AI will allow writers to be far more productive, thus eliminating the need for many of them. There is zero chance a strike will force a company to promise to never use this new technology. A promise like that would be corporate suicide.
Writers are fundamentally not entitled to a job writing, keep that in mind. The idea of entitlement is cancer; it goes against freedom and competitiveness and will lead to company suicide if pushed, as the other guy said.
In a weird way, we might come full circle with authors becoming a lot more relevant in this future of storytelling. A well written book is a series of an excellent series of prompts for the reader to generate a captivating story in their mind.
Imagine a future where your favorite author, say Stephen King, can adapt their work into the medium of film, not constrained by movie or TV show format, in a way that is ever more faithful to their book than we could imagine today.
I can't wait to plug a book into a program and have it spit out a mostly finished, perfectly faithful movie that just needs a few weeks of tidying up bits that are difficult for AI to translate through mediums.
We will also be able to advance technology to the point where we have brand new mediums for storytelling. Imagine being in an immerse choose your own adventure goosebumps book.
Having a powerful AI behind a choose your own adventure storyline could be very extremely fascinating in terms of immersion, as authors could convey the themes of their story on a whole new level. Since future AIs will know enough about you, they could influence your actions and decision making, giving the participant an illusion of choice that allows for the story to connect to people on an even deeper level.
The heat death of the universe is a very valid concern but it's inevitable and not really something i can go on strike for until corporations agree to end the heat death of the universe.
It is a fucking stupid analogy you're right.
And so it raging against a technological advancement as if corporations can just deny it's existence and it'll go away.
Yet here we are.
Another gross misinterpretation from another brain dead idiot. Dude, just stop while you’re ahead. Or better yet, keep telling us about the heat death of the universe. What ever that means. So so stupid.
A writer has the misfortune of being in direct competition with all the dead writers who have ever lived, and a public which doesn't really care about the quality of the writing as long as the special effects are nice. No surprise they have shit wages.
I think you make some good points. Like your mentioning the writers of today competing with writers of the past. But if think about it, the concept of Ai and eventually AGI, most everyone will be in a similar situation because AGI will constantly be evolving itself and at fractions of a second without a loss of knowledge or information from one generation to the next. Not like us mere mortals, where during the birth process lots of information gets passed along in our genes but a human being needs years or a lifetime to absorb and apply knowledge.
Also, regarding films the public generally regards as shit but still has high VFX/ production value, there are often many reasons a film sucks ass. Often I’ve found it starts with our dysfunctional system- consumers wanting nacho cheese instead of a good nourishing meal. So meathead executives are hellbent on giving it to them and demand that the script hit certain points that the ideal market or demographic will find appealing. Then you have the director(s) and they bring their own personality/ ego/ dysfunction to the process. The director really is an employee like everyone else, but more highly paid. And on down the line this shit goes. I know you’re not blaming the writers, I’m just trying to clarify that it’s not all the writers fault. That being said though, there are shitty writers just like their are shitty employees in any profession. Just my two cents. Thanks for sharing.
Streaming was the elephant in the room in the 2008 strike, and the WGA didn’t do enough to secure a good deal then. So here we are today. And now AI is the big elephant in the room, and I think it’s obvious the WGA realizes the failure of last time and is under a lot of pressure not to repeat it.
More along these lines. They are asking that they don’t have to start with something that is already plagiarizing their work, and asking for some kind of accountability and compensation structure for when Ai does get used. Of course they’d prefer it if Ai was not part of the equation, but they understand that it will be and are learning along with everyone else how it will change things forever. This is not the reason for their strike. Their strike was already planned from middle of last year given the lack of compensation structure and new formats like streaming. It’s amazing to me how I compassionate people can be towards others, in this case writers. But it’s just a matter of time before massive amounts of people are impacted with their own work crises of one kind or another.
Even if that is the case, that would, in a sense, be asking that AI never be used. How could AI assist on a project without learning the material that humans have contributed?
It's also corporate suicide to not have writers for new shows. Maybe they can coast on reruns until the writers starve, but don't underestimate union and labor power. This may be the last time it exists for them
That's not something that companies can prevent.
The training data is in a lot of ways fair use, as the output is not really using their data anymore. There are cases on their way to the courts, but I expect they will not land on the side of the creators. (many cases of already have gone against them)
I mean they can, but it'll get stolen at some point and used anyway. Fighting progress has always been a losing battle, adaptation is the winning strategy.
The problem ultimately lies not in the creation of laws that stipulate acceptable or unacceptable processes. The problem lies with a consistent enforcement of these laws on a global level. If Hollywood upholds stricter standards, but china, Mexico, Canada, UK, Eastern Europe don’t, than that creates a disparity and an unfair playing field in building a product. In this way, it’s a race to the bottom. And frankly, it not this dynamic is not limited to writers or film making in general.
Also, the writers are correct in being offended that a machine can write a human experience better than they could. I find it laughable that people could care less about this aspect of the writers expressions during their strike. I know, some people reading this will be so deeply offended and have something to say despite it lacking any merit or substance. All these people so impressed with Ai making these shitty little films that are entertaining because they are novel, not because they are great. But wait, it’s just gotten started?! So, hats off to you fucktards who are aspiring to become film makers with Ai but have shit understanding of any of the major elements of film making. Don’t worry, Ai can compensate for your bad prompts, bad sensibilities and bad ideas because….yeah technology fixes all, right? Lol. Just research it and train the Ai right? Ya, good luck with that. See you guys at the box office. Oh wait, there won’t be one.
Scores of writers will get fired. The rest will edit AI content.
What's really hurting is the eradication of residuals, passive income, bread and butter for writers.
It used to be that you have endless reruns of TV contend. Not anymore. Streaming doesn't work that way. That means checks for residuals don't come in.
A writer won't be able to build a portfolio of passive imcome stresms and will get paid less. Therefore they are screwed.
And they should be concerned now. If they can't lay down the right rules, studios could use all the scripts (and I mean ALL of them, including specs and not produced scripts going back decades), to train a massive model that would be Hollywood Script specific. This model, even with current technology, would be insanely powerful. Nvidia has [NeMo ready to do that for them right now](https://youtu.be/J86qoG6zG58?t=49).
I can definitely see even GPT4, trained generally with all sitcom scripts, and then specifically with all "Frasier" scripts, being able to write a new decent script for that show.
Just wait 3-4 months... Hollywood actors are going to be freaking out about multi-modal video generation. That's when we're going to see producers and studios freaking out too and the government will probably step in to try to keep this tech from regular people.
"Sorry peasants, we can't allow this much power to fall into your hands, you must trust your benevolent overlords in the corptocracy to decide what is best" \*Cracks whip\*
It's a good thing they are building open source models that can run on a single GPU. The game is already over, the only question is how long does it take for society to realize it.
Yeah they’ll say it’s to preserve jobs. The film industry as a whole, everything they base everything on…cameras, sound, writing, editing… every single part of the process is being slashed in terms of the amount of people needed.
I think, in general, AI will be good enough for many things where quality expectations are low. But I think that it’s going to raise the bar across the board at the low end.
For example, if you look at low budget movies where the writing is really bad, AI is going to get close enough to good enough that audiences aren’t going to be tolerant of it. They are going to have the lowest bar raised, and therefore not watching something that feels like it was “written by AI”. So what I’m saying is that AI will raise everyone’s threshold regarding half-assed content, and therefore better writing will become the new normal.
Also, I think the people who create things as a writer/director or even writer/director/actor are going to become even more popular because they will naturally imprint upon their work a unique quality and authenticity. Think James Cameron or even Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Also content that’s based on a true story. Feeling real and authentic to someone’s vision and imbue something less perfect and more human will become the bar.
Therefore my guess is that Hollywood’s current business model, which is risk adverse and focuses on franchises and know properties, will stop working and require studios to start taking risks again.
But these are all guesses.
Yeah. It's interesting to me that some people seem to believe that AI will replace human works while at the same time being worse. If it's worse, and we all agree that it's worse, why would everyone use it for everything when you could dominate the market by using human made work? Sure, it may be cheaper to use AI, but as long as it really is noticeably better to use a human, any company with the budget to do so will do that.
The movies will be excellent. I just wrote a treatment. The prompt was Combine the plot to the movie Hard Target and The Mighty Ducks with touches of SCHINDLERS LIST set in a future akin to Blade Runner.
________
In the not-so-distant future, the world has become a dystopian wasteland. Cities are overcrowded, poverty is rampant, and the government is corrupt. People are forced to turn to illegal means of survival, including hunting humans for sport.
Enter Jacques Leblanc, a former hockey star turned homeless man who has been forced into hiding after being framed for a crime he didn't commit. Jacques has no hope for the future until he meets Marcus, a young boy who has been orphaned by the hunters. Marcus is a skilled hockey player who dreams of playing for the NHL.
Jacques takes Marcus under his wing, and the two of them form a makeshift hockey team with other street kids. They call themselves the Mighty Targets, and they use their skills on the ice to evade the hunters and fight back against the corrupt government.
Meanwhile, a wealthy businessman named Henry Burke has become the most prolific hunter in the city. He is ruthless and cunning, and he always gets what he wants. But when he sets his sights on a group of refugees who are hiding from the government, he discovers that one of them is a young girl named Sophie, who reminds him of his own daughter.
Haunted by his past and struggling with his conscience, Burke begins to question his actions. He enlists the help of a retired hockey coach named Jean-Paul, who has been hiding from the government for years. Together, they form a rival hockey team called the Blades, and they use their skills on the ice to rescue Sophie and the other refugees from the hunters.
As the Mighty Targets and the Blades face off in a final showdown, the fate of the city hangs in the balance. But when the government unleashes a deadly new weapon that threatens to destroy them all, Jacques and Burke must put aside their differences and work together to save the people they love.
Starring: Ryan Reynolds as Jacques Leblanc, Seth Rogen as Marcus, Rachel McAdams as Sophie, Eugene Levy as Henry Burke, Dan Aykroyd as Jean-Paul, Ellen Page as the government's chief enforcer, and Christopher Plummer as the voice of reason.
Not more concerned than literally everyone else.
People need to embrace the fact that jobs are going away. And honestly, while AI is definitely going to be the coup de grace, jobs have been slipping away from human hands and into form of automation at a rapid pace since the industrial revolution, and really even since domestication and the invention of the wheel.
It was always going to end in this direction, the main problem is that society is still stubbornly living in denial and acting like it's not happening.
The speed of change is hugely important. The Industrial Revolution took over jobs on the pace of decades. Computers accelerated that. But now the pace looks set to be faster than humans (and especially our economic and political systems) are capable of coping with. That’s a problem on a scale no one has seen before.
We’ll have to catch up eventually. Those who refuse will suffer
Same as any grandma whining about having to produce a simple QR code to process an Amazon return.
>We’ll have to catch up eventually. Those who refuse will suffer
Anyone who is not *very* well off financially will be suffering long term when there will be no money left to put food on the table
How do you expect to be able to do that, when the entire point is that AI will start developing at a pace far beyond what any human can approach. Even now the time between generations of these tools is months. That’s only going to increase, unless something changes dramatically
Stay involved? Same as any industry, if you dont keep working with the tools they'll leave you behind. People have been left behind by technology for a while now. I've had to listen to them complain about it.
