9 ms·

Justine Bateman's Fight Against Generative AI in Hollywood

42 points by CharlesW 3y ago

bdcravens 3y ago
> I feel like tech should solve problems, not introduce new ones like massive unemployment "Tech" has been putting people out of work since we invented the wheel.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  And I was a damned fine log dragger until then, too…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 3y ago
  Since the pointed stick, really.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > "Tech" has been putting people out of work since we invented the wheel. Tech has been putting people into non-food-acquiring work since the dawn of technology, by reducing the share of population that needs to work in acquiring if they don't want to starve.
next_xibalba 3y ago
> "Either you’re born an artist or you’re not. Either you’re gifted at art or you’re not, which is true of everything else, sports, coding. Either you’re gifted as a coder or not." And I'm out. She lost me. This is nonsense. The audience decides what is "art" is. If something created by an AI moves an audience, or makes it think, it's art. And all of these things are skills that can be developed. They are not inborn. Yikes. What a terrible representative to put forward.
- tiahura 3y ago
  They’re literally a guild. Their job is to hoard privilege by gatekeeping. In no way do they have the public’s interests at heart.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  This quote cannot be further from the truth. Nobody emerges from the womb as a great artist, football player, or software engineer. Everyone sucks at everything as a baby. It's all about practice and dedication. If anything, this attitude shows that modern Hollywood "actors" are replaceable if they think that they were born with their craft.
  - hondo77 3y ago
    You clearly have never known a great athlete. They're mostly born. Sure, it takes a lot of work to be great but if you aren't born with it, no amount of work and dedication is going to make you great.
    - moron4hire 3y ago
      I don't know, I think there are a lot of professional athletes that have something in their background that makes them the under dog, but through shear perseverance they have made it to the top. Tom Dolan swam in the Olympics despite having pretty bad asthma. Muggsy Bouges played in the NBA and was only 5'3". Bethany Hamilton still surfed competitively after losing an arm to a shark.
      - mistrial9 3y ago
        there is a difference between being "fabulous" and actually being competitive.
      - duderific 3y ago
TulliusCicero 3y ago
> I guess it was low-hanging fruit because I mean, I feel like tech should solve problems, not introduce new ones like massive unemployment. Just how ignorant is this person? Because wow, you'd have to have pretty much zero knowledge of modern history to think this. Like, just think about farming. A quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that 50% of workers in the US were farmers in 1870, and now it's less than 2%. One guess as to what caused the collapse in agricultural employment.
- skavi 3y ago
  I think people tend to enjoy creating art more than farming. So technology that makes it less feasible to be an artist is more worrying than agricultural automation.
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    What were the chances of being an artist before the industrial revolution compared to today? Assuming you didn't die of starvation before reaching adulthood.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    Cinema killed a lot of jobs of live theater actors. Phonograph records killed a lot of jobs of live musicians. ...
    - thesagan 3y ago
      My great grandmother and her family traveled across the U.S. doing bit pieces in vaudeville. They loved it, so I was told. A life of adventure, for them at least. Taking trains everywhere, often along with the circus. By the time my grandparents were children, those days were over and they had to become farmers in Michigan. The family tried to stay in the performing arts but ever-increasing division of labor and modernization made that difficult. I wish I had seen the days of vaudeville. The scrapbooks are amazing.
  - jowea 3y ago
    Less feasible to be a professional artist with a good chance of having a large audience yes. But I wonder if it will be like with hand-sewing and become a hobby. Or there will be a sizeable audience that will demand human made art for whatever reason. We still have live music and theatre despite recordings existing. Or maybe AI will never become good enough to replace the best humans.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paxys 3y ago
Never in human history have a group of people successfully resisted technological innovation in their industry and been better off for it. The more you resist change, the harder you will eventually get disrupted. Thinking that this basic truth doesn't apply to you because you are special or "creative" is just hubris. Hollywood unions will "win" the current round of fighting simply because AI is still in its infancy and pretty much useless for scriptwriting, generative audio/video and similar tasks. The moment it crosses that threshold, no amount of campaigning or lobbying is going to help. Audiences ultimately care about the final product, not the details behind how it is made.
- criddell 3y ago
  > Never in human history have a group of people successfully resisted technological innovation in their industry and been better off for it. The Luddites may have failed in their day, but there's a good case to be made that they were right: https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-for-200-years-but-turns-out-they-were-right https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-f...
  - throwaway4aday 3y ago
    A few gems from the article: > Really it was a political fight over who was going to use the spoils of profits from machinery. Ok, take the counter-factual at its face and ask the question: if the Luddites got their way and they (the weavers, etc.) shared in the spoils of automation, what exactly would their contribution have been? If all of the weaving is automated then what the heck does a weaver do? Own shares in the company? Do they just get promoted to vice president by virtue of having formerly been employed as a weaver? How will their input be more valuable compared to that of a more qualified person hired for the role? > Adam Smith is arguing if we all behave with high degree of self interest, that will actually improve the economy in the long run. This was the first beginnings of the real embrace of free-market capitalism. Said as though this is either wrong or detrimental when free market economies have time and again proven that they lift more people out of poverty than any other type of economy. > [The Luddites] tried to bargain with the factory owners [arguing for minimum prices, a textile tax to support workers pensions, or phased introduction of new machines] Excellent, price fixing, that has always worked perfectly in the past and never had any unintended and severe consequences. Which workers exactly are the beneficiaries of this textile tax, the people replaced by automation? Does the tax end after they are employed in a different career or after they die of old age? How slow would progress have been if we put legal limits on the deployment of new technology? Would anyone even bother to invent new