6 ms·

I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

107 points by joozio 6mo ago

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
archive.is: https://archive.is/m19Zd https://archive.is/m19Zd
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
  with the recent google captcha requiring phones and some people facing this issue and multitude of other issues with archive.is here is an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260511122830/https://serjaimelannister.github.io/htmlpipe/?https://ppng.io/m19Zd https://web.archive.org/web/20260511122830/https://serjaimel... (Side-note: I have created htmlpipe which archives archive.is pages on archive.org so I am more than happy to answer if someone has any questions about it and I have an submission of a blog regarding it too if someone is interested but yeah, enjoy the article now!)
  - trollbridge 6mo ago
    yes please!
mkzet 6mo ago
I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.
- toyg 6mo ago
  > half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin women and dehydrated steroid-pumped men), mostly because they are abused to the point of absurdity.
  - DonHopkins 6mo ago
    The Americans, a great television series about Russian spies, really leaned into the wigs: 'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wig-of-the-week-ninas-emotional-disguises/360460/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wi... >Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties. >Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna. >Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favourite_wig/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favou...
- herpdyderp 6mo ago
  I, however, do look forward to a time when we can prompt our own TV shows. That second season that ruined your favorite show? Fix it. The second season that never happened? Create it. Of course AI needs to get better still for that to be bearable for many of us, but I'm still excited at the idea!
  - voidpointer 6mo ago
    Isn't the scenario you are describing the ultimate collapse of art and culture as we know it? If everyone sits at home and creates the content that they want, what do we talk about? How do we engage in shared culture if there is nothing to experience together?
    - mantas 6mo ago
      Welcome to the life of fringe subcultures. Of course subcultures, even most fringe ones, still have some community. But even in generated content world, some people would end up with similar taste and that generated content being similar. They may even share that content and watch some of each other's content! And oh boy the joy of meeting that rare human who has similar taste! E.g. knowing some fringe band that created a demo tape 2 decades ago that you found in some strange torrent tracker. But yes, mass/pop culture as we know it would be dead. And IMO the world would be better off. I agree with other comments that may lead to people staying inside their comfort zone. But I think it's question of time when good portion of people would start sharing that content with other people. Expanding each others' imagination. And few that don't... Well, existing pop culture is not exactly good at expanding mind as well. And such decentralized content creation may be less prone to propaganda and other social control efforts.
    - darkwater 6mo ago
      Well, that was a recent invention anyway - at least in Europe where I live. TVs did not really reach most of the households until late '70s and the shared pop culture based on movies (mostly from US), cartoons (mix from Japan and US), advertisements (usually national) was created quite fast. It's not an immutable fact of the human society.
- kylecazar 6mo ago
  I share your feelings, but the title is confusing... this is actually about people using gig AI training platforms for extra income (instead of bussing tables like they used to). Not building AI for cinema.
- vasco 6mo ago
  There's so many indie movies without much cgi, or good old movies that you'll never live long enough to watch. Writing off a whole art form is a bit weird.
  - hnthrowaway0315 6mo ago
    I think OP was saying that he/she only watches movies made before 2010. Coincidentally, I'm doing the same thing with movies, TV shows and games, and 2010 still feels too modern for me. I try to make it before 2005.
- torben-friis 6mo ago
  I mostly skip triple A hollywood movies, but the bulk of movies being made nowadays don't make use of any of that, mostly because it makes no sense in their genres. Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc. Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China starting to develop a world-friendly industry...
  - throwforfeds 6mo ago
    American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.
    - torben-friis 6mo ago
      Much like everything else in the US, products suffer and sink in quality for being sidelined by individual interests. Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified... All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.
- bsenftner 6mo ago
  Maybe this is relevant? I worked in animation and VFX for an Academy Award winning VFX studio and several well known animation / game studios, starting around '90. I formally left the industry around '04 to work on my own tech startup. When I left, there was a lot of R&D work surrounding the huge amounts of data that an animation studio generates and works with; I was one of those people creating early deep learning systems for production forecasting. Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media. That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.
- NickC25 6mo ago
  You can stop watching big budget productions, but you shouldn't skip out on your local independent cinema scene. If you're in or around a large metro area, there will be local(ish) folks out there making interesting stuff. Might not be super fancy CGI or incredible sound design, but it will be humans telling human stories, which is the heart of cinema.