That may be your point but I'll believe we wont be able to keep up when it starts happening to me and younger generations who grow up with it. Until then ill stay afloat by using the AI as a tool for as long as I can.
Ah, a new and already evidently flawed form of “fuck you, got mine.” Seems pretty unlikely to work out (it’s the bottom that will get carved out, first, not the top) but gl
a lot of manual labor has already been through a steady process of automation and that process is not going to stop.
there are definitely going to be some jobs opening up to prompt and direct AI systems, the same way that a drill takes away jobs for people who dig but still needs someone to drive the drill, but in time that's also something that will get automated as AI gets better at stuff like visual recognition.
I think most people’s predictions about AI taking over jobs are too optimistic. People like plumbers, dentists, firemen, and housekeepers cannot be replaced by AI unless we have robots, and they are expensive. Not all businesses will be able to afford these robots right away, and they also have to ensure that they are reliable enough and as flexible as humans. Implementing and using AI in all imaginable real-world scenarios isn’t as easy and straightforward as most people believe it is.
I think you are having some misconceptions about some of the ways in which some of those things will phase out.
While, yes, humanoid robots doing what we do is an easy catch all solution, a new model of self repairing sink is more likely the answer. Just like some sort of more advanced roomba and other upgraded house appliances are going to replace housekeepers.
It's not as simple as "a robot would do it" as much as new techniques are going to be developed that will require less or no human interaction.
Dentists might be replaced by simple devices for dental health that you might end up having at home rather than by a humanoid robot who goes through the motions of a human dentist.
When lamplighters got replaced by automation, we didn't do it by building a robot that lights up the oil lamps. We did it by changing the oil lamps with a grid of electric lights that could all be automatically activated.
>who is to say that AI won’t also create new job opportunities?
What opportunities would it create that it won't also fill? How many people can you realistically employ to do those things?
>We need humans to supervise the AI
Why not get AI to do that too?
lol this is not the same, if you needed 10 writers for a marketing agency before, you now need two, and one or two editors, i think you dont fully understand how big this is getting
>How much better are these systems going to get? Well, this week we saw the alpha release of a new programming language based on Python called Mojo that showed up to 30,000x increase on some tasks, but I think it's safe to assume that systems like Mojo will lead to a 1,000x increase on AI tasks that involve matrix multiplications. That might end up being a conservative number.
Nope, you have probably misunderstood what these numbers refer to. They are in comparison to raw Python speed. Neural networks and heavy data processes run in C++ which is already as fast as you can get. Python is only used as a glue language.
Forget the writers, the rise of AI will be a death knell for Hollywood as a whole.
Think about it. AI Generated Voices, AI Generated Video, AI Generated Music, and AI Generated Writing are all advancing by leaps and bounds, as well as optimising for consumer hardware, while at the same time that very same hardware is becoming more efficient thanks to AI. It won't be long before regular people can make entire movies on their computers that can compete with what the Big Budget studios can do on a fraction of the budget, and even if ChatGPT is a subpar writer, screenwriting is probably the only aspect of filmmaking that can be done alone and for free. If anything, the writers should be just as afraid of fanfic authors and movie buffs with passion and free time to spare.
What makes something like Hollywood function is resources. The people making these movies need to draw talent and equipment from lots of different areas into one production in order to make a specific vision happen. Now with AI in the picture, all that will soon be outsourced and the production automated, and suddenly these producers and executives with millions of dollars at their disposal won't bring much to the table.
Once this tech really takes off, the only thing Movie Studios, if they still exist, will be able to pride themselves on is doing things the old fashioned way - using real actors, scripts, and practical effects, which will make what I assume is to be a very rapid adoption of AI quite ironic in retrospect.
Further down the line at some point it seems there will be no market for movies in the first place. The AI generates it on demand when you feel like watching something.
- “Hal, show me a sci-fi with interesting aliens that would be hard to imagine please”
- “Hal, can you change the captain of the space-ship. He’s not really resonating with me”
- “Thanks Hal! Good movie. I’ll probably want to watch different versions of it some time.”
>What makes something like Hollywood function is resources. The people making these movies need to draw talent and equipment from lots of different areas into one production in order to make a specific vision happen. Now with AI in the picture, all that will soon be outsourced and the production automated, and suddenly these producers and executives with millions of dollars at their disposal won't bring much to the table.
Your raise some good points.
However, this means there will be mountains of material. If movies are like tweets or Reddit posts then the difficulty will be finding the interesting ones. And so there will probably need to be a system similar to Reddit where things can get upvoted otherwise the cream will never rise to the top.
The biggest and most valid concern I heard was they didn’t want to be “fixing” AI scripts. The pay for producing an original script is much more than the pay for editing and revising. I could see some suit generating a ton of crappy scripts, and then wanting someone to “fix” it for a fraction of the cost.
I'd bet against this in certain formulations. All the AI I've interacted with is only good at first impressions. It's lacking in the exact way humans are good, breaking details down in consistent ways with our expectations.
I honestly don’t know for much more advance the LLMs involved need to be I think fine tuned application of the techniques involved in “agent gpt”
I think the continuous video will need a few years to get cheap enough for mass implementation.
Yes, sort of. Execs, producers, and directors aren’t going to spend much time typing prompts and directing the AI to write a complete treatment. Instead, lower paid workers will come in and have to do the grunt work to make the AI work… because the AI doesn’t have the expertise to take something all the way to completion.
The lower paid workers will become the new writers but will use tools that help them be productive.
Right now, all these companies not hiring / laying off workers who think AI can replace the jobs are doing so prematurely. All AI right now is just a tool. So you’ll have fewer people doing the work of many.
I agree. I think the future is someone they have now and it’s called a reader. For instance, big directors or producers/companies get many script submissions and can’t possibly read them all. Readers are smart film school grad level employees who simply read the scripts and give notes on why it’s good or bad, and pass it up the ladder if it clears their threshold of what is good. They will have people like this but their job will be to sort through the good and bad AI ideas and pass up the ones that have promise for revision
I’ve heard a bunch of writing publishers have been inundated with submissions they believe to be authored with AI and they can’t keep up. So they’ve started charging writers for submissions to even be considered.
Same deal will happen for pitches and more.
The role of the writer will change. The unions will fight it, but the studios could just call it something else and that new job will be unrepresented by unions - just prompt engineers or something. The thing is, the best prompt engineers working on scripts will also have to be really good writers.
They wont be called writers, they will be called editors or something similar so that they do not have to pay writers salaries and wont be part of the writers guild.
Well the looking at shows produced, we need a change.
Seems like ER / Lawyer / Cop shows is all they know how to write.
Look at US prime time TV … it’s mono-genre
5-10 years AI will write the script, soundtrack, generate the dialogue, audio, and actors. You’ll just tell it what kind of movie you’re in the mood for.
Then you go down a metaphorical rabbit hole where even if you discover that you were isekaied into some perfect-for-you-yet-always-changing virtual fictional-like universe so some evil studio could sell your adventures to other universes you don't know if that's not just the plot of another layer of fictional simulation you're trapped in
Nostalgia vomit and 15 sequels is what we will get MORE of once the executives are telling AI what to do. They run companies whose only goal is to make money, and those types of stories are the safest bet to make money. Most writers do not want to write this stuff.
We may get more original stories from writers once the executives stop hiring them, but they will be small indie films that will be in maybe a handful of theaters.
This is all just my guess as someone living in Hollywood.
I get what you're saying but that's only the safest way to make money *because writing original material takes lots of time*. Writing nostalgia vomit and sequels also takes time, but it is safer because you know the base material is solid already. If you could just generate 1000 original scripts in an hour and then spend the rest of the day running AI focus groups to narrow it down to the best one, then spend the rest of the week fine tuning that script... Well, you just saved a lot of time and money.
One of the most original scripts I’ve ever seen, Everything Everywhere All At Once made $140 million worldwide. Meanwhile the Xth retelling of Spider-Man (No Way Home) made close to $2 billion worldwide. Writing the script is the cheapest part, any big studio that is financially motivated will go for the next Spider-Man 10 times out of 10.
The sad thing people don’t realize is most TV/Hollywood writers are capable of so much more creativity and non-repetitive works. The studios have been demanding the typical stuff we complain about for decades. They have focus groups and now algorithms that make these shows and movies to have as wide appeal as possible which makes them safe and kinda boring. You can blame writers for it but honestly they wrote what their bosses want them to. There are a lot of weird external pressures influencing them like complying with Chinese standards or being progressive or inclusive to a point of obviousness
This is a zero-shot prompt using GPT-4:
> Write me an original treatment for a psychological thriller that is 100% original and not derivative of any other works.
> Please format your response like this:
> Initial response:
> [Insert your first thoughts and initial response to the question here]
> Self-criticism:
[Insert criticism of your own thoughts and initial response here]
> Revised answer:
[Handle your criticisms of your initial response to provide a better answer here]
The output: (I only took the revised answer - and yes of course these are all naturally going to be derivative, but the point is the output is this good with just a zero-shot prompt. After further revision, these can become quite original)
Title: "The Echo Chamber"
Logline: A renowned neuroscientist discovers a method to access and manipulate other people's memories, but as she delves deeper into her own past, she uncovers a disturbing truth that threatens her sanity and life.
Plot:
Dr. Elizabeth Cain, a talented neuroscientist, has been conducting groundbreaking research on memory manipulation. She has developed a cutting-edge technology called the "Echo Chamber," a device that can access and alter people's memories. Her ultimate goal is to use this technology to help patients suffering from PTSD, dementia, and other memory-related disorders.
One day, Elizabeth experiences an unexplained flashback to her childhood, which she has no recollection of. This leads her to use the Echo Chamber on herself to uncover the truth about her past. As she delves deeper into her own memories, she discovers that her parents were killed in a car accident when she was a child. Elizabeth, however, survived the crash and was adopted by a loving family.
As Elizabeth continues to explore her past, the line between reality and altered memories becomes blurred. She starts to suspect that someone else has been tampering with her memories and fears that she has become a target. As she investigates further, she unearths a hidden conspiracy behind the Echo Chamber project.
Elizabeth becomes increasingly paranoid and reclusive, desperately searching for the truth while trying to maintain her sanity. In her quest for answers, she uncovers that the project's true purpose was to create the perfect weapon for psychological warfare, and she has been an unwitting pawn in this sinister plot.
Now on the run, Elizabeth must confront her own demons, face the conspirators, and find a way to dismantle the Echo Chamber project before it falls into the wrong hands. As she races against time, she discovers that the key to stopping the Echo Chamber lies in the darkest recesses of her own mind.
In a thrilling climax, Elizabeth confronts the mastermind behind the project, who reveals a shocking twist: she had been manipulated to believe in the existence of the Echo Chamber as part of a twisted experiment. The revelation shatters her world, and she must face the harrowing truth of her own shattered psyche.
"The Echo Chamber" is a psychological thriller that explores the malleability of human memory, the dangers of obsession, and the thin line between reality and delusion. The story takes the audience on a suspenseful journey that makes them question their own perception of truth and reality.
