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- 🎬 The Actors Strike Begins
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😮 Hollywood actors go on strike
🤖 AI may kill us, but it can’t write bangers
🍿 AI Kernels
Hollywood Actors Go On Strike
"This aggression will not stand, man."
Welp, Hollywood actors have confirmed they’re going on strike.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) were super excited about their “groundbreaking AI proposal”. But the proposal sounds like it’s right out of a dystopian TV show (cough cough Black Mirror).
“This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”
Ok even us AI nerds over here think that’s a little screwed up.
The use of generative AI has been one of the major sticking points in negotiations (and of course a major issue in the writers strike as well). This is the first dual strike in over six decades.
“They’ve recognized, as writers have, that the studios have broken the business and are calling the studios to account,” one showrunner told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t point out how much money these CEOs make to shame them — though they should be ashamed. We point it out to demonstrate that these companies clearly have money. They just don’t want to give it to writers or actors.”
“If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” said SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher. Today, the acting world is saluting the former star of The Nanny. “The. Fucking. Nanny.” said Writers Guild of America board member Liz Alper.
The SAG-AFTRA strike officially started July 14 at midnight.
“AI May Kill Us All, but It’ll Never Write a Good Movie,” writes John Lopez
John Lopez, a a writer/filmmaker whose credits include Seven Seconds, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and The Terminal List, is a member of the WGA’s AI working group. He has a lot to say about AI.
“Screenwriters were suddenly said to be candlemakers in a world that discovered electricity,” wrote Lopez. “So the WGA empowered its nerds. Meeting over Zoom early in the morning before going to our day jobs, those of us in the working group studied all the different LLMs and tried to figure out what studios would want to do with them. In short, we tried our best to game out how AI would change our industry, for better and for worse.”
Lopez wrote that it “became abundantly clear that writers were the canaries in the coal mine […] This is the moment that defines how AI will reshape society—and who benefits.” He explains that it was easier to figure out the math behind AI than the legal implications. When can you copyright output from a machine? Who owns the data? Etc.
Lopez spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a writer, what the difference is between a human writer and ChatGPT. The quote below is too good to try to paraphrase.
“So what is it I do when I write? For starters, I don’t read the whole history of human text. Nor am I powered by gigawatts of computing power. (Though I do need coffee.) If raw processing capacity and the ability to ingest vast gobs of data were the keys to artistic creation, how does Shakespeare still stand up? Why isn’t every English professor topping the New York Times bestseller list? Could it be that there’s a stark difference between drawing inspiration from others’ work and mindlessly mimicking something I once read? The former demands intent and meaning; the latter is a parlor trick. As a working writer trying to keep someone’s attention, I must figure out what I want to say, and why.
Because writing is communication. Writing is connection. A writer makes their thoughts echo in another’s head. Whether it’s poetry, ad copy, or emails to your mom, good writing resonates with its audience. Even in something as pragmatic as a screenplay, a writer conjures a “vision” in someone else’s head, enlisting their imagination to make it real.
All that matters is what you want to say. Everything else is style. (Yes, LLMs excel at copying others’ styles, but when it comes to saying anything that matters to you, why speak with someone else’s words?) Whether it’s a dick joke, an action sequence, or a yearning silence between lost souls, a writer—any artist, really—adds something meaningful to their work: themselves. That’s how we “transform” what we’ve “learned.” We add meaning. Our meaning. However advanced they become, LLMs will never know about truth or meaning. (And if they somehow start to, then the chances of them killing us all will skyrocket.)”
It’s good to remember AI is not human.
It has no experiences to write about, no funny childhood stories, no first kisses.
Until that happens, I’m not worried a bit.
AI Kernels
Here’s a round-up of interesting news and stories that caught our attention this week:
Make music with a simple text prompt. I tried this out and it’s insanely good. Go give Splash a try ASAP. → Splash Pro
Stability AI releases sketch-to-image tool Stable Doodle. Are you a bad artist like me? Turn your bad sketches into beautiful art. → TechCrunch
ChatGPT is losing users for the first time ever. Hmmmm maybe it has something do with students being out of school… → Futurism
AI-Themed Content of the Week
Every week, we’ll hit you with a piece of content centered around AI.
It might be a book, movie, whatever.
Today we’ve got an Elementary School Class Photos Full Of Students Who Are All Macho Man Randy Savage.
Thank you Reddit.