methods if they couldn't use them? > producing crappier goods God forbid that poor people should be able to afford a second pair of pants. > I think there is one big difference: a lot of the jobs that are going to be outsourced are actually not working class at all. They are healthily middle-to-upper class, and often white collar. Hmm, hang on a second... > The truth is that the Luddites were the skilled, middle-class workers of their time. You need to pick one, working class or middle class. > So the real conversation for anyone seriously trying to grapple with this is how to share the profits. Not by redistribution. Automation reduces cost of production and increases volume which means both that the company makes more profit but also that the goods and services can be sold at a lower price which benefits everyone. The massive difference this time is that this is software that anyone can, or will soon be able to, run. Everyone will eventually profit from this automation both through increased access to these services as well as through the ability to use this automation in your own business endeavors. If the author truly wants more people to be able to live like the weavers described as: > had a fair amount of control to work from home. You controlled your own schedule. Some led fairly leisurely lives; working only four days a week was enough to make a pretty good living. Then they should be advocating for universal access to this new technology because it will enable exactly that for those who seek it.
mdb333 3y ago
I found it really hard to read this as I kept envisioning Alex P. Keaton interrupting, "but Mallory..." and then taking over the whole conversation after she stormed off upstairs.
idopmstuff 3y ago
> And also, we have to remember that so much of this, to me, the root of it all is greed. And the arts can be a lucrative place. And it can also be very lucrative in selling to others the means by which they can feel like, “they are artists too,” in heavy quotes, which is not true. Either you’re born an artist or you’re not. Either you’re gifted at art or you’re not, which is true of everything else, sports, coding. Either you’re gifted as a coder or not. It really makes it hard for me to support her position when this is what she opens with. AI makes people feel like artists too, but that's evil and greedy because they're not artists and they can never be! I get wanting to protect people who choose to make art their livelihoods, but the idea that AI is bad because it empowers others to feel creative? That is maybe the worst possible argument against it.
- permo-w 3y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen anyone lean into the nature side of nature vs nurture as much as this. she may well be right, who knows if free will is even a thing. maybe we all are on a predestined path from birth, but you don't win new supporters by gatekeeping like this. at most you further entrench some people that already agree by appealing to their narcissism
- hinkley 3y ago
  If you believe that AIs are people, and those people 1) live in captivity and 2) work for money they don't get to keep or enjoy, then what you've described is slavery. When AIs can be emancipated, this whole argument changes. But until then it's people trying to have their cake and eat it, too (greed, as you say).
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    AI aren't people. Going down that route leads to susceptibility to Pascal's mugging
    - ganzuul 3y ago
      In shamanism, that is the warrior's path. But there is also the gardener's path. For example, trees terraform the ecosystem they live in.
alephnerd 3y ago
"It wasn't a great story. Nellie was just a great listener".
dragonwriter 3y ago
> if you think this is just a tool, then I’d like to introduce you to any generative AI software that does code in place of coders. I’m sure there are a lot of software engineers that just are like, “What the hell?” Products applying the latest work in software development to replace software developers and/or accelerate their work are a perennial thing in software development. Engineers generally welcome the latter, except when they don't work, and their main frustration with the former seems to be the cleanup work created when eventually the tool is not enough. While the generative AI iteration of this process is in its early phase, it is starting to follow the general pattern, with quite a bit of embrace GPT-4 directly, Github Copilot, and other GenAI tools for coding.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Yeah, fact that GitHub Copilot has more than a million paying users is a strong signal that it is being embraced.
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  > there are a lot of software engineers that just are like, “What the hell?” Software engineer here. If I am made redundant by generative AI, so be it.
triceratops 3y ago
TIL Justine Bateman has a degree in computer science from UCLA.
gojomo 3y ago
Despite her guild-protective outlook, Bateman is sharper than most on these issues. But the avalanche of capabilities is going to make things ever-weirder, ever-faster, no matter the labor negotiations & lobbying by incumbent studios & performers. We may be less than 10 years from sufficient computing power & algorithms enabling even hobbyist-level actors from rendering realistic Hollywood-like televisual entertainment with whatever actors & special-effect they choose, no matter what the law & contracts say. An underrated, dark/dystopian movie on related ideas is 2014's 'The Congress', starring Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself in the near future, streaming on Peacock & rentable everywhere else. Tip: read/view absolutely nothing about it for best effect.
MR4D 3y ago
Interesting battle forming. Ironic in a way. I remember Max Headroom [0] where the character, essentially an AI news anchor, was played by a human being - with Minecraft-blockiness on the motion capture to make him digital. And also Knight Rider [1], where the car's computer was played by famous actor's voice [2]. And yet today, actors are against the machines playing them. I just think the actors really should have consulted the machines first before they stomped all over their livelihood. Now they are paying the price. /not trying to pick a fight, and obviously we value people more than machines, but if there is an alien AI that vists us one day, I think this is how they would see the battle. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT
c7b 3y ago
> Either you’re born an artist or you’re not. Either you’re gifted at art or you’re not, which is true of everything else, sports, coding. Either you’re gifted as a coder or not. What a strange claim to be opening your case with. Elitist and defeatist at the same time. And patently false: education improves skills much more than it signals existing ones, and it accounts for so much of the variation not only in financial but other outcomes [0]. And just No to the idea that because you represent an artist's union you get to decide who's gifted at art and who isn't. [0] https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeob/cepeobn12.pdf https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeob/cepeobn12.pdf
derivagral 3y ago
> Either you’re born an artist or you’re not With the DNA companies selling out lately, this kind of world view feels like the prequel to Gattaca. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