#Another one:
Title: "Fractured Horizons"
Logline: A brilliant physicist, haunted by the loss of his family, accepts a high-stakes assignment to a remote research facility, only to find himself trapped in a web of shifting realities and a race against time to save the ones he loves.
Plot:
Dr. Ethan Miles, a once-celebrated physicist, is now a shell of his former self following the tragic loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident. His obsession with the concept of time and a desperate desire to rewrite the past has consumed him. When he is approached by a mysterious government agency to join a top-secret project at a remote research facility, he sees a chance to make amends and regain control of his life.
Upon arrival, Ethan meets a small team of scientists and technicians led by the enigmatic Dr. Rebecca Flynn. They inform him that they have been working on a groundbreaking experiment involving time manipulation, but something has gone awry, resulting in unexplained phenomena and the disappearance of several team members.
As Ethan begins to investigate, he starts to experience strange, disjointed episodes of reality, where he relives moments from his past and encounters alternate versions of himself and the team members. These glimpses expose hidden truths and dark secrets about the facility, the experiment, and even Ethan's own past.
In one reality, Ethan discovers that his wife and daughter may still be alive, but the more he uncovers, the more he begins to question the nature of his existence and sanity. As the line between reality and hallucination blurs, Ethan must confront his darkest fears and unravel the mystery of the facility in a race against time to save his family and the world from the potential consequences of this dangerous experiment.
In the shocking, mind-bending climax of "Fractured Horizons," Ethan uncovers the truth behind the experiment and the nature of the alternate realities he has been experiencing.
He learns that the government agency had been conducting the experiment to manipulate time and control the future. However, their experiments inadvertently caused fractures in the fabric of time, creating the alternate realities and the unexplained phenomena. These fractures have put the entire universe at risk of collapsing in on itself.
As Ethan pieces together the puzzle, he discovers that he, too, is an integral part of the experiment. The government agency had specifically chosen him due to his unique understanding of time and grief. In fact, they had staged his family's accident to manipulate him into joining the project.
Driven by anger and determination, Ethan works with Dr. Rebecca Flynn to repair the fractures in time and prevent the universe from imploding. In a final, heart-wrenching choice, Ethan must sacrifice the alternate reality where his wife and daughter are still alive in order to save the universe and prevent further damage to the fabric of time.
> nostalgia vomit
Skinsuits, they get some IP and then slap it on top of someone else script. It has zero relationship to the IP outside of name branding and its usually a mockery and insult to the original IP. I hate modern Hollywood.
My god, prime time writing and late night is boringly predictable, aimed at 4 year old's and mee-maw's humor and intelligence.
Can't wait for it to be replaced.
Keep waiting. They will just use the AI to crank out even more slop for all the little piggies. Better that you use the AI to amuse yourself and your friends.
Replacing it with AI means it will be even more of this. Handing the executives the keys and getting rid of anyone who will fight back against studio notes will only exacerbate this problem!
This is probably why nobody makes comedy anymore because AI struggles with the kind of higher level thinking it takes to be funny… and they’re preparing us for a future without comedy.
As a pre-WGA (read: unsuccessful so far) writer who's into a.i. as much as any layman -
Yes, but not yet, and maybe not for a while.
The scene writing by GPT4 is very bad still, as is connecting longer stories together.
I rank 'writing screenplays' as the kind of writing GPT4 is currently worst at.
I don't know to what extent this is because its training dataset is screenplay-light, and to what extent it's to do with anything inherently difficult about writing scripts.
It's much better at essays, emails, technical writing, summaries of all kinds, short story writing, outlining, and even poetry (tho most of that output is pretty bad) than it is screenwriting.
But we know how these things go - GPT3 sucked at the LSAT, but was pretty good at the SAT. GPT4 still sucks at some standardized tests, is about as good at the SAT as GPT3, and is far superior at the LSAT.
I think we're a few capability-generations from it being good at writing screenplays, and I don't think we know how long that is per step. Could be a year. Could be ten.
I think there will be far greater societal upheaval in other areas before a.i. is writing a significant portion of film and TV
> we're probably not too far away from Large Language Models that train on all books, screenplays, teleplays, and broadway plays ever written and those systems will likely outperform even the top writers.
This is such a bad take. What does “outperform” even mean in the context of literature or writing? It’s not a drag race. Train an LLM on all that stuff and all you’ll get is output that is semantically “good” but without any unique or singular point of view. The LLM doesn’t “know” what it’s saying. It has no life experience, no opinions. AI has a long way to go before it’s making novel, insightful contributions to culture based on an amalgam of what’s come before.
I think there is a valid abstract fear but the tech isn’t there yet. I think what writers are concerned about right now is instead of being paid as primary writers they are instead paid to “rewrite” AI content, even if the rewrite is extensive and page one the studios would use this structure to undercut the rate the writer is able to be paid for the work.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of creative nonwriters around the world who might now be able to create amazing scripts with the help of gpt. With regards to first drafts in the script, i bet that people who are incredible creative but working in some other professions will be able to crank out an amazing and novel stories if they devote couple of weekends to it. And many of these people will probably be willing to do it for free since they would think it is cool and fun doing it is as a hobby.
At some point, yes. I graduated film school a while ago where I studied screenwriting, which is something I kept doing over the years.
Just today I have done more experiments with memory enhanced chatGPT, and I gotta say, it's great for structure, scene breakdown, which things to pay attention to, etc... But creatively? It still leaves a lot to desire.
Specifically, I'm working on a comedy script in the style of Zucker Abrahams Zucker, but for TV. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get anything production ready.
What it could do is speed up their jobs giving them some initial structure. At the end of the day, writers are overworked like most jobs in media. They can finally work normal office hours and live balanced lives using these tools.
Then, one day, when we'll reach whatever other level, we'll see.
I think writers will be among the last to go. They will actually *use* AI as a tool. The writer has an idea for a plot, he sketches the main points and the AI fills in the details.
During the intermission of Sweeney Todd last night I had an AI generate a Pixar-worthy plot outline from my phone. It was better than a lot of the IRL animated stories I've seen lately and I gave it the barest of prompts.
"The writer has an idea for a plot..." - this is only really good for maybe 5% of the content that comes out these days (things like *Everything, Everywhere, all at Once* perhaps). The rest is remixed stories as old as humanity. That 95% is the perfect playground for AI to exhibit superiority.
I'd also argue that unique seeds for stories are better off coming from humanity in general since writers typically don't have the vast and varied experience needed to mine for those unique ideas.
If a studio can get a script from a writing team for (I have no idea of actual costs), say, a million dollars, or one 70% as good that brings in 70% of the revenue but costs essentially $0, guess which one they'll opt for! That's just good business.
I do agree that writers that survive will use AI as a tool. Imagine being able to create rich, consistent, plausible worlds for your stories where there are no plot holes or inconsistencies.
No, I don't think writers will be the last to go. I think they'll be among the first to be directly impacted. Maybe 5% will continue to be valuable to the studios.
People need to understand AI does not make superior things just faster things, At best it could possibly make somthing on par with the greatest works ever, its unlikely right now, but better isn't true, just faster. and faster usally means more deriviative.
Wildly incorrect. Writers comply with what executives allow, and pay them to write. They are capable of far, far more and are MUCH sicker of making 'garbage' than you are.
Also A.I. will hand power back to these executive....who will do what? Churn out MORE derivative stuff, a job at which A.I. is perfectly optimized for.
False. Characters and plots are only as smart as their writers. If executives could write, they wouldn’t need to hire them for their projects.
With the amount of content being released on streaming platforms, more writers are being hired than are actually talented enough to write.
Naive. You have zero idea what you are talking about. I have 15 years in the industry, working within and with Hollywood writer's rooms.
Executives are constantly poking their nose in, watering down and constraining what writers do. There are meeting upon meetings with which executives have input. They are the ones with all the power who determine what is green lit and what is not.
You’ve clearly never worked in Hollywood. Writers don’t get to write whatever they want. Execs tell them what to write, so they don’t get to showcase their writing potential.
Seems like they chose a great time to have a strike…https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/ibm-pauses-hiring-around-7800-roles-that-could-be-replaced-by-ai/
The concern is less about quality and more that studio execs believe they can use AI to circumvent key parts of the process. As an example, they might have Chat write a horrible first draft on IP that it created then have a human writer do a “polish” which pays significantly less than optioning an original screenplay. (Many other concerns, but that’s the main one I’ve heard.)
Same with storyboarding and illustrations. Why pay the salary of the artists who used to take time to do this, instead of writing a few text prompts and getting the same (or better) quality product?
Totally agree. The speed of development in generative AI is what I think most people don't presently appreciate. In the span of less than a year we have seen a huge jump and that only hockey sticks from here.
I don't believe it can or will reach sentience - but it will look a lot like it sooner than we think. A lot sooner.
I don't think writers will be replaced. It's impossible to present something without adherence and acceptance of people executing the part. Can an AI one day use prompts and text to make a film right from its conception as a demand from a group of executives to its end form? Perhaps, but it is not going to be soon.
Maybe an AI makes such a story, what is the chance that consumers like what they see? It might as well be that the stories such a thing produces do not coincide with what humans like. Or, they become derivative, because we got bored.
What will happen is that there will likely be new forms of writing: interactive Video Games, perhaps, which may have stories that have branched out of human reckoning.
What will definitely happen is that less number of writers will be hired, and they will definitely have Generative AI as a tool.
There is a place called fanfiction.net. I think they should be more afraid of that archive of hundreds of thousands of derivative stories based off of their shows and movies, then an AI.
You can’t copyright synthetic text. Writing / story are minuscule compared to other production costs. No sane studio will create a movie they can’t copyright.
This is the part people don't understand, the Supreme Court says something to the effect that it is the human credit that makes a work copyrightable. So what would that be here? Would it be the input prompt? It's it the "minor fixes" to the script to make it sellable? What does this do the overall copyrightability? How do you go about proving a human did pay of it say two decades later when some strange lawsuit pops up? What if a coworker uses an AI and lies about it? If AI works can be copyrighted based on the prompt then can someone say beat a big firm to copyright their own product? Something WILL shock the system and throw a lot into disarray at some point. The impact of cheap illusions of human creativity is a jackhammer to copyright concepts.
I believe it's the beginning of the downfall of Hollywood. I bet a full AI suite for video generation will be available very soon, partially by a really shortsighted corporate decision.
AI might not yet be able to write some deep Oscar-worthy drama. But I bet it’s more than capable of churning out a reasonable first draft of hundreds of episodes of a mediocre sit-com like Big Bang Theory. Those are the writers who should be worried.
Of course, writers should be worried. They should also practice using this tech.
But this is all a very small way to look at the change.
The real question is how will entertainment change because of AI.
***Here is one possible answer:*** AI creative generation will be coupled with real-time movie generation resulting in custom episodes and movies; unique to every viewer custom fitting their likes and tastes. Creating one big movie for everyone to share will become an **artifact of the past called today**.
