Strike! just in time to welcome our robot overlords
I support the WGA members who are now on strike. They have chosen a dangerous moment to do so, with robots waiting in the wings to take their jobs, studio executives must be thinking to themselves. But, then, any worthy executive knows the bots aren't quite there yet.
The writers aren't striking over AI, but they're also looking for some rules on AI in the negotiations.
The strike is about writers responding to a decade-worth of producers' schemes to avoid paying them. The usual.
The dispute is unfolding as a new technology has appeared on the scene with the potential to take workers' jobs. What's unusual is that we're talking about writers, here. It's a scenario previously known only to science fiction, that a kind of "artificial intelligence" can perform most writing tasks relatively easily. While we haven't had an entire movie written by an AI yet…
I provide the links just for reference. I am in no way endorsing the idea that you should watch this five minute or something movie "written and directed by" an AI. It's easily as terrible as that implies; so, no worse than most student films. But there's little to recommend it, although the bizarre camera moves that the AI supposedly asked for are rather amusing. Could this be an elaborate joke? Well-executed, if so, but not nearly funny enough.
The short film is an argument between three family members as they watch a news report. The top story is that rogue AI has taken over the world and humanity is at an end.
From the article: "According to [a producer], while AI still has ways to go in terms of creativity, it can indeed supplement human efforts by reducing months’ worth of writing into a couple of minutes." Emphasis mine.
The producers of the short film collaborated with the AI—it was a back and forth that generated many ideas; the team picked the ones they liked the best. That's not the same thing as "a robot wrote and directed the whole thing" but it's as near as makes no difference as it relates to the future job of the writer.
This is a real of-the-moment problem for the WGA. On the one hand, the Guild is due an updated contract and what they're asking is reasonable. On the other hand, if the strike goes on for any length of time—as historically these strikes have done—there is nothing stopping producers collaborating with AI and moving forward thinking maybe, this time, they really, truly don't need the goddamn writers anymore. Halle-fucking-lujah. A ChatGPT-like bot trained on a massive written corpus including screenplays could absolutely shit out a workable screenplay with a little help from a producer friend, potentially turning months to minutes. Now.
There is a moment when I am trying to think about AI where my thought processes kind of brown out. My brain gets fuzzed with activity and I can no longer find my way through. I know nothing in that moment.
The subject of the nothing that I know is What happens next? Once AI can be used to create entire photorealistic movies—from where we are today, for those looking closely at developments, just a small hop away, a matter of a handful of years—then what? It's one thing to think Then what? for the movie business, but I'm on to thinking more on a larger scale. This generation of AI—the large language models, the chatbots—is not sentient. But that's seeming increasingly beside the point. ChatGPT doesn't need to achieve self-consciousness to end the writing profession as we know it.
That's where my mind goes opaque. Supposing it's able to do that, really, what won't it do? There is a growing chorus of worry, like a black cloud on the horizon.