions will do an extremely good job to hide the production process from you-alike. Just like few people know how their food, clothes, or the skincare products they apply to their pretty faces every day are produced. The next generation of you-alike will not know how movies and comic books are produced [1].
[1] As if we know now, haha. How many frames of CGI are done by unpaid interns? I've met someone who actually thinks most Japanese manga are done by one single person.
Unclear how this is pertinent to what I said.
Just how ignorant is this person? Because wow, you'd have to have pretty much zero knowledge of modern history to think this.
Like, just think about farming. A quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that 50% of workers in the US were farmers in 1870, and now it's less than 2%. One guess as to what caused the collapse in agricultural employment.
Cheap oil and the rise of mechanized agriculture that it has allowed. Petroleum products have made human lives immensely better over the last century or so. ...but there are also costs such as climate change and microplastic pollution. How great these costs may be and how they may impact us, that we are only beginning to understand.
By the time my grandparents were children, those days were over and they had to become farmers in Michigan. The family tried to stay in the performing arts but ever-increasing division of labor and modernization made that difficult.
I wish I had seen the days of vaudeville. The scrapbooks are amazing.
But this change may happen comparatively fast - perhaps over 10-30 years. So it might affect people in the middle of their career.
"Tech" has been putting people out of work since we invented the wheel.
Tech has been putting people into non-food-acquiring work since the dawn of technology, by reducing the share of population that needs to work in acquiring if they don't want to starve.
Products applying the latest work in software development to replace software developers and/or accelerate their work are a perennial thing in software development. Engineers generally welcome the latter, except when they don't work, and their main frustration with the former seems to be the cleanup work created when eventually the tool is not enough.
While the generative AI iteration of this process is in its early phase, it is starting to follow the general pattern, with quite a bit of embrace GPT-4 directly, Github Copilot, and other GenAI tools for coding.
Software engineer here.
If I am made redundant by generative AI, so be it.
We may be less than 10 years from sufficient computing power & algorithms enabling even hobbyist-level actors from rendering realistic Hollywood-like televisual entertainment with whatever actors & special-effect they choose, no matter what the law & contracts say.
An underrated, dark/dystopian movie on related ideas is 2014's 'The Congress', starring Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself in the near future, streaming on Peacock & rentable everywhere else. Tip: read/view absolutely nothing about it for best effect.
I remember Max Headroom [0] where the character, essentially an AI news anchor, was played by a human being - with Minecraft-blockiness on the motion capture to make him digital. And also Knight Rider [1], where the car's computer was played by famous actor's voice [2].
And yet today, actors are against the machines playing them. I just think the actors really should have consulted the machines first before they stomped all over their livelihood. Now they are paying the price.
/not trying to pick a fight, and obviously we value people more than machines, but if there is an alien AI that vists us one day, I think this is how they would see the battle.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT
What a strange claim to be opening your case with. Elitist and defeatist at the same time. And patently false: education improves skills much more than it signals existing ones, and it accounts for so much of the variation not only in financial but other outcomes [0]. And just No to the idea that because you represent an artist's union you get to decide who's gifted at art and who isn't.
With the DNA companies selling out lately, this kind of world view feels like the prequel to Gattaca.
And I'm out. She lost me. This is nonsense. The audience decides what is "art" is. If something created by an AI moves an audience, or makes it think, it's art. And all of these things are skills that can be developed. They are not inborn. Yikes. What a terrible representative to put forward.
If your friends are the same, then you might believe that nobody ever got good at anything by sheer force of will - which is itself a talent that some learn along the way.
It's the hare telling us that the tortoise lost the race, only because they have been napping.
There are things in my life I was instantly good at. There are ones where I had to work my ass off. I get equal praise for both and it galls me because people assume that both skillsets required the same effort. One set was a pursuit and the other was a mission. An ordeal.
Wisdom has accumulated from both, but only one of them made me a better person.
Jason didn't peak until well into his 30's. If they don't argue about this it's because Jason realizes that winning that argument will just hurt his older sister more than letting her say stupid shit (when you convince someone their whole life is a lie, it doesn't often go well).
If Muggsy Bogues was born with an average athletic ability, rather than what he was born with, he probably wouldn't have been able to make his high school team.
The reason most professionals are physical freaks is because nobody but those people can get that edge, and professional sports is about finding every edge you can get.
Art (at least since impressionism) is mostly about subjective feelings. Professional sports are about pre-set rules and objectives. You are either a faster or a slower running than Bolt. There is little to no interpretation. Even if your underdog performance against Bolt moved the audience, you still lost the race.
People also differ in how much context they are able to hold in their working memory (which affects debugging more than coding per-se, but still).
While these and other aspects of human cognition are somewhat malleable and subject to improvement through practice, there are limits, and some folks just aren't going to ever be good software engineers, no matter how hard they try.
> [AI can make people] feel like, “they are artists too,” in heavy quotes, which is not true.
> Many people, they’d like to imply that they are gifted at coding by giving the generative AI a solution to that.
In her view, if you create great art, a great video game, a great piece of software—or really anything at all I suppose—with the help of AI then you're a fraud and you should feel bad. I guess a bunch of people had similar thoughts when artists (yes, artists) started making music with computers without even knowing how to read sheet music or play a musical instrument, but look at all the creativity that came out of that.
Nobody is born anything.
Nobody is born a slave, a criminal, a prodigy, a prophet, an athlete, an intellectual, an iconoclast, etc..
Every moment a person is born is an opportunity for us to be surpassed or ashamed.
What a disgusting gatekeeping statement.
The only thing people are born anything as are maybe royalty, which is an entirely different disgusting enterprise.
Maybe I am channeling too much OnePiece 1096.
Identical twins separated at birth can have vastly separate outcomes. Nurture >>> nature pretty definitively.
Next thing I notice, someone is gonna post a gwern style response on IQ ridiculousness.
How cursed it must to be so growth oriented with a fixed mindset.