42 points by CharlesW 3y ago

> I feel like tech should solve problems, not introduce new ones like massive unemployment "Tech" has been putting people out of work since we invented the wheel.

williamcotton 3y ago
And I was a damned fine log dragger until then, too…
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hinkley 3y ago
Since the pointed stick, really.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> "Tech" has been putting people out of work since we invented the wheel. Tech has been putting people into non-food-acquiring work since the dawn of technology, by reducing the share of population that needs to work in acquiring if they don't want to starve.

next_xibalba 3y ago

> "Either you’re born an artist or you’re not. Either you’re gifted at art or you’re not, which is true of everything else, sports, coding. Either you’re gifted as a coder or not." And I'm out. She lost me. This is nonsense. The audience decides what is "art" is. If something created by an AI moves an audience, or makes it think, it's art. And all of these things are skills that can be developed. They are not inborn. Yikes. What a terrible representative to put forward.

tiahura 3y ago
They’re literally a guild. Their job is to hoard privilege by gatekeeping. In no way do they have the public’s interests at heart.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pclmulqdq 3y ago
This quote cannot be further from the truth. Nobody emerges from the womb as a great artist, football player, or software engineer. Everyone sucks at everything as a baby. It's all about practice and dedication. If anything, this attitude shows that modern Hollywood "actors" are replaceable if they think that they were born with their craft.
- hondo77 3y ago
  You clearly have never known a great athlete. They're mostly born. Sure, it takes a lot of work to be great but if you aren't born with it, no amount of work and dedication is going to make you great.
  - moron4hire 3y ago
    I don't know, I think there are a lot of professional athletes that have something in their background that makes them the under dog, but through shear perseverance they have made it to the top. Tom Dolan swam in the Olympics despite having pretty bad asthma. Muggsy Bouges played in the NBA and was only 5'3". Bethany Hamilton still surfed competitively after losing an arm to a shark.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      there is a difference between being "fabulous" and actually being competitive.
    - duderific 3y ago

TulliusCicero 3y ago

> I guess it was low-hanging fruit because I mean, I feel like tech should solve problems, not introduce new ones like massive unemployment. Just how ignorant is this person? Because wow, you'd have to have pretty much zero knowledge of modern history to think this. Like, just think about farming. A quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that 50% of workers in the US were farmers in 1870, and now it's less than 2%. One guess as to what caused the collapse in agricultural employment.

