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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Never in human history have a group of people successfully resisted technological innovation in their industry and been better off for it. The more you resist change, the harder you will eventually get disrupted. Thinking that this basic truth doesn't apply to you because you are special or "creative" is just hubris.

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.

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We're already starting to see this in video games. An upcoming shooter is using AI text to speech for the in game "announcers" and voice actors are not happy.

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).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_HX5JyT18o

Text-to-speech for audio in videos has been a thing since Flash animations on Newgrounds (I know, I made a few myself).

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.

> Never in human history have a group of people successfully resisted technological innovation in their industry and been better off for it.

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...

>but there's a good case to be made that they were right

No, I really don't want to spend a week's salary on a T-shirt.

The modern defence of the Luddites is that they didn't want to destroy the machines forever, it was just a protest tactic.

A few gems from the article:

> 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.

Honestly this whole article makes me feel Luddites were actually proto-socialists, even if they hadn't figured out exactly how they wanted things to work instead.

More technology does not magically create more resources.

It doesn't magically create them but it enables us to access resources that we couldn't previously use. Examples: nitrogen fixation, use of fossil fuels which for all their side effects have inarguably lifted billions out of grinding poverty and starvation, nuclear power that provides carbon free energy exceeding all of our current needs should we choose to use it, better mining technology to extract metals and minerals from lower concentration deposits, photovoltaics that give us direct access to the abundant power of the sun, aluminum is impossible to produce or use without technology, hydrogen, synthetic fibers to replace inefficient organic ones, clean electric light that literally gives us more useful hours in the day. The list can go on.

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.

You are listing things that had great marginal improvements but giving people knowledge of the topic doesn't give someone even close to the ability to do those things. Its a precursor sure but if someone doesn't have a great deal of scrap aluminum and equipment you aren't going to start producing ingots. Ok probably there is someone bootstrapping just that on youtube but youtube is a hard paywall so I'm not sure who gets a point on that one.

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.

You've never benefited from aluminum let alone any of the other things listed?

That's not really true, at all.

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 final product is usually a mediocre cash-in with plenty of CGI and cardboard plots and characters.

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.

AI is quickly unlocking studio quality production for individual creatives in much the same way that authors can now self-publish, anyone with an iPhone can create rather stunning photographs and video, independent artists can create and distribute incredible digital art, music and animated CGI films, games, etc.

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

Even the bad guys resisted the temptation to use chemical weapons in world war 2, and I think everyone was better off for it

This is an interesting counter point and a good reason to avoid absolute statements... however, unfortunately, the threat of chemical warefare, and other means of mass and indiscriminate killing and suffering, are very sadly still with us to this day. We aren't really out of the woods and it seems like the biggest detterant so far has been the threat of greater destruction.

> Even the bad guys resisted the temptation to use chemical weapons in world war 2,

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.

Chemical Weapons were used during WWII...

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.)

> Audiences ultimately care about the final product, not the details behind how it is made.

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 think there is a platonic ideal of what media should be, versus a reality of what it actually is, that is at play here.

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.

The name of that ideal is in this case postmodernism. AI is the ultimate postmodernist.

Actually, no. The ideal is a modernist one. The reality is postmodern. My vision is post-postmodern.

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.

> Even if it got so good I couldn't tell if it was real or Memorex.

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.

I have no illusions that I will, at some point, watch something 100% AI. I'm saying I don't want to. I want to know it was created by a human. To me, that means something.

There will still be substantial effort required on the part of humans to deliver compelling films using AI.

1) There are not that many people like you.

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.

> 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.

Total guess but this may be their best hope. Assume the most favourable scenario for future AI, with it being more or less able to replace actors. What do the Hollywood actors have? The prestige of Hollywood and tradition. Their best hope may be defending the value of the traditional cinema brand, asserting it means human actors and then convincing the consumers that human actors are better for whatever reason. I think there are quite some examples of people making an apparently materially inferior choice because of cultural values.

Human actors do not choose Hollywood. They know this. They made The Truman Show.

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