It seems the most equitable solution would be to base residuals on watch-hours, which the services all track and which Nielsen currently ranks. But it has to be acknowledged that streaming works differently than broadcast tv. Netflix has over 200 million monthly subscribers, generating about $30 billion in income. A show can be a huge hit in terms of watched hours without making them an extra dime as it would in the days of ad-supported content because the revenue is fixed at subscriber levels - a hit just means a lot of existing subscribers spent their watch hours on something new in their library for a few days, not necessarily that the show brought in a bunch of new subscribers and more money (especially long term). And since subscribers have limited time, the money from Wednesday being a hit means fewer people watching Itaewon Class.
It appears that a particular, popular show can and does drive subscriptions/re-subscriptions for streaming services, as described in this article about Stranger Things.
Or fewer people watching House of the Dragon.
Streaming is different, but hit shows are still valuable. Hit shows, especially proprietary shows, make your service interesting and desirable. Hit shows make money for the people who own them.
Awesome! Can it do it in the style of Quentin Tarantino?
These are ridiculous arguments. ‘Vulture Capitalism’ == The search for efficiency and for growing markets. People just don’t like it when it affects their own jobs, but it’s the engine that has brought us great increases in our standards of living.
This one though is incredibly dumb:
Just like every other technological change in history. Telephone switchbvoard operators did not ask for automated switching. That was done by people trying to make PROFIT. The effect was to make long distance calling cheaper and easier for everyone, but no employed in manual switching ASKED for it.
ChatGPT and its ilk are going to take a LOT of jobs. They are also going to create a lot of jobs. Screenwriters are a drop in the bucket. Some estimates are that as many as 30% of ALL white collar jobs will be either eliminated or transformed by AI just in the next two years. Why should screenwriters get special protection from them? Are we going to see armies of spreadsheet slingers fighting to keep AI away from their work? How about copy editors? Tech writers? Programmers? Graphics artists? Business analysts? Project managers? Where are we going to stop?
He’s right that this is not new. People have been fighting against ‘techbro’ changes since the automated loom.
And growth is not ‘the mania of wall street’, it’s a requirement to maintain and improve human lives. A world of no growth is a world full of people fighting over a fixed pie. It’s also a world of decay and stagnation as the population grows but economic output doesn’t. It’s also a world where we stop striving, stop innovating, stop making new things.
The problem for the screenwriters is that you can’t close Pandora’s box. If chatbots can’t write effective screenplays or scripts, then the writers don’t need protection from them. If they can write screenplays well, then trying to block them as a union will just push work to non-union shops, independent authors and others who are under no such restriction.
The option of making AI go away and not affect their jobs is not available. All they can do is strike to keep their little corner of writing pure for a little while until the reality of how much they cost compared to AI starts to affect competitiveness.
They should instead be getting ahead of the technology. Figure out how you can use AI for rapid script prototyping so they can make better scripts than they used to.
If you are a writer of any sort today, Job #1 should be figuring out how to use AI to make you a better, faster writer. Not whingeing about how AI is going to take all the jobs, or fighting to stop AI from being implemented at all. Because that option is off the table. AI is too useful, too powerful, and too easy to use for it to ever go away. Adapt or die.
Which humans?
I’ve no clue how close it came to that style.
ChatGPT-4:
INT. ECLECTIC LIVING ROOM - DAY
Meet our two fabulous femme fatales, ROXY, a tall, curvy bombshell with a razor-sharp wit, and VELVET, a sultry, enigmatic beauty with a killer smile. They’re lounging on a plush velvet couch, sipping martinis and watching a badass action flick.
ROXY
(smiling wickedly)
Darlin’, this action-packed bloodbath we’re watchin’ has got the ChatGPT touch, don’t ya think?VELVET
(purring)
Oh, Roxy, you’re damn right! Using ChatGPT from OpenAI has revolutionized the way those Hollywood bigwigs create movie and TV scripts.They exchange smirks and clink their martini glasses.
CUT TO:
INT. FUTURISTIC WRITERS’ ROOM - DAY
A diverse team of hip, cool writers are huddled around a sleek holographic table, brainstorming while ChatGPT’s interface lights up with brilliant ideas.
ROXY (V.O.)
(chatting with excitement)
Just look at these creative geniuses! They’ve ditched the traditional grind and embraced the freakin’ future.VELVET (V.O.)
(laughing)
And now they’re pumpin’ out one mind-blowing masterpiece after another.CUT BACK TO:
INT. ECLECTIC LIVING ROOM - DAY
Roxy and Velvet seductively bite into a shared cherry as the action flick explodes with excitement in the background.