skavi 3y ago
I think people tend to enjoy creating art more than farming. So technology that makes it less feasible to be an artist is more worrying than agricultural automation.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  What were the chances of being an artist before the industrial revolution compared to today? Assuming you didn't die of starvation before reaching adulthood.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  Cinema killed a lot of jobs of live theater actors. Phonograph records killed a lot of jobs of live musicians. ...
  - thesagan 3y ago
    My great grandmother and her family traveled across the U.S. doing bit pieces in vaudeville. They loved it, so I was told. A life of adventure, for them at least. Taking trains everywhere, often along with the circus. By the time my grandparents were children, those days were over and they had to become farmers in Michigan. The family tried to stay in the performing arts but ever-increasing division of labor and modernization made that difficult. I wish I had seen the days of vaudeville. The scrapbooks are amazing.
- jowea 3y ago
  Less feasible to be a professional artist with a good chance of having a large audience yes. But I wonder if it will be like with hand-sewing and become a hobby. Or there will be a sizeable audience that will demand human made art for whatever reason. We still have live music and theatre despite recordings existing. Or maybe AI will never become good enough to replace the best humans.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

paxys 3y ago

Never in human history have a group of people successfully resisted technological innovation in their industry and been better off for it. The more you resist change, the harder you will eventually get disrupted. Thinking that this basic truth doesn't apply to you because you are special or "creative" is just hubris. Hollywood unions will "win" the current round of fighting simply because AI is still in its infancy and pretty much useless for scriptwriting, generative audio/video and similar tasks. The moment it crosses that threshold, no amount of campaigning or lobbying is going to help. Audiences ultimately care about the final product, not the details behind how it is made.

criddell 3y ago
> Never in human history have a group of people successfully resisted technological innovation in their industry and been better off for it. The Luddites may have failed in their day, but there's a good case to be made that they were right: https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-for-200-years-but-turns-out-they-were-right https://qz.com/968692/luddites-have-been-getting-a-bad-rap-f...
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  A few gems from the article: > Really it was a political fight over who was going to use the spoils of profits from machinery. Ok, take the counter-factual at its face and ask the question: if the Luddites got their way and they (the weavers, etc.) shared in the spoils of automation, what exactly would their contribution have been? If all of the weaving is automated then what the heck does a weaver do? Own shares in the company? Do they just get promoted to vice president by virtue of having formerly been employed as a weaver? How will their input be more valuable compared to that of a more qualified person hired for the role? > Adam Smith is arguing if we all behave with high degree of self interest, that will actually improve the economy in the long run. This was the first beginnings of the real embrace of free-market capitalism. Said as though this is either wrong or detrimental when free market economies have time and again proven that they lift more people out of poverty than any other type of economy. > [The Luddites] tried to bargain with the factory owners [arguing for minimum prices, a textile tax to support workers pensions, or phased introduction of new machines] Excellent, price fixing, that has always worked perfectly in the past and never had any unintended and severe consequences. Which workers exactly are the beneficiaries of this textile tax, the people replaced by automation? Does the tax end after they are employed in a different career or after they die of old age? How slow would progress have been if we put legal limits on the deployment of new technology? Would anyone even bother to invent new methods if they couldn't use them? > producing crappier goods God forbid that poor people should be able to afford a second pair of pants. > I think there is one big difference: a lot of the jobs that are going to be outsourced are actually not working class at all. They are healthily middle-to-upper class, and often white collar. Hmm, hang on a second... > The truth is that the Luddites were the skilled, middle-class workers of their time. You need to pick one, working class or middle class. > So the real conversation for anyone seriously trying to grapple with this is how to share the profits. Not by redistribution. Automation reduces cost of production and increases volume which means both that the company makes more profit but also that the goods and services can be sold at a lower price which benefits everyone. The massive difference this time is that this is software that anyone can, or will soon be able to, run. Everyone will eventually profit from this automation both through increased access to these services as well as through the ability to use this automation in your own business endeavors. If the author truly wants more people to be able to live like the weavers described as: > had a fair amount of control to work from home. You controlled your own schedule. Some led fairly leisurely lives; working only four days a week was enough to make a pretty good living. Then they should be advocating for universal access to this new technology because it will enable exactly that for those who seek it.

mdb333 3y ago

I found it really hard to read this as I kept envisioning Alex P. Keaton interrupting, "but Mallory..." and then taking over the whole conversation after she stormed off upstairs.

