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Previous
revolutions that mechanized the labor force tended to disproportionately hit
the working class.
Here’s the news:
History doesn’t always repeat itself.
article here
“This time the
robots aren’t invading textile factories or threatening blue collar workers on
assembly lines,” says Jeremy Fuster at The Wrap. “In 2023,
they’re storming executive and creative suites, going after educated, white
collar workers, what used to be considered the most protected class.”
Ironically, in the
near future, the employees with the most job security in Hollywood may very well
be the ones who work with their hands, like key grips, electricians and craft
service caterers.
“The rest of us
will have to learn to either somehow adapt our current jobs to the new AI
matrix or — more likely — start looking for other occupations,” Fuster says.
That’s a doomsday
scenario but other views are available.
“I think some
people in Hollywood are panicking unnecessarily,” Ben Grossman, founder and CEO
of VR/AI studio Magnopus, tells Fuster. “But there are a lot of others who look
at AI and say, ‘Well, great, this is an opportunity for me to actually make it
home in time for dinner for a change.’ Because the demand for content is so
high right now, a lot of people are working seven days a week.”
“There’s a lot of
fear of the unknown,” agrees Scott Mann, co-founder of AI startup Flawless and
director of Fall. “People are frightened of new technologies. But AI has
the potential to actually strengthen Hollywood. The industry has been suffering
for a long time, but AI could be the solution that saves it. It could be the
tool that empowers and enables us all.”
In a three-part
look at “AI and the Rise of the Machines” The Wrap delves a little
deeper into the implications for Hollywood.
Practical Magic
The first part
of the series examines the implications of ChatGPT on flesh-and-blood
screenwriters. Most don’t seem alarmed.
“I mean, is it
possible that we would one day see a film that was entirely written that way?”
ponders Sera Gamble, showrunner for Netflix’s You. “But the technology is
not there yet.”
Gamble and other
writers see AI as a potential helper or a tool to help game out plot points in
ways that would otherwise require countless hours of human toil.
“It won’t come up
with amazingly original story leaps, but it is helpful to just lay out the most
obvious story path so you can tweak from there,” former Amazon and Disney
executive Roy Price posted on Twitter.
Elsewhere, the
University of Southern California’s Entertainment Technology Center, or
ETC@USC, s working on an AI tool that allows content creators to extract
features of the content to speed editing.
“Right now, when
you shoot a bunch of content, someone has to sit in front of the rushes and tag
certain moments,” explains Yves Bergquist, director of the Center’s AI and
Neuroscience in Media Project. “We’re making videos searchable by shot types,
emotional arcs of the characters, scenes, objects, talent and colors. That
should really help producers go through the content a lot faster.”
It’s a time- and
money-saving win for everybody involved in the film production process —
except, of course, for the someone who’s currently getting paid to sit in front
of rushes and tag moments the old-fashioned way.
“I mean, there’s
not going to be no impact,” Bergquist admitted. “There will be impact in a lot
of jobs that are very menial, that don’t involve super-high technical knowledge
or super-high creative ability. Probably these jobs are going to take a hit.
But I don’t think there’s going to be much job displacement. People are just
going to need to educate themselves and ramp up on how AI can help them.”
What about actors —
should they be worried about an entirely new synthetic star taking over
Tinseltown with no on-set tantrums? Or perhaps they could benefit from sending
in their digital twin to preserve their looks on screen when the real thing
wrinkles with age.
“People are
starting to have those conversations,” says Grossman. “It’s conceivable that in
the relatively near future… you could have a famous actor like Michelle Yeoh,
and you train an AI on how she looks, how she acts, what she sounds like, and
then give guardrails around what her performance should be. That’s what
everyone is working towards.
“Right now, it
makes more sense in the metaverse and the gaming world because the bar for
quality is so high in film and television. But soon we’ll have a level of
quality that could be applied in a TV commercial or a movie. Without doubt,
that’s going to happen.”
Screenwriters and
Actors Guilds Respond
Part two of The
Wrap’s report takes a closer look at how the industry’s labor guilds are
responding to automation.
Duncan
Crabtree-Ireland, national executive of actors union SAG-AFTRA, believes that
if proper guardrails are put in place, AI can be a benefit rather than a threat
to its members.
“We definitely
recognize that there are real risks to jobs, but past history has shown that
resisting technology or pretending it doesn’t exist or hoping things don’t
change doesn’t work,” he said. “We need to be ahead of the curve and have a say
in how this technology will be used.”