ROXY
(looking into the camera)
So, baby, are you ready to turn your storytelling up to 11?VELVET
(licking her lips)
Try ChatGPT from OpenAI, and let your imagination run wild.FADE OUT.
That’s my basic take on the subject. If all AI can do is produce low-quality derivative works, it’s not going to be putting any professional writers that are any good out of business. It might put some bad writers who’ve been coasting on the fact that the industry needed some people of their caliber before, but it strikes me as typical of organized labor to want to protect the worst of their lot at the expense of moving their craft forward into the future. It’s going to be the case that all creative workers are going to be using AI to help them generate ideas; the ones that don’t are simply going to be less productive as they spend more of their time performing tasks that others have eliminated through automation. This has happened in every industry as technology advances.
If the AI can produce high-quality output, refusing to use it is simply being a Luddite.
You say that like it’s a bad thing; why shouldn’t someone be upset if their job is replaced by automation?
Thanks. I’d ask for Wes Anderson now but I don’t want to create a moddable hijack.
Word. The Luddites didn’t have a problem with machines that made their lives better.
Does the WGA say anything about preventing writers from using AI to improve their productivity or output? They clearly don’t want non-writers to replace writers with AI and keep all the benefits of that increased productivity out of writer’s hands.
The point of these negotiations is to help direct the benefits of increased productivity, automation, new business models, and overall financial success towards the workforce instead of every penny of that benefit going to owners.
It’s not so much the “progress” that they’re trying to slow down, it’s the movement of money from their pockets to the owners.
They are. Hit shows and new content don’t necessarily increase subscriptions, but a steady trickle helps maintain subscriptions, preventing “churn.” Even if the new content isn’t watched that month, it seems to keep people from unsubscribing.
Hulu seems to have resigned themselves to churn. There’s a button to pause my subscription for 3 months, which I do a couple of times a year.
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that the entire internet buzzed over Netflix losing customers creating an existential crisis about it’s very existence? I said that was nonsense then. Correctly. Netflix gained 10 million customers in the second half of 2022 even though their share of the market has continuously declined since the start of Covid.
Money is not the issue. As with sports figures, the owners make at least an order of magnitude more than the employees. Billionaires are fighting with people making five figures. Their demands are only around $300 million apart. The cost of one good pitcher would cover the entire industry.
The suits are balking because a) that is what they always do, b) the demands of shareholders always outweigh to them the worth of the people who create the actual product that brings in the money, c) they like power, demonstrating power, and exerting power, and d) they are scared shitless. The ridiculous Netflix fluffle reminds them that the Future is nebulous and uncontrollable. They can disappear overnight the way SVB Bank did, no matter how solid they appear.
True and irrelevant. I’m saying nonsense again to any thought that the Future should just roll over the writers because that’s the way Progress works. The creatives - don’t forget that the Directors and Actors Guilds’ contracts will expire at the end of June - are the industry. They will continue to be the industry for a generation. The streaming services are not a miracle Future technology that will make them obsolete, and AI is not a miracle Future technology that will create popular entertainment anytime soon.
So the suits are scared. That’s the best time to wrestle them to the floor and riffle through every pocket. They know they have to lose this contest; the show being put on is just so the Directors and Actors don’t win as big as they should.
In the short term everybody will lose. In the medium term the corporations will make billions. Will they all be the same corporations making billions today? Not likely. Therefore: shitless, scared. In the really long term, however, writer’s strikes have been a constant in the industry since the 1930s. Nobody outside the industry can remember the outcome of any of them, because the entertainment rolled onward just like before. It will this time too.
Yes, and we should be very grateful they do, because the relentless drive for improvement and efficiency is what made the modern world.
What a strange way to phrase the fact that shareholders demand that the company focus on return on their investment. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be shareholders, and the only people who could start companies would be the very rich.
Tell me, if you have a 401(k) that held Netflix, would you be personally happy if Netflix stopped focusing on shareholder return and instead paid their employees far more, killing profit and share price and hurting your retirement? And if Netflix started dojng that, any fund manager who invested other people’s money in them would be derelict, wouldn’t they?
Bullshit. They like growing their companies and making them more profitable. There are lots of ways to demonstrate ‘power’ if you think that’s what motivates them. This sounds like garden variety hatred of capitalists.
This is true, both of the owners and workers of these companies. No one knows what the right staffing levels are anymore. No one knows who the top performers will be once AI is in the mix. No one knows what jobs should or shouldn’t be given over to AI, etc. And these are decisions that can make or break their companies. Who can blame them for being scared?