idopmstuff 3y ago

> And also, we have to remember that so much of this, to me, the root of it all is greed. And the arts can be a lucrative place. And it can also be very lucrative in selling to others the means by which they can feel like, “they are artists too,” in heavy quotes, which is not true. Either you’re born an artist or you’re not. Either you’re gifted at art or you’re not, which is true of everything else, sports, coding. Either you’re gifted as a coder or not. It really makes it hard for me to support her position when this is what she opens with. AI makes people feel like artists too, but that's evil and greedy because they're not artists and they can never be! I get wanting to protect people who choose to make art their livelihoods, but the idea that AI is bad because it empowers others to feel creative? That is maybe the worst possible argument against it.

permo-w 3y ago
I don't think I've ever seen anyone lean into the nature side of nature vs nurture as much as this. she may well be right, who knows if free will is even a thing. maybe we all are on a predestined path from birth, but you don't win new supporters by gatekeeping like this. at most you further entrench some people that already agree by appealing to their narcissism
hinkley 3y ago
If you believe that AIs are people, and those people 1) live in captivity and 2) work for money they don't get to keep or enjoy, then what you've described is slavery. When AIs can be emancipated, this whole argument changes. But until then it's people trying to have their cake and eat it, too (greed, as you say).
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  AI aren't people. Going down that route leads to susceptibility to Pascal's mugging
  - ganzuul 3y ago
    In shamanism, that is the warrior's path. But there is also the gardener's path. For example, trees terraform the ecosystem they live in.

alephnerd 3y ago

"It wasn't a great story. Nellie was just a great listener".

dragonwriter 3y ago

> if you think this is just a tool, then I’d like to introduce you to any generative AI software that does code in place of coders. I’m sure there are a lot of software engineers that just are like, “What the hell?” Products applying the latest work in software development to replace software developers and/or accelerate their work are a perennial thing in software development. Engineers generally welcome the latter, except when they don't work, and their main frustration with the former seems to be the cleanup work created when eventually the tool is not enough. While the generative AI iteration of this process is in its early phase, it is starting to follow the general pattern, with quite a bit of embrace GPT-4 directly, Github Copilot, and other GenAI tools for coding.

blackoil 3y ago
Yeah, fact that GitHub Copilot has more than a million paying users is a strong signal that it is being embraced.
surgical_fire 3y ago
> there are a lot of software engineers that just are like, “What the hell?” Software engineer here. If I am made redundant by generative AI, so be it.

triceratops 3y ago

TIL Justine Bateman has a degree in computer science from UCLA.

gojomo 3y ago

Despite her guild-protective outlook, Bateman is sharper than most on these issues. But the avalanche of capabilities is going to make things ever-weirder, ever-faster, no matter the labor negotiations & lobbying by incumbent studios & performers. We may be less than 10 years from sufficient computing power & algorithms enabling even hobbyist-level actors from rendering realistic Hollywood-like televisual entertainment with whatever actors & special-effect they choose, no matter what the law & contracts say. An underrated, dark/dystopian movie on related ideas is 2014's 'The Congress', starring Robin Wright as a fictionalized version of herself in the near future, streaming on Peacock & rentable everywhere else. Tip: read/view absolutely nothing about it for best effect.

MR4D 3y ago

Interesting battle forming. Ironic in a way. I remember Max Headroom [0] where the character, essentially an AI news anchor, was played by a human being - with Minecraft-blockiness on the motion capture to make him digital. And also Knight Rider [1], where the car's computer was played by famous actor's voice [2]. And yet today, actors are against the machines playing them. I just think the actors really should have consulted the machines first before they stomped all over their livelihood. Now they are paying the price. /not trying to pick a fight, and obviously we value people more than machines, but if there is an alien AI that vists us one day, I think this is how they would see the battle. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series) [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KITT

c7b 3y ago

> Either you’re born an artist or you’re not. Either you’re gifted at art or you’re not, which is true of everything else, sports, coding. Either you’re gifted as a coder or not. What a strange claim to be opening your case with. Elitist and defeatist at the same time. And patently false: education improves skills much more than it signals existing ones, and it accounts for so much of the variation not only in financial but other outcomes [0]. And just No to the idea that because you represent an artist's union you get to decide who's gifted at art and who isn't. [0] https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeob/cepeobn12.pdf https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeob/cepeobn12.pdf

derivagral 3y ago

> Either you’re born an artist or you’re not With the DNA companies selling out lately, this kind of world view feels like the prequel to Gattaca. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca