10 ms·

I'm not sure if this is a comment written out of naivety of the profit focused nature of studios or ignorance of the writing process. Replacing writers and pay

by slg 3y ago

I'm not sure if this is a comment written out of naivety of the profit focused nature of studios or ignorance of the writing process. Replacing writers and paying writers less is effectively the same thing. That "full credit" that you mention isn't just about what those writers got paid, it tells you what work they did. For example, a writer will often write a treatment of a movie which is effectively a short summary of a movie that is done before writing a script. Sometimes different writers will do the treatment and screenplay. This is generally the distinction you might see in "Story By" and "Written By" credits in movies (although these distinctions can and often are a lot more complicated). One likely goal of the studios is for an AI to write the treatment and then hand that off to a writer to turn it into a screenplay. That is one of the most practical ways AI can be used since treatments aren't an end product themselves and the AI's flaws can be corrected by humans when translating the treatment into a script. However, that is still effectively replacing writers by taking away one of their clearly defined jobs and in turn one of their paychecks.

chii 3y ago
If the AI does a better job writing said treatments (aka, does the same or more for less cost), why shouldn't it take away the job?
- slg 3y ago
  This question is irrelevant in the context of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. The WGA's motivations are obvious. They are protecting the livelihoods of their members. If a studio thinks AI can genuinely do a better job than human writers, that studio has the right to replace those human writers with AI. The human writers likewise have the right to refuse to work with any studio that does so. The fact that no studio has even hinted at taking this route during a 5-month-long strike suggests that no one believes AI would actually do a better job than WGA members.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    No way AI could write another remake of a movie from the 80's.
    - krapp 3y ago
      The list of things AI could never do, that it has already done, is getting rather long for a statement like that to read as anything but naive. Eventually, given enough investment, yes it could.
      - shrubhub 3y ago
        Woosh!
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      And yet, the studios came to the bargaining table instead of doing just that. Sounds like they don't have that much confidence in such a plan.
    - slg 3y ago
      I realize this is a joke, but it is important to remember that Hollywood doesn't produce remakes because that is what writers want to write. It produces remakes because that is what studios want to make. Writers are probably the strongest force for injecting originality into the process.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > why shouldn't it take away the job? Because in context of the current generation of "AI" , i.e the ChatGPT cohort, all that it's doing is "given a very large number of examples of this text, generate one more that fits the prompt". It's nothing without the training data. And the training data is the output of people's jobs. If you called it "distributed plagiarism" would that make the problem with the idea that AI replaces the need for the writers more apparent? It can not, but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution, as it's further from the end product. https://www.zmescience.com/science/chatgpt-stocastic-parrot/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/chatgpt-stocastic-parrot/ https://apnews.com/article/openai-lawsuit-authors-grisham-george-rr-martin-37f9073ab67ab25b7e6b2975b2a63bfe https://apnews.com/article/openai-lawsuit-authors-grisham-ge... The same applies to the DALL-E cohort of image generators: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-letter-urges-publishers-not-to-use-ai-generated-illustrations-2294392 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-letter-urges-publishe...
  - chii 3y ago
    > It's nothing without the training data. And the training data is the output of people's jobs. so do you not claim that a student learning off textbooks or teachers are also doing "distributed plagiarism"? > but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee, or was using material that was publicly available to be learnt off, the contribution is already paid for. There's no possibility of a royalty payment with AI generated content.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
      > so do you not claim that a student learning off textbook No, these are not the same. A student has mental faculties that ChatGPT does not. The understanding-free predictive text processing of ChatGPT is the whole deal of that software. A student does not require 10 thousand textbooks as examples in order to understand a concept. Students do exhibit originality and reasoning that is not in the training data. You should not equate them. > assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee Why would you assume that, when the links provided make it clear that this did not happen?

by slg 3y ago

chii 3y ago

If the AI does a better job writing said treatments (aka, does the same or more for less cost), why shouldn't it take away the job?

slg 3y ago
This question is irrelevant in the context of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. The WGA's motivations are obvious. They are protecting the livelihoods of their members. If a studio thinks AI can genuinely do a better job than human writers, that studio has the right to replace those human writers with AI. The human writers likewise have the right to refuse to work with any studio that does so. The fact that no studio has even hinted at taking this route during a 5-month-long strike suggests that no one believes AI would actually do a better job than WGA members.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  No way AI could write another remake of a movie from the 80's.
  - krapp 3y ago
    The list of things AI could never do, that it has already done, is getting rather long for a statement like that to read as anything but naive. Eventually, given enough investment, yes it could.
    - shrubhub 3y ago
      Woosh!
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    And yet, the studios came to the bargaining table instead of doing just that. Sounds like they don't have that much confidence in such a plan.
  - slg 3y ago
    I realize this is a joke, but it is important to remember that Hollywood doesn't produce remakes because that is what writers want to write. It produces remakes because that is what studios want to make. Writers are probably the strongest force for injecting originality into the process.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
> why shouldn't it take away the job? Because in context of the current generation of "AI" , i.e the ChatGPT cohort, all that it's doing is "given a very large number of examples of this text, generate one more that fits the prompt". It's nothing without the training data. And the training data is the output of people's jobs. If you called it "distributed plagiarism" would that make the problem with the idea that AI replaces the need for the writers more apparent? It can not, but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution, as it's further from the end product. https://www.zmescience.com/science/chatgpt-stocastic-parrot/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/chatgpt-stocastic-parrot/ https://apnews.com/article/openai-lawsuit-authors-grisham-george-rr-martin-37f9073ab67ab25b7e6b2975b2a63bfe https://apnews.com/article/openai-lawsuit-authors-grisham-ge... The same applies to the DALL-E cohort of image generators: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-letter-urges-publishers-not-to-use-ai-generated-illustrations-2294392 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-letter-urges-publishe...
- chii 3y ago
  > It's nothing without the training data. And the training data is the output of people's jobs. so do you not claim that a student learning off textbooks or teachers are also doing "distributed plagiarism"? > but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee, or was using material that was publicly available to be learnt off, the contribution is already paid for. There's no possibility of a royalty payment with AI generated content.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    > so do you not claim that a student learning off textbook No, these are not the same. A student has mental faculties that ChatGPT does not. The understanding-free predictive text processing of ChatGPT is the whole deal of that software. A student does not require 10 thousand textbooks as examples in order to understand a concept. Students do exhibit originality and reasoning that is not in the training data. You should not equate them. > assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee Why would you assume that, when the links provided make it clear that this did not happen?