The Writers Guild
of America, meanwhile, has made AI part of its recently-started contract
negotiations, though such talks are mostly to protect members from a point in
the future when AI programs like ChatGPT become powerful enough to generate a
full script.
The Screen Actors
Guild plans to secure those protections by enforcing already existing federal
and state laws as well as rules within its own contracts with studios regarding
fair use of media and artists’ consent.
In a statement,
SAG-AFTRA declared that AI performances based on an actor’s voice and/or
likeness fall under the guild’s jurisdiction, and per the National Labor
Relations Act, studios wishing to acquire the rights to recreate an actor in AI
must negotiation with the guild.
“In addition, any use
or reuse of recorded performances is limited by our collectively bargained
contract provisions, including those requiring consent and negotiation of
compensation,” SAG-AFTRA added.
“If a company
decides to start licensing or using AI content based on a performer’s work as
part of training datasets for AI engines, then there’s a whole broader social
question going on about what that means. Even copyright owners have deep
questions about that,” Crabtree-Ireland said.
“One of the reasons
why I have a good deal of confidence that we will arrive at the same conclusion
with the studios on this is that principle applies just as much to them as it
does to us,” he continued. “They don’t want other companies scraping the
internet for content created by the major studios and using that as part of
training datasets for AI to create other content outside of their systems. So
really, the copyright rights that are sort of a key part of this and our
contractual rights are very much aligned.”
He continued, “As
long as our members are armed with knowledge of how they can take advantage of
this new tech and how it can exploit them, AI can be a net positive for actors.
This is just the next step of what we’ve always done in this guild, and that’s
keep up with the times.”
The WGA wants to
ensure that studios “can’t use AI to undermine writers’ working standards
including compensation, residuals, separated rights and credits.”
As part of the
proposal, the WGA would permit studios to suggest to writers that they refer to
AI-generated writing when writing or rewriting a script, but that AI writing
cannot be used as the core source material for an adaptation to “create
MBA-covered writing or rewrite MBA-covered work, and AI-generated text cannot
be considered in determining writing credits.”
David Goodman,
current negotiating committee co-chair at WGA, told The Wrap that he
believes copyright concerns surrounding AI are a major concern for studios and
believes that is a major reason why there hasn’t been an attempt yet to try
using AI in a screenwriting capacity.
“AI has to
read human-made work to understand how to write in a specific style or like a
specific author, and most of that is copyrighted. Outside of our own response
as a union protecting writers, trying to greenlight a project with an
AI-generated screenplay would be an easy target for several lawsuits,” he said.
“But for us, our
members have told us that they want this addressed immediately, and it’s
already in our MBA that scripts have to be written by a WGA member. That still
stands, even with artificial intelligence.”
The third part
of the series looks at AI’s implications for journalists.
Will AI threaten
the core of our news-gathering culture, which already has been challenged in
the past two decades by the Internet?
“Journalists and
especially publishers of journalism need to know what AI models are good at
doing and what they’re bad at doing,” says Jeremy Gilbert, the Knight Chair in
Digital Media Strategy for Northwestern University’s Medill School of
Journalism. “They are bad at facts. They are bad at math.”
Assuming the
technology is better trained on journalistic output and accuracy, generative AI
could be used to create different versions of an article depending on the
reader’s individual needs and preferences.
“There are clearly
ways that journalism can’t be using AI because it cannot be depended on yet to
act like a real journalist,” said Sisi Wei, editor-in-chief at The Markup.
“But that doesn’t mean there aren’t many exciting and extremely helpful ways
that journalists can use AI as a part of the journalistic process.”
Based on the quotes
a reporter has and the kind of story it wants to tell they could, for example,
direct a large language model like GPT-4, the latest version of OpenAI’s
artificial intelligence model, to churn out a longer or shorter version, a more
linguistically complicated or simpler version tailored to individual users’
needs. This would enable often complex topics like technology and politics to
become more accessible to people.
While Wei said she
doesn’t trust AI to generate articles for The Markup — or even for
low-stakes writing like automated Little League game articles — she noted that
it can be used as a good brainstorming partner.
Even though
journalists need to keep in mind that not all the information churned out might
be correct, the reporter may find one or two of the suggestions interesting and
then ask for some well known experts on those topics.
“I think there’s a
lot of researching that it can do in a very conversational kind of way and then
it’s up to you to go validate that information and then actually go do your
real reporting after that,” Wei said.