ffsoftboiled 6mo ago
Mirrors my own experience doing this type of work (only made it two weeks before I gave up) and my partners. Excellent piece.
amazingamazing 6mo ago
It is interesting to see how all of these folks are out of main work and doing gig work instead, with productions being moved to Canada and other places abroad. I wonder why. All of the strikes?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- ido 6mo ago
  Cost
- spwa4 6mo ago
  The writer's guild and other striking organizations put it to: 1) general decline in wages 2) only short-term work being available 3) streaming platforms never pay the way Hollywood/Broadcast TV did: bad pay, but with a share of show profits for decades afterwards. Now just bad pay So it was generally about getting their pay increased. Instead, the strike lead to a big decrease in pay that Netflix and Skydance (Paramount) are blamed for.
  - doitLP 6mo ago
    Not just writers…there’s unions for every piece of the pie and they all have members and pensions and have to justify their existence. There’s the ever-increasing restrictions and cost of shooting in California and the huge incentives other localities offer to film and even commercial (advert) projects. My friend just flew the whole production to Louisiana to shoot a 30 second commercial because of the incentives. There’s the fact that even if a new show or movie is good, it is competing not only with other new stuff but also with the entire back catalogue of everything ever made that is instantly available for viewers. There’s streaming rights, that never paid as much as traditional TV even though it had broader reach. There’s competition with phone / social platforms that continue to optimize their content and algorithms with shorter feedback loops and more additive content, against trad production which takes a ton of money and time and upfront cost.
- vrganj 6mo ago
orsorna 6mo ago
> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.
- glimshe 6mo ago
  "first world problems", as people say. And the tone also felt dismissive of the work done by the cleaner... If it's such a big amount, he could consider entering her line of business.
- sligbad 6mo ago
  If this is your takeaway, it's what you were looking to believe anyway...
  - orsorna 6mo ago
    [dead]
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  That was my first clue that the author was squeezing this for a story. The snide joke about taking their kid on vacation so they could ignore each other felt really cold, too. The section where she tried to dunk on a coworker for trying to do the job well was also consistent with someone just squeezing this whole thing for a writing piece instead of trying to do the job. Nowhere in the article did she support the “everyone in Hollywood” claim, other than saying she found it in a Facebook group for writers.
  - stringfood 6mo ago
    The author also suffers from ethos fry, where his failed career as a writer and entry level job experience nullifies his ability to come to a useful conclusion on AI and current affairs. How can someone who has shown little ability to time or predict the future or control his destiny be trusted when it comes to analyzing the emergence of new technologies? But I think that logic might be an Ad Hominem attack
LogicFailsMe 6mo ago
So... Hollywood... They were an oligarchy of billionaires living off minions living paycheck to paycheck before it was cool... Below the line talent always gets shafted there. And it would all collapse without the minimum viable safety net of the guilds... Musicians seem to be embracing AI as a platform given that's another oligarchy itself. Where's the Robert Rodriguez of AI film-making? We haven't even seen the Ed Wood here yet. Edit: and here we go with the enablers of the overlord status quo again. I'd love to know why people think Hollywood's effective caste system is worth preserving. You don't like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel? Cool, the smarter Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood are much worse and they're the ones that didn't get caught to this day.
Aurornis 6mo ago
I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs. The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience. I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner, or the long rant about not being invited to a Slack channel she needed for the work then later realizing they were in the channel from the start and just missed the required onboarding. There’s a section where we’re supposed to hate a coworker whose only offense is trying to do the job well. Doesn’t sound like a great job, but the article was trying so hard to show this as an “everyone in Hollywood” instead of admitting it was one person’s bumbling misadventure.
- delichon 6mo ago
  > claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My money angst was probably less than hers.
  - rsynnott 6mo ago
    Well, presumably you didn't have a debilitating horse addiction.
    - rsynnott 6mo ago
      (It is fascinating to me, though, how these "I'm broke due to [completely bonkers lifestyle expense]" things span almost all income levels. From "decent salary but has four cars for no obviously explicable reason" to crippling horse addictions, for some people there just seems to be no income level at which they will not screw up their finances.)
bena 6mo ago
I think I understand why she told people not to look up her credits. It seems this may be a case of "I am representative of everyone's experience." Her first credit was in 2008 and then there is a 5 year gap between that and her next credit. Then 8 years between that one and the next. For comparison, I pulled up the crew for The Boys. Most of them have tighter credits. While there is probably some people in her situation. I feel that she also could have written this with the title: "I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Waiting Tables." And this isn't to disparage her. It was always a hard business and getting consistent work was always hard. Even if it is good.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