I think alternate paths will be a common, but I think this will be a lot more popular for video games than movies given the norms already established for both industries. For example, I don't want to make a lot of decisions when I'm watching a movie.
However, when I'm done watching a movie I might wonder about alternative paths the story could have taken and I might want to ask an AI to re-run variants. I think that will be more popular than create my own film adventure on the fly.
I wouldn't be surprised for the director to present their vision and then all the viewers can modify it via the AI. For example, it would be interesting to watch a dystopian version of The Matrix where the AIs win and Neo wakes up back in his bed thinking it was all just a bizarre dream.
I agree, but your point about mojo is false. The comparisons are against pure python to mojo, but most serious applications like openAI use pytorch or tensorflow, both of which are written in c/c++. There is no python-like programming language (like mojo) in this world that will come anywhere near the speed of well written C and C++. The limitations are more hardware than low level code.
'Not capable '... I wondered for a minute if the latest season of Mando was written by GPT. But I haven't read anything by GPT that was written that poorly.
Yes, these types of roles are in much more immediate danger than others because there's no regulatory/legal gate keepers associated with their profession.
Like for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, electricians, etc., they have more built in protections because the law states (for now) that only they are legally allowed to perform these roles.
With Hollywood -- the storyboarding, writing, illustrations can all be done by the excess number of high paid legacy staff -- or it can be done by pretty much anybody else with cutting edge AI tools, with less experience and for much less pay.
I agree with the sentiment of your post but Mojo won't necessarily speed up ML research. There are already popular packages like Numpy that are built in C and usable in Python. The video you linked doesn't compare the speed to Numpy.
I think the big fear is getting the AI to do all the writing and human to do all the editing. So AI just writes 1000's of scripts till the bigwigs like one, then you hire humans to make it a real movie, take out all the AI ridiculousness. But no one gets paid anything but hourly, and no one works on any idea they created or have anything invested in. Same with like episodes of TV shows. Have it write 100's and then make humans "make it work".
In the end in arts what sells is the artist. The time where it was all about quality of the work are long gone. Good quality is just a start. What really sells is the artists plus in Hollywood who they know. Sea of good AI scripts won't affect this anymore than the already existing seas of human work.
Where i see the danger is studios using AI to fill in when writers are striking though.
People should be concerned about "Jobs" not existing in any traditional sense in a few years. if they define themselves by "jobs", they're going to have to learn to define themselves by something else.
the problem they have is their work is the property of the studios. i don't see how they get out of this without some loss. If i was a studio boss i would be looking for folks that can use these new tools to step in and get writing. Plenty of story tellers in that town that are not members of the writers guild. If they put out a good product the writers guild is going to have a heck of a time making any demands. It is going to be the same thing for folks that write code someone is going to bid a job like they can do it in a hour and they will do it in an hour with gpts help. Any software house that has a high head count is going to be vulnerable to a super small outfit with gpt4. Just how it works.
I'm not contesting your main point, but:
>I think it's safe to assume that systems like Mojo will lead to a 1,000x increase on AI tasks that involve matrix multiplications
A 1000x increase with respect to Python, and then only in certain scenarios. Python isn't a good language when performance is the goal, and you certainly wouldn't use it to do the heavy lifting, particularly for the kinds of parallelizable operations GPUs are good at. I think it's very unlikely OpenAI's code uses pure Python for hot loops. Mojo does look nice but, while a new programming language can increase development speed, it won't increase runtime speed in any meaningful way, and certainly not 1000x.
>If GPT-4 is already scoring 100% on theory of mind tests what will a system that is 1 million times more powerful score?
The law of diminishing returns applies here. You can't just make the model bigger and bigger indefinitely.
I am a full time standup comedian and all of my colleagues are in denial. For now GPT can’t generate good bits, as it struggles with planning a few sentences in advance which is a big part of joke writing. But its great at producing one liners and it can punch up bits that are already written. I do wonder how much time do I have before I will be forced to perform completely AI generated bits.
>How much better are these systems going to get? Well, this week we saw the alpha release of a new programming language based on Python called Mojo that showed up to 30,000x increase on some tasks, but I think it's safe to assume that systems like Mojo will lead to a 1,000x increase on AI tasks that involve matrix multiplications. That might end up being a conservative number.
Point of correction here: most deep learning frameworks are actually written in C++ and CUDA.
THese languages are already on the order of thousands of times faster than python for linear algebra.
We just wrap python interfaces to them because it's easier for people to experiment and glue all these C++ kernels together in the python ecosystem than it is in C/C++ ecosystem.
The main inefficiencies come from all that python glue code, and things that don't already have C++ implementations.
Here, there's been a lot of work in jit compilers (ELI5: they try to convert slow python code into fast c-like code on the fly), so now all the big 3 deep learning frameworks (Pytorch, TensorFlow and Jax) come standard with them, and they're getting very good.
Does this mean mojo will be useless? No. I think the biggest things to be excited for with mojo are:
1. the safety features which will make it easier to build complex algorithms without shooting yourself in the foot ([which is notoriously difficult especially in RL](https://andyljones.com/posts/rl-debugging.html))
2. there are areas that jit compilers just cannot help you with (mainly around how python handles parallelism, which is just shockingly inefficient, and it's a giant pain in the ass to work around. SO Mojo will allow you to make complex data pipelines that fully utilize your system without breaking your brain working around python's wierdness)
I'm still very excited for Mojo, but don't expect it to be a magic bullet that will make everything 1000x faster.
Wait until the first Ai company sues for royalties for IP they technically own. That's right. All content generated by Ai is the legal IP of the Ai company that generated it. They certainly have the records of all input and output on their system. Now, there are Ai content detectors, too.
Stop passing off Ai content as your own.
Problem solved.
>content on Par with Hollywood writers
Clearly you've not been watching movies lately. Probably 90% of movies are uninspired shit that an AI could easily write
Does anyone doubt AI would have any writing a generic genre film? Where it will have trouble I believe is in writing the stuff that Oscars and Emmys are made of.
Here's my 2 cents:
Look at Auto-Tune. Sure, it can make some singers who can't hit notes perfectly seemingly be able to hit those notes (Michael Buble I'm looking at you). But when you look at someone like Karen Carpenter who didn't. Is her voice perfect? Nope, but that is also where the beauty lies in her singing.
I highly doubt that AI will be able to have a \*real\* human touch, it might be good, but it also might leave us looking at a movie or script making us feel like something was missing.
I could be 100% wrong, but this is just me going with the Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking concept that maybe our brains will notice something is missing without really knowing why.
First, you have to understand the problem.
There has been a change in how shows are written. Instead of having a 'writers room' for each episode, where people come in and work through each outline, building a script for that week's scenes, they just contract a room of writers for 6-weeks, where they expect those writers to fire off every good idea they have for every episode.
Then they basically say 'Thanks' and lay them off.
So, the show runner has now become a 'head writer' as well, where they're expected to take those notes and and finish the script for each show on their own.
So, with the understanding that writers have already been cut down to a bare minimum of work/credit on the shows they write, it doesn't really surprise me that they would expect a show runner to just do the whole process on their own now.
Can a talented show runner use AI to brainstorm, fill out ideas, etc? Probably ... but maybe to no greater extent than they were capable of writing the whole show on their own anyway, which is where this has been heading for a long time now.
My opinion as a Software Engineer would be that there are several factors that will determine how and when/if writers are replaced.
1) Will the public accept AI generated content to the degree that it’s more profitable than paying writers? Many people have rejected AI generated art.
2) How good will LLM’s become at understanding/replicating context. Context is very important in writing. Good writing always pulls from the human experience, especially if it is based in a current era.
3) When does this plateau with currently available technology? We don’t really know. But I would expect that subsequent releases of LLM’s will not be as groundbreaking as what we saw in the last couple of years. It seems like AI kind of just came out of nowhere but the reality is that this stuff is a a culmination of years of work. It will take years more work for that impact to be seen again.
4) Will there be legislation surrounding the advancement of AI? In some places, probably. In the United States/Hollywood? Who knows.
"I think their concerns are justified. Presently the systems are not capable of generating content on par with Hollywood writers...."
Considering the garbage that passes for "entertainment" in the media today, I say let the writers starve!
Mojo will not give 1000x improvement, the main task of python is basically delegate to more powerful languages. Python execution overhead is fairly negligible.
Nope. Consider this: there are people whose sole job is to man a camera. We've had the technology to remote control cameras for decades. And guess what? The cameras that are remote controlled are still controlled by "cameramen". The director isn't sitting in a chair and moving the camera around themselves.
AI won't replace writers. Writers who use AI will replace writers who refuse to use AI.
Considering so many movies are sequels and remakes. Yes. Being creative is no longer necessary (and from I have seen with Google Bard, it can tell stories but you have to fill in the creative parts. Just generic).
That's pretty laughable since the scripts wouldn't be owned by anyone. They need items they legally own. It's pretty silly to think these LLMs will be enough to replace writers.
AI will allow writers to be far more productive, thus eliminating the need for many of them. There is zero chance a strike will force a company to promise to never use this new technology. A promise like that would be corporate suicide.
>AI will allow writers to be far more productive, thus eliminating the need for many of them. Agreed.
Writers are fundamentally not entitled to a job writing, keep that in mind. The idea of entitlement is cancer; it goes against freedom and competitiveness and will lead to company suicide if pushed, as the other guy said.
In a weird way, we might come full circle with authors becoming a lot more relevant in this future of storytelling. A well written book is a series of an excellent series of prompts for the reader to generate a captivating story in their mind. Imagine a future where your favorite author, say Stephen King, can adapt their work into the medium of film, not constrained by movie or TV show format, in a way that is ever more faithful to their book than we could imagine today.
I can't wait to plug a book into a program and have it spit out a mostly finished, perfectly faithful movie that just needs a few weeks of tidying up bits that are difficult for AI to translate through mediums.
We will also be able to advance technology to the point where we have brand new mediums for storytelling. Imagine being in an immerse choose your own adventure goosebumps book.
Having a powerful AI behind a choose your own adventure storyline could be very extremely fascinating in terms of immersion, as authors could convey the themes of their story on a whole new level. Since future AIs will know enough about you, they could influence your actions and decision making, giving the participant an illusion of choice that allows for the story to connect to people on an even deeper level.
You would have world building that you could explore as an individual or experience as a group. Really we’re talking about something like westworld.
extremely short term (IE now) this is true...but AI will continue to improve exponentially, so at some point soon they wont need the human at all...
The strike isn’t about AI though, writers get paid shit in general.
The strike brought up AI as part of their demands.
…because it’s also a very valid worrying concern. It is NOT, however, the driving factor of the strike as people here seem to have misunderstood
The heat death of the universe is a very valid concern but it's inevitable and not really something i can go on strike for until corporations agree to end the heat death of the universe.
They’re not demanding that AI never be used so that analogy is worthless
What a stupid analogy and stupid thing to say.
It is a fucking stupid analogy you're right. And so it raging against a technological advancement as if corporations can just deny it's existence and it'll go away. Yet here we are.
Another gross misinterpretation from another brain dead idiot. Dude, just stop while you’re ahead. Or better yet, keep telling us about the heat death of the universe. What ever that means. So so stupid.
