What Hollywood’s AI tussle portends for the rest of us
LAST week, thousands of unionised Hollywood screenwriters slammed their Macbooks shut and went on strike, bringing TV and movie productions to a crashing halt.
The fallout between the writers and their overlords revolved around pay increases and protection from artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) had wanted a prohibition on AI generating any literary or source material. Any writing credit would have to be attributed to a person, it said.
On both pay and AI, employers told the union to take a hike down Burbank Boulevard.
Other white-collar workers toiling in fluorescent-lit jobs might be tempted to play the world’s smallest violin for writers in sunny California. Even so, cubicle-dwellers everywhere are headed down their own version of Burbank Boulevard. Some are hurtling down it faster than others, and Hollywood is a harbinger of what awaits other kinds of jobs.
A prime space for the scythe of AI is one where the wage economics are already unfavourable. Today, streamed TV show seasons are half the length of broadcast ones, and more writers at all levels are working for minimum industry wage than ever before, even as industry profits have ballooned.
Perception matters as much as numbers. Writing in La La Land has long been derided. “Your only competition here is idiots,” one screenwriter told a friend in 1925 when urging the latter to come out west. Another wrote in 1996: “Everyone in the business thinks he or she can write, if only time can be found.”
This is not unique to Hollywood. Every sector has their own version of the ambulance-chasing lawyer, for whom skill and prestige are assumed to be de minimis.
Sometimes, the lack of regard is understandable when the finished product is increasingly commoditised – exhibit A being the 10 films in the Fast & Furious series, which can be condensed into a montage of sliding cars and screeching brakes.
This brings us to another risk factor for replacement by AI – low stakes and low standards for output. Exhibit B: the more-than-US$6 billion that the Fast & Furious franchise has made. There is ostensibly a market for interchangeable car-chase montages.
Writers might have ceased work last week, but AI marches on. ChatGPT is already able to generate storylines, scenes and dialogue. Early efforts are flawed but improving exponentially.
As AI gets better at doing other jobs, the only things slowing down its encroachment elsewhere are high stakes (diagnosing a disease) or high standards (Stephen Fry’s audiobook narration of the Harry Potter series).
These bulwarks can hold for only so long. Already, Apple has launched a catalogue of audiobooks narrated by text-to-speech AI.
In June, Fry’s peers will doubtless be paying attention when SAG-AFTRA, the union for actors and voice actors, begins contract negotiations. Another clash over AI usage is bound to take place then.
The impending skirmish begs a desperately existential question for everyone else: will we ever be able to draw a line between man and machine?
Ironically, TV writers might have provided an inadvertent answer to this question. In HBO’s Succession, the fictional media mogul Logan Roy was not referencing AI when he uttered the following, but he might as well have been: “Nothing is a line. Everything, everywhere is always moving. Forever. Get used to it.”