maxglute 6mo ago
IMO AI already doing better creative writing than most hollywood shows, I see myself enjoying premium mediocre slop.
- godzillabrennus 6mo ago
  IMO, AI is still not there, but getting better quickly, and I'm excited about how it is going to unlock so much creative talent held back by an expensive system that requires a lot of labor to create content. I know someone who has been trying to raise money for a while to create a movie he wrote a script for. He's registered it with SAG-AFTRA. He's put on dinners. He's worked tirelessly to pull it together. He is an unknown quantity with a couple of roles in movies but no track record of making movies. I keep watching the progress, counting down the days until I can feed his script into a tool and show him a version of his vision come to life. I don't doubt he'd still rather do it with human talent the old school way, but, like tens of millions of other people on earth who have a creative vision and aren't named Bezos, Musk, or Gates, he may never succeed in raising, and I think some version of those visions becoming a reality is better than none. It's also like watching people who understand the problems in an industry work on tech tools by vibe coding solutions.
  - maxglute 6mo ago
    It's not there for medium or long form content, but I'm enjoying the hell out of kungfu cats, north korean gta, swole harry potter slop. Maybe my attention span too cooked, but I would enjoy a future of one-shot passion projects from 1000s of amateur creators. I'd also rather deal with Asian microshows where you get 100x5m episodes dropped everyday. Frankly hollywood lost moving from 20 episode per year seasons to 8 episodes every other year. Life's too short for current model, for content creators and consumers.
terseus 6mo ago
I understand that it is not easy to relate to the author who pays (or was paying) $150 for a house cleaner, I understand that this is a 1-person history and may be highly biased, I understand the author is motivated to create a story from it. However, if you think that any of the conditions described in the article are acceptable or that this is a fair price to pay for having AI, I think you are a horrible human being and I hope you'll be expelled from civilized society.
- senordevnyc 6mo ago
  We’re horrible humans who should be expelled from society if we think it’s fine for people to get paid $52/hr for a boring remote job at a shitty bureaucratic company? Ok.
  - Ekaros 6mo ago
    Isn't that like almost 100k a year? Sounds like amount of money you should suffer a quite a bit for...
gwbas1c 6mo ago
> You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t. I see two problems here: 1: The streaming platforms are filling themselves with slop shows. Maybe not "AI slop," but slop in general. When I browse, I keep seeing lots of shows that I have no desire to watch, and wonder who actually watches them. Every time I open a streaming platform, they keep wanting me to watch a new series that I have no time to watch. 2: It seems there is an over-abundance of screenwriters.
- jermaustin1 6mo ago
  I agree with you (mostly), but I suggest you should spend an hour a week watching something new - do it while folding laundry or working out. Something you might never have chosen. There are gems out there waiting for discovery. Now onto my response: TV has always been this way, the only difference is there aren't time slots now, so they can develop a bunch of crap shows (that used to just get left for dead after pilot season), let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live). When it was ad-supported with 4 prime-time hours across 10-ish channels (between OTA, cable, and premium), every show had to count. Streaming removes that constraint, which has actually been beneficial to producers and consumers of content. More shows means more jobs for writers, actors, directors, crew, etc., even if those shows they are working on are completely forgettable. But with every gold rush, comes over-abundance of people panning for gold. So yes, there is an over-abundance of screenwriters. There is an over-abundance of choice on the platforms. There is an over-abundance of platforms to chose from. There is an over-abundance of over-consumption of content on these platforms.
  - __d 6mo ago
    > let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live). And so you don’t contribute to the selection of shows. It’s a dilemma. I started streaming stuff I like the sound of despite the risk of being rug-pulled, because otherwise there’s no signal that they should fund series 2.
  - 6mo ago
ForHackernews 6mo ago
> Then our managers announced that a “golden batch” of tasks would be released to the most talented, the most special, the royalty of annotators—the folks, we were told, who consistently scored a perfect 5 with an average handling time well below the recommended amount. Shades of Glengarry Glen Ross "These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads, and to you, they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers."
insane_dreamer 6mo ago
If you worked hard to get a degree from a prestigious college, and worked hard to get to the place where your skills were valued and used to generate value (script-writing in this case), and suddenly AI is taking lots of jobs so you're doing AI-review gig work, you'd be angry too. It's the equivalent of losing your job and having to run DoorDash to pay the bills. All the while you're being lied to with promises that this will somehow set you free to "work on your own terms". That's fine if you are gainfully employed and want to earn some extra cash, but not if that's all you have. This is just the next step in the gig economy, which strips away rights and security from employees and hands profits to employers.