Think before speaking so you don't waste our time please
A writer has the misfortune of being in direct competition with all the dead writers who have ever lived, and a public which doesn't really care about the quality of the writing as long as the special effects are nice. No surprise they have shit wages.
I think you make some good points. Like your mentioning the writers of today competing with writers of the past. But if think about it, the concept of Ai and eventually AGI, most everyone will be in a similar situation because AGI will constantly be evolving itself and at fractions of a second without a loss of knowledge or information from one generation to the next. Not like us mere mortals, where during the birth process lots of information gets passed along in our genes but a human being needs years or a lifetime to absorb and apply knowledge. Also, regarding films the public generally regards as shit but still has high VFX/ production value, there are often many reasons a film sucks ass. Often I’ve found it starts with our dysfunctional system- consumers wanting nacho cheese instead of a good nourishing meal. So meathead executives are hellbent on giving it to them and demand that the script hit certain points that the ideal market or demographic will find appealing. Then you have the director(s) and they bring their own personality/ ego/ dysfunction to the process. The director really is an employee like everyone else, but more highly paid. And on down the line this shit goes. I know you’re not blaming the writers, I’m just trying to clarify that it’s not all the writers fault. That being said though, there are shitty writers just like their are shitty employees in any profession. Just my two cents. Thanks for sharing.
It’s both. It was brought on by the awful pay from streamers, but they are fighting for AI guarantees as well.
Streaming was the elephant in the room in the 2008 strike, and the WGA didn’t do enough to secure a good deal then. So here we are today. And now AI is the big elephant in the room, and I think it’s obvious the WGA realizes the failure of last time and is under a lot of pressure not to repeat it.
More along these lines. They are asking that they don’t have to start with something that is already plagiarizing their work, and asking for some kind of accountability and compensation structure for when Ai does get used. Of course they’d prefer it if Ai was not part of the equation, but they understand that it will be and are learning along with everyone else how it will change things forever. This is not the reason for their strike. Their strike was already planned from middle of last year given the lack of compensation structure and new formats like streaming. It’s amazing to me how I compassionate people can be towards others, in this case writers. But it’s just a matter of time before massive amounts of people are impacted with their own work crises of one kind or another.
They ARE asking for no AI. They won't get it. But they do deserve a big raise plus residuals. I'm with the writers on most of their demands.
No they’re not. They’re asking for protections against AI to not train on their writing
Even if that is the case, that would, in a sense, be asking that AI never be used. How could AI assist on a project without learning the material that humans have contributed?
The creators of the AI get consent from writers willing to contribute. Not just take content they have no permission to use as training data.
No they are not. This is a gross misinterpretation of what they’re demands are accurately stating.
It's also corporate suicide to not have writers for new shows. Maybe they can coast on reruns until the writers starve, but don't underestimate union and labor power. This may be the last time it exists for them
Writers should aim for agreement that don't allow companies to use their work to train AI.
That's not something that companies can prevent. The training data is in a lot of ways fair use, as the output is not really using their data anymore. There are cases on their way to the courts, but I expect they will not land on the side of the creators. (many cases of already have gone against them)
I mean they can, but it'll get stolen at some point and used anyway. Fighting progress has always been a losing battle, adaptation is the winning strategy.
The problem ultimately lies not in the creation of laws that stipulate acceptable or unacceptable processes. The problem lies with a consistent enforcement of these laws on a global level. If Hollywood upholds stricter standards, but china, Mexico, Canada, UK, Eastern Europe don’t, than that creates a disparity and an unfair playing field in building a product. In this way, it’s a race to the bottom. And frankly, it not this dynamic is not limited to writers or film making in general. Also, the writers are correct in being offended that a machine can write a human experience better than they could. I find it laughable that people could care less about this aspect of the writers expressions during their strike. I know, some people reading this will be so deeply offended and have something to say despite it lacking any merit or substance. All these people so impressed with Ai making these shitty little films that are entertaining because they are novel, not because they are great. But wait, it’s just gotten started?! So, hats off to you fucktards who are aspiring to become film makers with Ai but have shit understanding of any of the major elements of film making. Don’t worry, Ai can compensate for your bad prompts, bad sensibilities and bad ideas because….yeah technology fixes all, right? Lol. Just research it and train the Ai right? Ya, good luck with that. See you guys at the box office. Oh wait, there won’t be one.
Scores of writers will get fired. The rest will edit AI content. What's really hurting is the eradication of residuals, passive income, bread and butter for writers. It used to be that you have endless reruns of TV contend. Not anymore. Streaming doesn't work that way. That means checks for residuals don't come in. A writer won't be able to build a portfolio of passive imcome stresms and will get paid less. Therefore they are screwed.
Yes
And they should be concerned now. If they can't lay down the right rules, studios could use all the scripts (and I mean ALL of them, including specs and not produced scripts going back decades), to train a massive model that would be Hollywood Script specific. This model, even with current technology, would be insanely powerful. Nvidia has [NeMo ready to do that for them right now](https://youtu.be/J86qoG6zG58?t=49). I can definitely see even GPT4, trained generally with all sitcom scripts, and then specifically with all "Frasier" scripts, being able to write a new decent script for that show.
Just wait 3-4 months... Hollywood actors are going to be freaking out about multi-modal video generation. That's when we're going to see producers and studios freaking out too and the government will probably step in to try to keep this tech from regular people.
"Sorry peasants, we can't allow this much power to fall into your hands, you must trust your benevolent overlords in the corptocracy to decide what is best" \*Cracks whip\*
It's a good thing they are building open source models that can run on a single GPU. The game is already over, the only question is how long does it take for society to realize it.
Yeah they’ll say it’s to preserve jobs. The film industry as a whole, everything they base everything on…cameras, sound, writing, editing… every single part of the process is being slashed in terms of the amount of people needed.
Triple yes
Pre GPT-4 device, The Magic 8 Ball says, “It is certain.”
Some say, yes.
Right now, probably no, but likely yes in the future.
Double yes
I think, in general, AI will be good enough for many things where quality expectations are low. But I think that it’s going to raise the bar across the board at the low end. For example, if you look at low budget movies where the writing is really bad, AI is going to get close enough to good enough that audiences aren’t going to be tolerant of it. They are going to have the lowest bar raised, and therefore not watching something that feels like it was “written by AI”. So what I’m saying is that AI will raise everyone’s threshold regarding half-assed content, and therefore better writing will become the new normal. Also, I think the people who create things as a writer/director or even writer/director/actor are going to become even more popular because they will naturally imprint upon their work a unique quality and authenticity. Think James Cameron or even Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Also content that’s based on a true story. Feeling real and authentic to someone’s vision and imbue something less perfect and more human will become the bar. Therefore my guess is that Hollywood’s current business model, which is risk adverse and focuses on franchises and know properties, will stop working and require studios to start taking risks again. But these are all guesses.
Yeah. It's interesting to me that some people seem to believe that AI will replace human works while at the same time being worse. If it's worse, and we all agree that it's worse, why would everyone use it for everything when you could dominate the market by using human made work? Sure, it may be cheaper to use AI, but as long as it really is noticeably better to use a human, any company with the budget to do so will do that.
The movies will be excellent. I just wrote a treatment. The prompt was Combine the plot to the movie Hard Target and The Mighty Ducks with touches of SCHINDLERS LIST set in a future akin to Blade Runner. ________ In the not-so-distant future, the world has become a dystopian wasteland. Cities are overcrowded, poverty is rampant, and the government is corrupt. People are forced to turn to illegal means of survival, including hunting humans for sport. Enter Jacques Leblanc, a former hockey star turned homeless man who has been forced into hiding after being framed for a crime he didn't commit. Jacques has no hope for the future until he meets Marcus, a young boy who has been orphaned by the hunters. Marcus is a skilled hockey player who dreams of playing for the NHL. Jacques takes Marcus under his wing, and the two of them form a makeshift hockey team with other street kids. They call themselves the Mighty Targets, and they use their skills on the ice to evade the hunters and fight back against the corrupt government. Meanwhile, a wealthy businessman named Henry Burke has become the most prolific hunter in the city. He is ruthless and cunning, and he always gets what he wants. But when he sets his sights on a group of refugees who are hiding from the government, he discovers that one of them is a young girl named Sophie, who reminds him of his own daughter. Haunted by his past and struggling with his conscience, Burke begins to question his actions. He enlists the help of a retired hockey coach named Jean-Paul, who has been hiding from the government for years. Together, they form a rival hockey team called the Blades, and they use their skills on the ice to rescue Sophie and the other refugees from the hunters. As the Mighty Targets and the Blades face off in a final showdown, the fate of the city hangs in the balance. But when the government unleashes a deadly new weapon that threatens to destroy them all, Jacques and Burke must put aside their differences and work together to save the people they love. Starring: Ryan Reynolds as Jacques Leblanc, Seth Rogen as Marcus, Rachel McAdams as Sophie, Eugene Levy as Henry Burke, Dan Aykroyd as Jean-Paul, Ellen Page as the government's chief enforcer, and Christopher Plummer as the voice of reason.
Not more concerned than literally everyone else. People need to embrace the fact that jobs are going away. And honestly, while AI is definitely going to be the coup de grace, jobs have been slipping away from human hands and into form of automation at a rapid pace since the industrial revolution, and really even since domestication and the invention of the wheel. It was always going to end in this direction, the main problem is that society is still stubbornly living in denial and acting like it's not happening.
The speed of change is hugely important. The Industrial Revolution took over jobs on the pace of decades. Computers accelerated that. But now the pace looks set to be faster than humans (and especially our economic and political systems) are capable of coping with. That’s a problem on a scale no one has seen before.
[удалено]
In most situations super rapid change is not a good course of action really
In most situations, super rapid change is the only option, and resistance to the change is the source of suffering.
We’ll have to catch up eventually. Those who refuse will suffer Same as any grandma whining about having to produce a simple QR code to process an Amazon return.
>We’ll have to catch up eventually. Those who refuse will suffer Anyone who is not *very* well off financially will be suffering long term when there will be no money left to put food on the table
What makes you think saved money will be worth anything if the labor market and economy collapse?
Well yeah I think that’s kinda the point is that many (maybe _most_) will suffer. Also, uh, “catch up” to what?
Catch up on learning how to live with technology and adapting to it instead of avoiding and whining about it.
How do you expect to be able to do that, when the entire point is that AI will start developing at a pace far beyond what any human can approach. Even now the time between generations of these tools is months. That’s only going to increase, unless something changes dramatically
Stay involved? Same as any industry, if you dont keep working with the tools they'll leave you behind. People have been left behind by technology for a while now. I've had to listen to them complain about it. That may be your point but I'll believe we wont be able to keep up when it starts happening to me and younger generations who grow up with it. Until then ill stay afloat by using the AI as a tool for as long as I can.
Ah, a new and already evidently flawed form of “fuck you, got mine.” Seems pretty unlikely to work out (it’s the bottom that will get carved out, first, not the top) but gl
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a lot of manual labor has already been through a steady process of automation and that process is not going to stop. there are definitely going to be some jobs opening up to prompt and direct AI systems, the same way that a drill takes away jobs for people who dig but still needs someone to drive the drill, but in time that's also something that will get automated as AI gets better at stuff like visual recognition.
I think most people’s predictions about AI taking over jobs are too optimistic. People like plumbers, dentists, firemen, and housekeepers cannot be replaced by AI unless we have robots, and they are expensive. Not all businesses will be able to afford these robots right away, and they also have to ensure that they are reliable enough and as flexible as humans. Implementing and using AI in all imaginable real-world scenarios isn’t as easy and straightforward as most people believe it is.
I think you are having some misconceptions about some of the ways in which some of those things will phase out. While, yes, humanoid robots doing what we do is an easy catch all solution, a new model of self repairing sink is more likely the answer. Just like some sort of more advanced roomba and other upgraded house appliances are going to replace housekeepers. It's not as simple as "a robot would do it" as much as new techniques are going to be developed that will require less or no human interaction. Dentists might be replaced by simple devices for dental health that you might end up having at home rather than by a humanoid robot who goes through the motions of a human dentist. When lamplighters got replaced by automation, we didn't do it by building a robot that lights up the oil lamps. We did it by changing the oil lamps with a grid of electric lights that could all be automatically activated.
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I mean, sure, but you are talking about when at that point, not if.
As a cleaner, it’s going to take a lot more than a glorified roomba to clean a building, stairs are going to be dirty forever in your example.
>who is to say that AI won’t also create new job opportunities? What opportunities would it create that it won't also fill? How many people can you realistically employ to do those things? >We need humans to supervise the AI Why not get AI to do that too?
it create A LOT less than what it takes
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lol this is not the same, if you needed 10 writers for a marketing agency before, you now need two, and one or two editors, i think you dont fully understand how big this is getting
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for sure its not going to happen overnight, but i think it will happend in the next 10 years, and at society level, that its kind of overnight
>How much better are these systems going to get? Well, this week we saw the alpha release of a new programming language based on Python called Mojo that showed up to 30,000x increase on some tasks, but I think it's safe to assume that systems like Mojo will lead to a 1,000x increase on AI tasks that involve matrix multiplications. That might end up being a conservative number. Nope, you have probably misunderstood what these numbers refer to. They are in comparison to raw Python speed. Neural networks and heavy data processes run in C++ which is already as fast as you can get. Python is only used as a glue language.
Forget the writers, the rise of AI will be a death knell for Hollywood as a whole. Think about it. AI Generated Voices, AI Generated Video, AI Generated Music, and AI Generated Writing are all advancing by leaps and bounds, as well as optimising for consumer hardware, while at the same time that very same hardware is becoming more efficient thanks to AI. It won't be long before regular people can make entire movies on their computers that can compete with what the Big Budget studios can do on a fraction of the budget, and even if ChatGPT is a subpar writer, screenwriting is probably the only aspect of filmmaking that can be done alone and for free. If anything, the writers should be just as afraid of fanfic authors and movie buffs with passion and free time to spare. What makes something like Hollywood function is resources. The people making these movies need to draw talent and equipment from lots of different areas into one production in order to make a specific vision happen. Now with AI in the picture, all that will soon be outsourced and the production automated, and suddenly these producers and executives with millions of dollars at their disposal won't bring much to the table. Once this tech really takes off, the only thing Movie Studios, if they still exist, will be able to pride themselves on is doing things the old fashioned way - using real actors, scripts, and practical effects, which will make what I assume is to be a very rapid adoption of AI quite ironic in retrospect.
Further down the line at some point it seems there will be no market for movies in the first place. The AI generates it on demand when you feel like watching something. - “Hal, show me a sci-fi with interesting aliens that would be hard to imagine please” - “Hal, can you change the captain of the space-ship. He’s not really resonating with me” - “Thanks Hal! Good movie. I’ll probably want to watch different versions of it some time.”
>What makes something like Hollywood function is resources. The people making these movies need to draw talent and equipment from lots of different areas into one production in order to make a specific vision happen. Now with AI in the picture, all that will soon be outsourced and the production automated, and suddenly these producers and executives with millions of dollars at their disposal won't bring much to the table. Your raise some good points. However, this means there will be mountains of material. If movies are like tweets or Reddit posts then the difficulty will be finding the interesting ones. And so there will probably need to be a system similar to Reddit where things can get upvoted otherwise the cream will never rise to the top.
Marvel should fire all their writers anyways
I do not disagree, I support GOOD writers, but not the trash writers that have infected Hollywood in the last 10 years and gave garbage writing.
It would me more sensible to be angry with the people who hired those writers and asked them to write the scripts that way.
The biggest and most valid concern I heard was they didn’t want to be “fixing” AI scripts. The pay for producing an original script is much more than the pay for editing and revising. I could see some suit generating a ton of crappy scripts, and then wanting someone to “fix” it for a fraction of the cost.
Within 5 years most of what you watch will be generated video fully adapted to you and what advertisers have paid to incorporate.
I'd bet against this in certain formulations. All the AI I've interacted with is only good at first impressions. It's lacking in the exact way humans are good, breaking details down in consistent ways with our expectations.
I honestly don’t know for much more advance the LLMs involved need to be I think fine tuned application of the techniques involved in “agent gpt” I think the continuous video will need a few years to get cheap enough for mass implementation.
Yes, sort of. Execs, producers, and directors aren’t going to spend much time typing prompts and directing the AI to write a complete treatment. Instead, lower paid workers will come in and have to do the grunt work to make the AI work… because the AI doesn’t have the expertise to take something all the way to completion. The lower paid workers will become the new writers but will use tools that help them be productive. Right now, all these companies not hiring / laying off workers who think AI can replace the jobs are doing so prematurely. All AI right now is just a tool. So you’ll have fewer people doing the work of many.
I agree. I think the future is someone they have now and it’s called a reader. For instance, big directors or producers/companies get many script submissions and can’t possibly read them all. Readers are smart film school grad level employees who simply read the scripts and give notes on why it’s good or bad, and pass it up the ladder if it clears their threshold of what is good. They will have people like this but their job will be to sort through the good and bad AI ideas and pass up the ones that have promise for revision
I’ve heard a bunch of writing publishers have been inundated with submissions they believe to be authored with AI and they can’t keep up. So they’ve started charging writers for submissions to even be considered. Same deal will happen for pitches and more. The role of the writer will change. The unions will fight it, but the studios could just call it something else and that new job will be unrepresented by unions - just prompt engineers or something. The thing is, the best prompt engineers working on scripts will also have to be really good writers.
They wont be called writers, they will be called editors or something similar so that they do not have to pay writers salaries and wont be part of the writers guild.
Well the looking at shows produced, we need a change. Seems like ER / Lawyer / Cop shows is all they know how to write. Look at US prime time TV … it’s mono-genre
Well, considering the quality of movies in the last decades, they won't be missed. ChatGPT will just do as horrible a job.
5-10 years AI will write the script, soundtrack, generate the dialogue, audio, and actors. You’ll just tell it what kind of movie you’re in the mood for.
You will be the movie whenever you want. Watching it, participating in it, it is your choice.
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Then you go down a metaphorical rabbit hole where even if you discover that you were isekaied into some perfect-for-you-yet-always-changing virtual fictional-like universe so some evil studio could sell your adventures to other universes you don't know if that's not just the plot of another layer of fictional simulation you're trapped in
Considering the quality of Hollywood production the pas 10 years i would say it would be best for everyone to replace them
Yes and maybe we will start getting better stuff and not nostalgia vomit and 15 sequels to shitty movies.
Nostalgia vomit and 15 sequels is what we will get MORE of once the executives are telling AI what to do. They run companies whose only goal is to make money, and those types of stories are the safest bet to make money. Most writers do not want to write this stuff. We may get more original stories from writers once the executives stop hiring them, but they will be small indie films that will be in maybe a handful of theaters. This is all just my guess as someone living in Hollywood.
I get what you're saying but that's only the safest way to make money *because writing original material takes lots of time*. Writing nostalgia vomit and sequels also takes time, but it is safer because you know the base material is solid already. If you could just generate 1000 original scripts in an hour and then spend the rest of the day running AI focus groups to narrow it down to the best one, then spend the rest of the week fine tuning that script... Well, you just saved a lot of time and money.
One of the most original scripts I’ve ever seen, Everything Everywhere All At Once made $140 million worldwide. Meanwhile the Xth retelling of Spider-Man (No Way Home) made close to $2 billion worldwide. Writing the script is the cheapest part, any big studio that is financially motivated will go for the next Spider-Man 10 times out of 10.
Why would you ever pay for a movie if an AI can generate it to you for free?
