# The Open Letter to "Pause All AI Development" **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Tags:** ai\ **Created:** [March 30, 2023, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-open-letter-to-pause-all-ai-development/981862 "2023-03-30T00:49:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 212
**Author:** ![Banquet\_Bear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banquet_bear/32/373_2.png) [@Banquet\_Bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banquet_Bear)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2023, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-open-letter-to-pause-all-ai-development/981862/212 "2023-05-03T03:16:31Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > This is a bad time to become a screenwriter or fiction author. Unless you are the next Adam McKay or Paddy Chayefsky, you’re going to basically be scrubbing dialogue and massaging prompts. …which of course, is the entire point of the strike. The writers can’t allow this to happen because, and I’m not being hyperbolic here, if they do, it will destroy the film and television industry as we know it. As I posted in the other thread: > [@John Rogers](#): > > 1. The bosses of these companies have stopped caring about whether the shows and movies are profitable — because THEY ARE, we know they are, the companies have made between $28-30 BILLION in profit — PROFIT — _every year for the last five years_. > 2. They’ve decided to chase the classic techbro, financialization metric, the mania of modern Wall Street — growth. Nonstop growth. Something you can base stock options on. But as the man says, the only thing that grows forever is cancer, and even that eventually kills the host. > 3. The new robber barons of Hollywood are on a suicide run. They’ll extract as much wealth out of the system as they can before it crashes, and they’ll beat up the workforce as much as they need to to create “savings” to make Wall Street happy, to stretch out the run. > 4. THIS IS NOT NEW. This is classic vulture capitalism, this is what happened to K-mart, Toys R’ US, this is airline stock buybacks, it’s just moved from hard infrastructure and retail to the information and entertainment world. > This isn’t really about “Artificial Intelligence” at all. This isn’t really “AI.” Its the “classic techbro” mania for non-stop growth. The modern era of robber barons, of unrestrained capitalism. When somebody said earlier in the thread that “the proper solution is to force people to suck it up” this is what "sucking it up looks like. This is the endgame. “Scrubbing dialogue” and “massaging prompts.” SPOILER warning for “The Leftovers”. CW Suicide. There are things that an AI will never be able to do. The showrunner for the Leftovers talks about a pivotal decision that was made in the writer’s room that almost entirely came down to what the actress bought to the table. No amount of “writing prompts” will ever replace what happened in that writer’s room that day. > **[‘The Leftovers’: Damon Lindelof on the ‘Tremendous’ Debate Over the Finale’s...](https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/the-leftovers-laurie-alive-finale-amy-brenneman-damon-lindelof-1201836872/)** > > Damon Lindelof explains how a last-minute change resulted in resurrecting one of the series’ most beloved characters. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-open-letter-to-pause-all-ai-development/981862)._