107 points by joozio 6mo ago

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago

archive.is: https://archive.is/m19Zd https://archive.is/m19Zd

Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago
with the recent google captcha requiring phones and some people facing this issue and multitude of other issues with archive.is here is an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260511122830/https://serjaimelannister.github.io/htmlpipe/?https://ppng.io/m19Zd https://web.archive.org/web/20260511122830/https://serjaimel... (Side-note: I have created htmlpipe which archives archive.is pages on archive.org so I am more than happy to answer if someone has any questions about it and I have an submission of a blog regarding it too if someone is interested but yeah, enjoy the article now!)
- trollbridge 6mo ago
  yes please!

mkzet 6mo ago

I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.

toyg 6mo ago
> half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin women and dehydrated steroid-pumped men), mostly because they are abused to the point of absurdity.
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  The Americans, a great television series about Russian spies, really leaned into the wigs: 'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wig-of-the-week-ninas-emotional-disguises/360460/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wi... >Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties. >Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna. >Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favourite_wig/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favou...
herpdyderp 6mo ago
I, however, do look forward to a time when we can prompt our own TV shows. That second season that ruined your favorite show? Fix it. The second season that never happened? Create it. Of course AI needs to get better still for that to be bearable for many of us, but I'm still excited at the idea!
- voidpointer 6mo ago
  Isn't the scenario you are describing the ultimate collapse of art and culture as we know it? If everyone sits at home and creates the content that they want, what do we talk about? How do we engage in shared culture if there is nothing to experience together?
  - mantas 6mo ago
    Welcome to the life of fringe subcultures. Of course subcultures, even most fringe ones, still have some community. But even in generated content world, some people would end up with similar taste and that generated content being similar. They may even share that content and watch some of each other's content! And oh boy the joy of meeting that rare human who has similar taste! E.g. knowing some fringe band that created a demo tape 2 decades ago that you found in some strange torrent tracker. But yes, mass/pop culture as we know it would be dead. And IMO the world would be better off. I agree with other comments that may lead to people staying inside their comfort zone. But I think it's question of time when good portion of people would start sharing that content with other people. Expanding each others' imagination. And few that don't... Well, existing pop culture is not exactly good at expanding mind as well. And such decentralized content creation may be less prone to propaganda and other social control efforts.
  - darkwater 6mo ago
    Well, that was a recent invention anyway - at least in Europe where I live. TVs did not really reach most of the households until late '70s and the shared pop culture based on movies (mostly from US), cartoons (mix from Japan and US), advertisements (usually national) was created quite fast. It's not an immutable fact of the human society.
kylecazar 6mo ago
I share your feelings, but the title is confusing... this is actually about people using gig AI training platforms for extra income (instead of bussing tables like they used to). Not building AI for cinema.
vasco 6mo ago
There's so many indie movies without much cgi, or good old movies that you'll never live long enough to watch. Writing off a whole art form is a bit weird.
- hnthrowaway0315 6mo ago
  I think OP was saying that he/she only watches movies made before 2010. Coincidentally, I'm doing the same thing with movies, TV shows and games, and 2010 still feels too modern for me. I try to make it before 2005.
torben-friis 6mo ago
I mostly skip triple A hollywood movies, but the bulk of movies being made nowadays don't make use of any of that, mostly because it makes no sense in their genres. Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc. Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China starting to develop a world-friendly industry...
- throwforfeds 6mo ago
  American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.
  - torben-friis 6mo ago
    Much like everything else in the US, products suffer and sink in quality for being sidelined by individual interests. Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified... All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.
bsenftner 6mo ago
Maybe this is relevant? I worked in animation and VFX for an Academy Award winning VFX studio and several well known animation / game studios, starting around '90. I formally left the industry around '04 to work on my own tech startup. When I left, there was a lot of R&D work surrounding the huge amounts of data that an animation studio generates and works with; I was one of those people creating early deep learning systems for production forecasting. Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media. That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.
NickC25 6mo ago
You can stop watching big budget productions, but you shouldn't skip out on your local independent cinema scene. If you're in or around a large metro area, there will be local(ish) folks out there making interesting stuff. Might not be super fancy CGI or incredible sound design, but it will be humans telling human stories, which is the heart of cinema.

ffsoftboiled 6mo ago

Mirrors my own experience doing this type of work (only made it two weeks before I gave up) and my partners. Excellent piece.