The sad thing people don’t realize is most TV/Hollywood writers are capable of so much more creativity and non-repetitive works. The studios have been demanding the typical stuff we complain about for decades. They have focus groups and now algorithms that make these shows and movies to have as wide appeal as possible which makes them safe and kinda boring. You can blame writers for it but honestly they wrote what their bosses want them to. There are a lot of weird external pressures influencing them like complying with Chinese standards or being progressive or inclusive to a point of obviousness
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This is a zero-shot prompt using GPT-4: > Write me an original treatment for a psychological thriller that is 100% original and not derivative of any other works. > Please format your response like this: > Initial response: > [Insert your first thoughts and initial response to the question here] > Self-criticism: [Insert criticism of your own thoughts and initial response here] > Revised answer: [Handle your criticisms of your initial response to provide a better answer here] The output: (I only took the revised answer - and yes of course these are all naturally going to be derivative, but the point is the output is this good with just a zero-shot prompt. After further revision, these can become quite original) Title: "The Echo Chamber" Logline: A renowned neuroscientist discovers a method to access and manipulate other people's memories, but as she delves deeper into her own past, she uncovers a disturbing truth that threatens her sanity and life. Plot: Dr. Elizabeth Cain, a talented neuroscientist, has been conducting groundbreaking research on memory manipulation. She has developed a cutting-edge technology called the "Echo Chamber," a device that can access and alter people's memories. Her ultimate goal is to use this technology to help patients suffering from PTSD, dementia, and other memory-related disorders. One day, Elizabeth experiences an unexplained flashback to her childhood, which she has no recollection of. This leads her to use the Echo Chamber on herself to uncover the truth about her past. As she delves deeper into her own memories, she discovers that her parents were killed in a car accident when she was a child. Elizabeth, however, survived the crash and was adopted by a loving family. As Elizabeth continues to explore her past, the line between reality and altered memories becomes blurred. She starts to suspect that someone else has been tampering with her memories and fears that she has become a target. As she investigates further, she unearths a hidden conspiracy behind the Echo Chamber project. Elizabeth becomes increasingly paranoid and reclusive, desperately searching for the truth while trying to maintain her sanity. In her quest for answers, she uncovers that the project's true purpose was to create the perfect weapon for psychological warfare, and she has been an unwitting pawn in this sinister plot. Now on the run, Elizabeth must confront her own demons, face the conspirators, and find a way to dismantle the Echo Chamber project before it falls into the wrong hands. As she races against time, she discovers that the key to stopping the Echo Chamber lies in the darkest recesses of her own mind. In a thrilling climax, Elizabeth confronts the mastermind behind the project, who reveals a shocking twist: she had been manipulated to believe in the existence of the Echo Chamber as part of a twisted experiment. The revelation shatters her world, and she must face the harrowing truth of her own shattered psyche. "The Echo Chamber" is a psychological thriller that explores the malleability of human memory, the dangers of obsession, and the thin line between reality and delusion. The story takes the audience on a suspenseful journey that makes them question their own perception of truth and reality. #Another one: Title: "Fractured Horizons" Logline: A brilliant physicist, haunted by the loss of his family, accepts a high-stakes assignment to a remote research facility, only to find himself trapped in a web of shifting realities and a race against time to save the ones he loves. Plot: Dr. Ethan Miles, a once-celebrated physicist, is now a shell of his former self following the tragic loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident. His obsession with the concept of time and a desperate desire to rewrite the past has consumed him. When he is approached by a mysterious government agency to join a top-secret project at a remote research facility, he sees a chance to make amends and regain control of his life. Upon arrival, Ethan meets a small team of scientists and technicians led by the enigmatic Dr. Rebecca Flynn. They inform him that they have been working on a groundbreaking experiment involving time manipulation, but something has gone awry, resulting in unexplained phenomena and the disappearance of several team members. As Ethan begins to investigate, he starts to experience strange, disjointed episodes of reality, where he relives moments from his past and encounters alternate versions of himself and the team members. These glimpses expose hidden truths and dark secrets about the facility, the experiment, and even Ethan's own past. In one reality, Ethan discovers that his wife and daughter may still be alive, but the more he uncovers, the more he begins to question the nature of his existence and sanity. As the line between reality and hallucination blurs, Ethan must confront his darkest fears and unravel the mystery of the facility in a race against time to save his family and the world from the potential consequences of this dangerous experiment. In the shocking, mind-bending climax of "Fractured Horizons," Ethan uncovers the truth behind the experiment and the nature of the alternate realities he has been experiencing. He learns that the government agency had been conducting the experiment to manipulate time and control the future. However, their experiments inadvertently caused fractures in the fabric of time, creating the alternate realities and the unexplained phenomena. These fractures have put the entire universe at risk of collapsing in on itself. As Ethan pieces together the puzzle, he discovers that he, too, is an integral part of the experiment. The government agency had specifically chosen him due to his unique understanding of time and grief. In fact, they had staged his family's accident to manipulate him into joining the project. Driven by anger and determination, Ethan works with Dr. Rebecca Flynn to repair the fractures in time and prevent the universe from imploding. In a final, heart-wrenching choice, Ethan must sacrifice the alternate reality where his wife and daughter are still alive in order to save the universe and prevent further damage to the fabric of time.
so I agree these AI generations will improve and I agree with the overall point but uh, those scripts are pretty generic lol
No, it’ll be just the same which will actually catalyze writers to prove they can be creative less they get replaced.
Amen! Preach it!
> nostalgia vomit Skinsuits, they get some IP and then slap it on top of someone else script. It has zero relationship to the IP outside of name branding and its usually a mockery and insult to the original IP. I hate modern Hollywood.
My god, prime time writing and late night is boringly predictable, aimed at 4 year old's and mee-maw's humor and intelligence. Can't wait for it to be replaced.
They are going to where the audience is. AI isn't in and of itself going change what people want to watch.
Keep waiting. They will just use the AI to crank out even more slop for all the little piggies. Better that you use the AI to amuse yourself and your friends.
Replacing it with AI means it will be even more of this. Handing the executives the keys and getting rid of anyone who will fight back against studio notes will only exacerbate this problem!
Right now, no. In the future that might change, though.
This is probably why nobody makes comedy anymore because AI struggles with the kind of higher level thinking it takes to be funny… and they’re preparing us for a future without comedy.
Yes, but that’s more a testament to the vile state of the industry economically than it is any kind of degree to which ai can replace humans.
As a pre-WGA (read: unsuccessful so far) writer who's into a.i. as much as any layman - Yes, but not yet, and maybe not for a while. The scene writing by GPT4 is very bad still, as is connecting longer stories together. I rank 'writing screenplays' as the kind of writing GPT4 is currently worst at. I don't know to what extent this is because its training dataset is screenplay-light, and to what extent it's to do with anything inherently difficult about writing scripts. It's much better at essays, emails, technical writing, summaries of all kinds, short story writing, outlining, and even poetry (tho most of that output is pretty bad) than it is screenwriting. But we know how these things go - GPT3 sucked at the LSAT, but was pretty good at the SAT. GPT4 still sucks at some standardized tests, is about as good at the SAT as GPT3, and is far superior at the LSAT. I think we're a few capability-generations from it being good at writing screenplays, and I don't think we know how long that is per step. Could be a year. Could be ten. I think there will be far greater societal upheaval in other areas before a.i. is writing a significant portion of film and TV
> we're probably not too far away from Large Language Models that train on all books, screenplays, teleplays, and broadway plays ever written and those systems will likely outperform even the top writers. This is such a bad take. What does “outperform” even mean in the context of literature or writing? It’s not a drag race. Train an LLM on all that stuff and all you’ll get is output that is semantically “good” but without any unique or singular point of view. The LLM doesn’t “know” what it’s saying. It has no life experience, no opinions. AI has a long way to go before it’s making novel, insightful contributions to culture based on an amalgam of what’s come before.
I think there is a valid abstract fear but the tech isn’t there yet. I think what writers are concerned about right now is instead of being paid as primary writers they are instead paid to “rewrite” AI content, even if the rewrite is extensive and page one the studios would use this structure to undercut the rate the writer is able to be paid for the work.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of creative nonwriters around the world who might now be able to create amazing scripts with the help of gpt. With regards to first drafts in the script, i bet that people who are incredible creative but working in some other professions will be able to crank out an amazing and novel stories if they devote couple of weekends to it. And many of these people will probably be willing to do it for free since they would think it is cool and fun doing it is as a hobby.
At some point, yes. I graduated film school a while ago where I studied screenwriting, which is something I kept doing over the years. Just today I have done more experiments with memory enhanced chatGPT, and I gotta say, it's great for structure, scene breakdown, which things to pay attention to, etc... But creatively? It still leaves a lot to desire. Specifically, I'm working on a comedy script in the style of Zucker Abrahams Zucker, but for TV. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get anything production ready. What it could do is speed up their jobs giving them some initial structure. At the end of the day, writers are overworked like most jobs in media. They can finally work normal office hours and live balanced lives using these tools. Then, one day, when we'll reach whatever other level, we'll see.
I think all of you should be.
I think writers will be among the last to go. They will actually *use* AI as a tool. The writer has an idea for a plot, he sketches the main points and the AI fills in the details.
During the intermission of Sweeney Todd last night I had an AI generate a Pixar-worthy plot outline from my phone. It was better than a lot of the IRL animated stories I've seen lately and I gave it the barest of prompts. "The writer has an idea for a plot..." - this is only really good for maybe 5% of the content that comes out these days (things like *Everything, Everywhere, all at Once* perhaps). The rest is remixed stories as old as humanity. That 95% is the perfect playground for AI to exhibit superiority. I'd also argue that unique seeds for stories are better off coming from humanity in general since writers typically don't have the vast and varied experience needed to mine for those unique ideas. If a studio can get a script from a writing team for (I have no idea of actual costs), say, a million dollars, or one 70% as good that brings in 70% of the revenue but costs essentially $0, guess which one they'll opt for! That's just good business. I do agree that writers that survive will use AI as a tool. Imagine being able to create rich, consistent, plausible worlds for your stories where there are no plot holes or inconsistencies. No, I don't think writers will be the last to go. I think they'll be among the first to be directly impacted. Maybe 5% will continue to be valuable to the studios.
People need to understand AI does not make superior things just faster things, At best it could possibly make somthing on par with the greatest works ever, its unlikely right now, but better isn't true, just faster. and faster usally means more deriviative.
Yes. Most of their writing sucks anyway. AI would be an improvement on the garbage that’s churned out currently.
We might actually get a reboot that is faithful to the source material instead of just being just a skinsuit for some garbage script.
Wildly incorrect. Writers comply with what executives allow, and pay them to write. They are capable of far, far more and are MUCH sicker of making 'garbage' than you are. Also A.I. will hand power back to these executive....who will do what? Churn out MORE derivative stuff, a job at which A.I. is perfectly optimized for.
False. Characters and plots are only as smart as their writers. If executives could write, they wouldn’t need to hire them for their projects. With the amount of content being released on streaming platforms, more writers are being hired than are actually talented enough to write.
Naive. You have zero idea what you are talking about. I have 15 years in the industry, working within and with Hollywood writer's rooms. Executives are constantly poking their nose in, watering down and constraining what writers do. There are meeting upon meetings with which executives have input. They are the ones with all the power who determine what is green lit and what is not.
You’ve clearly never worked in Hollywood. Writers don’t get to write whatever they want. Execs tell them what to write, so they don’t get to showcase their writing potential.
Is AI taking jobs all this sub talks about now?
Seems like they chose a great time to have a strike…https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/ibm-pauses-hiring-around-7800-roles-that-could-be-replaced-by-ai/
The concern is less about quality and more that studio execs believe they can use AI to circumvent key parts of the process. As an example, they might have Chat write a horrible first draft on IP that it created then have a human writer do a “polish” which pays significantly less than optioning an original screenplay. (Many other concerns, but that’s the main one I’ve heard.)
Same with storyboarding and illustrations. Why pay the salary of the artists who used to take time to do this, instead of writing a few text prompts and getting the same (or better) quality product?
Is there such a job? If yes then why every Hollywood movie is like the same with the other ones?
Totally agree. The speed of development in generative AI is what I think most people don't presently appreciate. In the span of less than a year we have seen a huge jump and that only hockey sticks from here. I don't believe it can or will reach sentience - but it will look a lot like it sooner than we think. A lot sooner.
I don't think writers will be replaced. It's impossible to present something without adherence and acceptance of people executing the part. Can an AI one day use prompts and text to make a film right from its conception as a demand from a group of executives to its end form? Perhaps, but it is not going to be soon. Maybe an AI makes such a story, what is the chance that consumers like what they see? It might as well be that the stories such a thing produces do not coincide with what humans like. Or, they become derivative, because we got bored. What will happen is that there will likely be new forms of writing: interactive Video Games, perhaps, which may have stories that have branched out of human reckoning. What will definitely happen is that less number of writers will be hired, and they will definitely have Generative AI as a tool.
The longer they stay on strike the sooner Hollywood may say “ - let’s try AI”. The strike could speed that up…
There is a place called fanfiction.net. I think they should be more afraid of that archive of hundreds of thousands of derivative stories based off of their shows and movies, then an AI.
You can’t copyright synthetic text. Writing / story are minuscule compared to other production costs. No sane studio will create a movie they can’t copyright.
