1y ago

Hollywood Shuts Down After 160,000 Actors Walk Off the Set

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I have mixed feelings about this. I hope they all are compensated fairly, but technology keeps getting better and capitalism latches on to the absolute cheapest solution. If that includes firing most employees and using AI to save billions a year then they will do it. I think this will just excacerbate AI proliferation in the end. Alas, no one gets paid to strike in America.
- Just like the last writers strike produced an endless unmitigated firehose of reality TV and bastardized all the good TV channels, this move is going to double down on that model
  AI isn't going to be able to do what actors can do. Not for some time yet. The content will probably start off okay, but we've already seen issues with AI used for "creative" purposes. It sucks. The quality of content on streaming platforms is already hurting. This is going to make it even shittier.
  Something will get figured out, because now there are gonna be a lot of people sitting around at home with no bread and no games.
- This is why governments need to get involved legislationing profits from AI work. Shareholders can't be the beneficiary of lower costs from AI when it means workers lose their jobs. There needs to be an AI specific tax, to support people losing their livelihoods.
  
  I think they are doing the right thing before AI gets firmly set in as the "norm" and that laws are put in place that movies have to use human actors, or they get labeled properly as AI movies so we can skip them if we don't approve of AI taking over the industry.
  
  so we can skip them if we don’t approve of AI taking over the industry.
  Spoiler alert: Nobody will give a fuck, people will watch AI movies, and human actors will lose their jobs.
  The only question is, shall we tax AI usage and implement UBI? Or watch as entire industries full of people will be laid off? And HOW to tax AI usage? Just implement huge taxes on dividends, stock buybacks and annual salaries and bonuses > 10 mill?
  
  Very true. The amount of luddites in this thread are amazing.
  It sounds like angry old people telling at a car in the horse era. It's happening whether you like it or not. Taxing it as a special case is ridiculous, especially since it just means you move your operations to a friendly jurisdiction that won't tax you.
  Happened with a large portion of Hollywood moving to Canada awhile back.
  It will happen with AI. Embrace it and find a way to make money with it. Fighting it won't do any good.
  This is what separate successful people from failures. Most people are failures because they can't envision a way to adapt so rail against progress. Those that see an opportunity instead of a problem are the ones they are going to succeed.
  
  Yeah. Fuck collective action and an entire industry fighting for their own survival. You get yours!
  
  the car replaced the horse, the plane replaced the ship, we still drive, we still travel.
  My prediction is that AI will replace the PC like it replaced the typewriter, like it replaced the quill.
  People will still write and act, but it will be a faster process.
- The actors' anti-AI protests are much, much stronger than the writers' (and I say this as someone who is nevertheless 100% supportive of the writers' demands vis-a-vis AI). Because the actors are literally talking about studios demanding to have the right to use their likeness. That's not a technological hurdle that has to be overcome, it's literally just profiting off of someone else's image without having to pay them. A mere $200 to hire an actor for one day, and they own their likeness in perpetuity; that's what studios are supposedly asking for.
  The writers' case is still very strong, in my opinion. Because their fear (and I think it's very founded) is not that their jobs will be replaced by AI. Not in a real sense. But that they'll be forced to do like 90% of the work for like 50% of the pay because of studios' use of AI. The way studio credits/payment works for writers, "revising" an existing script pays less than writing a script fresh. So if the studios can create a really shitty script with AI and hand it to a writer who has to do a significant amount of work editing it to be in an actually-usable state. But because they're being paid to revise it, not write it, they don't get paid commensurate to the amount of work actually being done.
  In theory, the writers' case could eventually be harmed by actual use of AI in a way that the actors' simply cannot (an AI could theoretically eventually replace an actor entirely, but that's not the debate on the table right now). I think that "eventually" is much further away than most techbros seem to suggest, because frankly LLMs are just not as close to AGI as it seems they usually get thought of as. But that eventually could happen, and then the nature of a writers' job will have to change more substantially in a way that does hurt them quite a bit more. Though it's worth noting that AI is even further away from doing the less-obviously-"writery" work writers do, which often sets them on the path to becoming directors and producers, and without that pipeline for creating the higher-level roles, film studios are going to struggle to keep making films.
- Well, yeah. That's part of why they're on strike lol. They are very aware of that threat. Everyone is

428 comments