amazingamazing 6mo ago

It is interesting to see how all of these folks are out of main work and doing gig work instead, with productions being moved to Canada and other places abroad. I wonder why. All of the strikes?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ido 6mo ago
Cost
spwa4 6mo ago
The writer's guild and other striking organizations put it to: 1) general decline in wages 2) only short-term work being available 3) streaming platforms never pay the way Hollywood/Broadcast TV did: bad pay, but with a share of show profits for decades afterwards. Now just bad pay So it was generally about getting their pay increased. Instead, the strike lead to a big decrease in pay that Netflix and Skydance (Paramount) are blamed for.
- doitLP 6mo ago
  Not just writers…there’s unions for every piece of the pie and they all have members and pensions and have to justify their existence. There’s the ever-increasing restrictions and cost of shooting in California and the huge incentives other localities offer to film and even commercial (advert) projects. My friend just flew the whole production to Louisiana to shoot a 30 second commercial because of the incentives. There’s the fact that even if a new show or movie is good, it is competing not only with other new stuff but also with the entire back catalogue of everything ever made that is instantly available for viewers. There’s streaming rights, that never paid as much as traditional TV even though it had broader reach. There’s competition with phone / social platforms that continue to optimize their content and algorithms with shorter feedback loops and more additive content, against trad production which takes a ton of money and time and upfront cost.
vrganj 6mo ago

orsorna 6mo ago

> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.

glimshe 6mo ago
"first world problems", as people say. And the tone also felt dismissive of the work done by the cleaner... If it's such a big amount, he could consider entering her line of business.
sligbad 6mo ago
If this is your takeaway, it's what you were looking to believe anyway...
- orsorna 6mo ago
  [dead]
Aurornis 6mo ago
That was my first clue that the author was squeezing this for a story. The snide joke about taking their kid on vacation so they could ignore each other felt really cold, too. The section where she tried to dunk on a coworker for trying to do the job well was also consistent with someone just squeezing this whole thing for a writing piece instead of trying to do the job. Nowhere in the article did she support the “everyone in Hollywood” claim, other than saying she found it in a Facebook group for writers.
- stringfood 6mo ago
  The author also suffers from ethos fry, where his failed career as a writer and entry level job experience nullifies his ability to come to a useful conclusion on AI and current affairs. How can someone who has shown little ability to time or predict the future or control his destiny be trusted when it comes to analyzing the emergence of new technologies? But I think that logic might be an Ad Hominem attack

LogicFailsMe 6mo ago

So... Hollywood... They were an oligarchy of billionaires living off minions living paycheck to paycheck before it was cool... Below the line talent always gets shafted there. And it would all collapse without the minimum viable safety net of the guilds... Musicians seem to be embracing AI as a platform given that's another oligarchy itself. Where's the Robert Rodriguez of AI film-making? We haven't even seen the Ed Wood here yet. Edit: and here we go with the enablers of the overlord status quo again. I'd love to know why people think Hollywood's effective caste system is worth preserving. You don't like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel? Cool, the smarter Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood are much worse and they're the ones that didn't get caught to this day.

Aurornis 6mo ago

I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs. The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience. I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner, or the long rant about not being invited to a Slack channel she needed for the work then later realizing they were in the channel from the start and just missed the required onboarding. There’s a section where we’re supposed to hate a coworker whose only offense is trying to do the job well. Doesn’t sound like a great job, but the article was trying so hard to show this as an “everyone in Hollywood” instead of admitting it was one person’s bumbling misadventure.

delichon 6mo ago
> claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My money angst was probably less than hers.
- rsynnott 6mo ago
  Well, presumably you didn't have a debilitating horse addiction.
  - rsynnott 6mo ago
    (It is fascinating to me, though, how these "I'm broke due to [completely bonkers lifestyle expense]" things span almost all income levels. From "decent salary but has four cars for no obviously explicable reason" to crippling horse addictions, for some people there just seems to be no income level at which they will not screw up their finances.)

bena 6mo ago

I think I understand why she told people not to look up her credits. It seems this may be a case of "I am representative of everyone's experience." Her first credit was in 2008 and then there is a 5 year gap between that and her next credit. Then 8 years between that one and the next. For comparison, I pulled up the crew for The Boys. Most of them have tighter credits. While there is probably some people in her situation. I feel that she also could have written this with the title: "I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Waiting Tables." And this isn't to disparage her. It was always a hard business and getting consistent work was always hard. Even if it is good.

deleted 6mo ago

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maxglute 6mo ago

IMO AI already doing better creative writing than most hollywood shows, I see myself enjoying premium mediocre slop.

godzillabrennus 6mo ago
IMO, AI is still not there, but getting better quickly, and I'm excited about how it is going to unlock so much creative talent held back by an expensive system that requires a lot of labor to create content. I know someone who has been trying to raise money for a while to create a movie he wrote a script for. He's registered it with SAG-AFTRA. He's put on dinners. He's worked tirelessly to pull it together. He is an unknown quantity with a couple of roles in movies but no track record of making movies. I keep watching the progress, counting down the days until I can feed his script into a tool and show him a version of his vision come to life. I don't doubt he'd still rather do it with human talent the old school way, but, like tens of millions of other people on earth who have a creative vision and aren't named Bezos, Musk, or Gates, he may never succeed in raising, and I think some version of those visions becoming a reality is better than none. It's also like watching people who understand the problems in an industry work on tech tools by vibe coding solutions.
- maxglute 6mo ago
  It's not there for medium or long form content, but I'm enjoying the hell out of kungfu cats, north korean gta, swole harry potter slop. Maybe my attention span too cooked, but I would enjoy a future of one-shot passion projects from 1000s of amateur creators. I'd also rather deal with Asian microshows where you get 100x5m episodes dropped everyday. Frankly hollywood lost moving from 20 episode per year seasons to 8 episodes every other year. Life's too short for current model, for content creators and consumers.

terseus 6mo ago

I understand that it is not easy to relate to the author who pays (or was paying) $150 for a house cleaner, I understand that this is a 1-person history and may be highly biased, I understand the author is motivated to create a story from it. However, if you think that any of the conditions described in the article are acceptable or that this is a fair price to pay for having AI, I think you are a horrible human being and I hope you'll be expelled from civilized society.

senordevnyc 6mo ago
We’re horrible humans who should be expelled from society if we think it’s fine for people to get paid $52/hr for a boring remote job at a shitty bureaucratic company? Ok.
- Ekaros 6mo ago
  Isn't that like almost 100k a year? Sounds like amount of money you should suffer a quite a bit for...

gwbas1c 6mo ago

> You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t. I see two problems here: 1: The streaming platforms are filling themselves with slop shows. Maybe not "AI slop," but slop in general. When I browse, I keep seeing lots of shows that I have no desire to watch, and wonder who actually watches them. Every time I open a streaming platform, they keep wanting me to watch a new series that I have no time to watch. 2: It seems there is an over-abundance of screenwriters.

jermaustin1 6mo ago
I agree with you (mostly), but I suggest you should spend an hour a week watching something new - do it while folding laundry or working out. Something you might never have chosen. There are gems out there waiting for discovery. Now onto my response: TV has always been this way, the only difference is there aren't time slots now, so they can develop a bunch of crap shows (that used to just get left for dead after pilot season), let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live). When it was ad-supported with 4 prime-time hours across 10-ish channels (between OTA, cable, and premium), every show had to count. Streaming removes that constraint, which has actually been beneficial to producers and consumers of content. More shows means more jobs for writers, actors, directors, crew, etc., even if those shows they are working on are completely forgettable. But with every gold rush, comes over-abundance of people panning for gold. So yes, there is an over-abundance of screenwriters. There is an over-abundance of choice on the platforms. There is an over-abundance of platforms to chose from. There is an over-abundance of over-consumption of content on these platforms.
- __d 6mo ago
  > let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live). And so you don’t contribute to the selection of shows. It’s a dilemma. I started streaming stuff I like the sound of despite the risk of being rug-pulled, because otherwise there’s no signal that they should fund series 2.
- 6mo ago

ForHackernews 6mo ago

> Then our managers announced that a “golden batch” of tasks would be released to the most talented, the most special, the royalty of annotators—the folks, we were told, who consistently scored a perfect 5 with an average handling time well below the recommended amount. Shades of Glengarry Glen Ross "These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads, and to you, they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers."

insane_dreamer 6mo ago

If you worked hard to get a degree from a prestigious college, and worked hard to get to the place where your skills were valued and used to generate value (script-writing in this case), and suddenly AI is taking lots of jobs so you're doing AI-review gig work, you'd be angry too. It's the equivalent of losing your job and having to run DoorDash to pay the bills. All the while you're being lied to with promises that this will somehow set you free to "work on your own terms". That's fine if you are gainfully employed and want to earn some extra cash, but not if that's all you have. This is just the next step in the gig economy, which strips away rights and security from employees and hands profits to employers.