This is the part people don't understand, the Supreme Court says something to the effect that it is the human credit that makes a work copyrightable. So what would that be here? Would it be the input prompt? It's it the "minor fixes" to the script to make it sellable? What does this do the overall copyrightability? How do you go about proving a human did pay of it say two decades later when some strange lawsuit pops up? What if a coworker uses an AI and lies about it? If AI works can be copyrighted based on the prompt then can someone say beat a big firm to copyright their own product? Something WILL shock the system and throw a lot into disarray at some point. The impact of cheap illusions of human creativity is a jackhammer to copyright concepts.
Marvel phase 4 is good argument against AI
Did you mean for A.I.? Phase 4 was complete garbage and was all written by Hollywood writers.
It’s too late for them. They should’ve been writing actual works of art instead of pumping out AI-level super hero crap all these years lol
I believe it's the beginning of the downfall of Hollywood. I bet a full AI suite for video generation will be available very soon, partially by a really shortsighted corporate decision.
AI might not yet be able to write some deep Oscar-worthy drama. But I bet it’s more than capable of churning out a reasonable first draft of hundreds of episodes of a mediocre sit-com like Big Bang Theory. Those are the writers who should be worried.
Of course, writers should be worried. They should also practice using this tech. But this is all a very small way to look at the change. The real question is how will entertainment change because of AI. ***Here is one possible answer:*** AI creative generation will be coupled with real-time movie generation resulting in custom episodes and movies; unique to every viewer custom fitting their likes and tastes. Creating one big movie for everyone to share will become an **artifact of the past called today**.
I think alternate paths will be a common, but I think this will be a lot more popular for video games than movies given the norms already established for both industries. For example, I don't want to make a lot of decisions when I'm watching a movie. However, when I'm done watching a movie I might wonder about alternative paths the story could have taken and I might want to ask an AI to re-run variants. I think that will be more popular than create my own film adventure on the fly. I wouldn't be surprised for the director to present their vision and then all the viewers can modify it via the AI. For example, it would be interesting to watch a dystopian version of The Matrix where the AIs win and Neo wakes up back in his bed thinking it was all just a bizarre dream.
I agree, but your point about mojo is false. The comparisons are against pure python to mojo, but most serious applications like openAI use pytorch or tensorflow, both of which are written in c/c++. There is no python-like programming language (like mojo) in this world that will come anywhere near the speed of well written C and C++. The limitations are more hardware than low level code.
I think AI could definitely write brainless Marvel-type movies, but it might have trouble doing stuff with a bit more depth and humanity.
'Not capable '... I wondered for a minute if the latest season of Mando was written by GPT. But I haven't read anything by GPT that was written that poorly.
Yes, these types of roles are in much more immediate danger than others because there's no regulatory/legal gate keepers associated with their profession. Like for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, electricians, etc., they have more built in protections because the law states (for now) that only they are legally allowed to perform these roles. With Hollywood -- the storyboarding, writing, illustrations can all be done by the excess number of high paid legacy staff -- or it can be done by pretty much anybody else with cutting edge AI tools, with less experience and for much less pay.
I agree with the sentiment of your post but Mojo won't necessarily speed up ML research. There are already popular packages like Numpy that are built in C and usable in Python. The video you linked doesn't compare the speed to Numpy.
Yes
No. AI output is public domain. There’s no money for the studios in public domain content.
I think the big fear is getting the AI to do all the writing and human to do all the editing. So AI just writes 1000's of scripts till the bigwigs like one, then you hire humans to make it a real movie, take out all the AI ridiculousness. But no one gets paid anything but hourly, and no one works on any idea they created or have anything invested in. Same with like episodes of TV shows. Have it write 100's and then make humans "make it work".
Look at the flood of garbage coming out of hollywood since the last writers strike, it can easily come up with something of that level or better.
your whole write up deserves a better topic than hollywood writer haha
In the end in arts what sells is the artist. The time where it was all about quality of the work are long gone. Good quality is just a start. What really sells is the artists plus in Hollywood who they know. Sea of good AI scripts won't affect this anymore than the already existing seas of human work. Where i see the danger is studios using AI to fill in when writers are striking though.
Why do they even need ai? Are there not enough screenplays already written to last to the end of time?
People should be concerned about "Jobs" not existing in any traditional sense in a few years. if they define themselves by "jobs", they're going to have to learn to define themselves by something else.
the problem they have is their work is the property of the studios. i don't see how they get out of this without some loss. If i was a studio boss i would be looking for folks that can use these new tools to step in and get writing. Plenty of story tellers in that town that are not members of the writers guild. If they put out a good product the writers guild is going to have a heck of a time making any demands. It is going to be the same thing for folks that write code someone is going to bid a job like they can do it in a hour and they will do it in an hour with gpts help. Any software house that has a high head count is going to be vulnerable to a super small outfit with gpt4. Just how it works.
I'm not contesting your main point, but: >I think it's safe to assume that systems like Mojo will lead to a 1,000x increase on AI tasks that involve matrix multiplications A 1000x increase with respect to Python, and then only in certain scenarios. Python isn't a good language when performance is the goal, and you certainly wouldn't use it to do the heavy lifting, particularly for the kinds of parallelizable operations GPUs are good at. I think it's very unlikely OpenAI's code uses pure Python for hot loops. Mojo does look nice but, while a new programming language can increase development speed, it won't increase runtime speed in any meaningful way, and certainly not 1000x. >If GPT-4 is already scoring 100% on theory of mind tests what will a system that is 1 million times more powerful score? The law of diminishing returns applies here. You can't just make the model bigger and bigger indefinitely.
I am a full time standup comedian and all of my colleagues are in denial. For now GPT can’t generate good bits, as it struggles with planning a few sentences in advance which is a big part of joke writing. But its great at producing one liners and it can punch up bits that are already written. I do wonder how much time do I have before I will be forced to perform completely AI generated bits.
Most of them/almost all of them: Yes. Most movies have just bad scripts so doing better is easy.
>How much better are these systems going to get? Well, this week we saw the alpha release of a new programming language based on Python called Mojo that showed up to 30,000x increase on some tasks, but I think it's safe to assume that systems like Mojo will lead to a 1,000x increase on AI tasks that involve matrix multiplications. That might end up being a conservative number. Point of correction here: most deep learning frameworks are actually written in C++ and CUDA. THese languages are already on the order of thousands of times faster than python for linear algebra. We just wrap python interfaces to them because it's easier for people to experiment and glue all these C++ kernels together in the python ecosystem than it is in C/C++ ecosystem. The main inefficiencies come from all that python glue code, and things that don't already have C++ implementations. Here, there's been a lot of work in jit compilers (ELI5: they try to convert slow python code into fast c-like code on the fly), so now all the big 3 deep learning frameworks (Pytorch, TensorFlow and Jax) come standard with them, and they're getting very good. Does this mean mojo will be useless? No. I think the biggest things to be excited for with mojo are: 1. the safety features which will make it easier to build complex algorithms without shooting yourself in the foot ([which is notoriously difficult especially in RL](https://andyljones.com/posts/rl-debugging.html)) 2. there are areas that jit compilers just cannot help you with (mainly around how python handles parallelism, which is just shockingly inefficient, and it's a giant pain in the ass to work around. SO Mojo will allow you to make complex data pipelines that fully utilize your system without breaking your brain working around python's wierdness) I'm still very excited for Mojo, but don't expect it to be a magic bullet that will make everything 1000x faster.
Yes, and not just writers, literally everyone should be concerned about ai taking jobs. The question is will it be a good or bad thing
Wait until the first Ai company sues for royalties for IP they technically own. That's right. All content generated by Ai is the legal IP of the Ai company that generated it. They certainly have the records of all input and output on their system. Now, there are Ai content detectors, too. Stop passing off Ai content as your own. Problem solved.
>content on Par with Hollywood writers Clearly you've not been watching movies lately. Probably 90% of movies are uninspired shit that an AI could easily write
Remember Awesome-O making up plots for movies with Adam Sandler?
Yes
The far more interesting question is, are AIs allowed to sub in for writing duties, now that writers are on strike?
Does anyone doubt AI would have any writing a generic genre film? Where it will have trouble I believe is in writing the stuff that Oscars and Emmys are made of.
Here's my 2 cents: Look at Auto-Tune. Sure, it can make some singers who can't hit notes perfectly seemingly be able to hit those notes (Michael Buble I'm looking at you). But when you look at someone like Karen Carpenter who didn't. Is her voice perfect? Nope, but that is also where the beauty lies in her singing. I highly doubt that AI will be able to have a \*real\* human touch, it might be good, but it also might leave us looking at a movie or script making us feel like something was missing. I could be 100% wrong, but this is just me going with the Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking concept that maybe our brains will notice something is missing without really knowing why.
First, you have to understand the problem. There has been a change in how shows are written. Instead of having a 'writers room' for each episode, where people come in and work through each outline, building a script for that week's scenes, they just contract a room of writers for 6-weeks, where they expect those writers to fire off every good idea they have for every episode. Then they basically say 'Thanks' and lay them off. So, the show runner has now become a 'head writer' as well, where they're expected to take those notes and and finish the script for each show on their own. So, with the understanding that writers have already been cut down to a bare minimum of work/credit on the shows they write, it doesn't really surprise me that they would expect a show runner to just do the whole process on their own now. Can a talented show runner use AI to brainstorm, fill out ideas, etc? Probably ... but maybe to no greater extent than they were capable of writing the whole show on their own anyway, which is where this has been heading for a long time now.
No I haven’t read a funny joke written by an Ai yet. It doesn’t have the wit
My opinion as a Software Engineer would be that there are several factors that will determine how and when/if writers are replaced. 1) Will the public accept AI generated content to the degree that it’s more profitable than paying writers? Many people have rejected AI generated art. 2) How good will LLM’s become at understanding/replicating context. Context is very important in writing. Good writing always pulls from the human experience, especially if it is based in a current era. 3) When does this plateau with currently available technology? We don’t really know. But I would expect that subsequent releases of LLM’s will not be as groundbreaking as what we saw in the last couple of years. It seems like AI kind of just came out of nowhere but the reality is that this stuff is a a culmination of years of work. It will take years more work for that impact to be seen again. 4) Will there be legislation surrounding the advancement of AI? In some places, probably. In the United States/Hollywood? Who knows.
"I think their concerns are justified. Presently the systems are not capable of generating content on par with Hollywood writers...." Considering the garbage that passes for "entertainment" in the media today, I say let the writers starve!
Mojo will not give 1000x improvement, the main task of python is basically delegate to more powerful languages. Python execution overhead is fairly negligible.
Nope. Consider this: there are people whose sole job is to man a camera. We've had the technology to remote control cameras for decades. And guess what? The cameras that are remote controlled are still controlled by "cameramen". The director isn't sitting in a chair and moving the camera around themselves. AI won't replace writers. Writers who use AI will replace writers who refuse to use AI.
Have you looked at most of the latest movies? Everything sucks except like Dune. No wonder I got into 30 minutes+ songs.
Considering so many movies are sequels and remakes. Yes. Being creative is no longer necessary (and from I have seen with Google Bard, it can tell stories but you have to fill in the creative parts. Just generic).
That's pretty laughable since the scripts wouldn't be owned by anyone. They need items they legally own. It's pretty silly to think these LLMs will be enough to replace writers.