The writers are simply being short-sighted. If AI does a better job of writing scripts than they do (or writers using AI vs those who don’t), then eventually AI will be writing scripts. Can anyone else think of a transformational, highly profitable technology that we shelved and never allowed to be used because it would take away jobs?
And Netflix and other contrnt producers have another big problem: Scripts are only the beginning. It will not be long before feature length shows can be made completely by AI. In just a new years (or months?) A single human working with AIs may be able to produce a product every bit as good looking as one produced by a major studio.
When that happens, Hollywood itself is in big trouble. Maybe not the stars, who will find a way to monetize their likenesses, but the armies of production people, cameramen, gaffers, lighting techs, etc will simply be gone. Streaming services could find themselves in competition with Youtubers producing movies that look like big budget spectaculars.
If independent producers produce superior products for a fraction of the price of a Hollywood movie, they can offer them to threaters at a much better deal than traditional movies, or set up streaming services of their own.
In the meantime, if AI can actually produce scripts as good as the writers, then they have no leverage and their strike will fail. That’s probably why they are striking now - before the next release of an AI makes them obsolete.
But if the streaming services lock themselves into a contract with screenwriters that prevents them from innovating along with others and better screenplays are written by AI, they could destroy their entire business model.
It did a pretty poor job; there were no F-bombs and nobody called anybody the N word.
This strike is local to me and I have friends and know plenty of people directly affected. I’m firmly on the side of the creatives here.
But this is all business. Everyone wants their cut and they’ll figure out what it takes to keep everyone making money.
Part of the issue is fear of AI producing derivative works by parasitizing/plagiarising existing works by human writers. This has already happened in the case of visual art, IIUC.
From the bit I quoted earlier:
Depends. Do I have a Soap Opera Disease that will shuffle me off this mortal coil in a few months, or do I expect my retirement to last at least a decade or two? That has a rather large impact on my preference for short-term vulture capitalism versus long-term infrastructure building.
Some of my first prompts with ChatGTP were for scripts, and was the first thing that blew me away about it. This one is from early December last year and I would dearly love to see it actually acted out by the cast:
“Write a script for an episode of Friends where Ross buys an avocado but finds out that it is actually an advanced scout for an alien invasion fleet”
[Scene: Central Perk. Ross is sitting on the couch, holding an avocado in his hand.]
Ross: Hey guys, look what I just bought!
Monica: An avocado?
Ross: Yeah, I thought I’d make some guacamole for our movie night tonight.
Rachel: You do realize that avocados are actually a fruit, right?
Ross: Oh come on, everyone knows that avocados are vegetables.
Phoebe: (entering the cafe) Hey guys, what’s up?
Monica: Ross just bought an avocado.
Phoebe: Ooh, I love avocados! Can I have some?
Ross: Sure, here you go. (hands Phoebe the avocado)
[Phoebe takes a bite of the avocado and suddenly starts choking.]
Phoebe: (coughing) What the hell is this?!
Ross: What do you mean? It’s an avocado.
Phoebe: (coughing) This is not an avocado! It’s some kind of alien scout!
Monica: What are you talking about?
Phoebe: (pointing to the avocado) This thing has been communicating with other alien ships! It’s part of an invasion fleet!
Ross: (shocked) What?!
Rachel: (laughing) Oh my God, Phoebe, you are so full of it!
Phoebe: I’m serious, guys! I can feel it in my psychic powers!
Monica: (skeptical) Uh huh. And what exactly do these aliens look like?
Phoebe: (closing her eyes) I see them… they have slimy green skin and big black eyes… and they’re coming to Earth to enslave us all!
Ross: (panicked) Oh my God, we have to stop them!
Chandler: (entering the cafe) Hey guys, what’s going on?
Monica: Phoebe thinks the avocado that Ross bought is actually an alien scout.
Chandler: (dumbfounded) Uh, okay.
[The group starts arguing about what to do about the avocado. Ross suggests calling the government, while Rachel suggests just throwing it away. Phoebe insists that they need to communicate with the aliens and find out their intentions.]
[The scene cuts to Ross and the rest of the group standing in front of the avocado, which is now inside a glass container.]
Ross: (to the avocado) Okay, listen up, you slimy little alien! We know what you’re up to, and we’re not going to let you get away with it!
Phoebe: (to Ross) Ross, we need to be diplomatic. We need to find out why they’re here and what they want from us.
Rachel: (to Phoebe) Yeah, and while we’re at it, maybe we can ask them to share some of their avocado recipes.
[The group continues to argue and debate what to do, while the avocado sits silently in the glass container.]
[The scene fades to black, ending the episode.]