Writers Guild of America goes on strike (5/2/23) tentative deal (9/25/23) Now accepted (10/9/23)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

…well, no. “Vulture capitalism” is exactly as described. It isn’t about “the search for efficiency and growing markets.” Its the utterly misguided belief that the size of the market will forever go up. That the goal is to extract as much wealth out of the system before it crashes. Its “agile capitalism.” It’s inherently contradictory. It leads to what happened to K-mart, to Toys R US, to what we are seeing with media conglomerates now, to “live services” in the gaming industry, and if the Writers Guild don’t get what they are fighting for, will lead to the end of film and television as we know it.

The gig economy hasn’t increased the standard of living for the people who now have to rely upon it to survive. It drove down wages. It drove down worker protections. It put health insurance out of reach. It made a few already rich people significantly richer. But it wasn’t an “engine that bought everyone great increases in their standard of living.” For a not insignificant amount of people their standard of living declined.

Except not every " technological change in history" was the result of “people trying to make a profit.” And even if that were true, there is a difference between a sustainable business plan and the kind-of-nonsense we are seeing from the robber barrons today. What the studios are doing isn’t sustainable. There will come a point (and arguably we have already hit it) where growth levels off. Where they are unable to extract any more wealth. Then the system will crash. If there is anyone in the industry who has seen this happen over-and-over again its John Rogers. Every absurd, over the top premise that ended up in a typical Leverage episode was based on things that actually happened.

I utterly reject this premise. Completely.

Television is driven from the writers room. There is a reason why the showrunner on almost every show on television right now is a writer first and foremost. Even at the most rudimentary level the writers aren’t “a dime a dozen.”

Its called a “negotiation.” This isn’t “special protection.” Why shouldn’t the writers be able to negotiate for a deal that works best not only for them, but for people like us who want to watch interesting, entertaining television not driven by an algorithm?

I mean, yes?

I very much want the AI Corporate Overlords to stop using my photography without my permission, and I hope that the various lawsuits in place right now are successful. In many cases AI will make things orders of magnitude worse for customers. “Where will it stop” isn’t a valid argument. Its just hand-waving.

There were no tech bros around at the time of the automated loom. You are talking about a completely different thing.

You are confusing growth with “non-stop growth” of the type that John Rogers described. He was very specific here.

The mstake you make here (and its a big one) is that the writers don’t need protection from AI.

They need protection from the studios.

The Writers Guild haven’t taken AI off the table. It can be a useful tool and they’ve explicitly acknowledged this.

The chatbots can’t write effective screenplays or scripts. We all know this. But the vulture capitalists don’t care. They don’t give a damn about quality. They don’t understand that the reason why people loved Game of Thrones wasn’t because it was fantasy and dragons, but because it told a compelling story with twists and turns that made people want to tune in every week to see what happened next. They, like you, consider writers to be a “drop in the bucket.” Easily replaced. But they, like you, are wrong.

But AI can’t write screenplays well. AI can’t sit in on set, observe the unique dynamics at play when the actor take centre stage, and adjust the script accordingly.

And the studios can try to push work to non-union shops. But the problem they will hit if they try to do this is that…writers aren’t a drop in the bucket. It isn’t as easy as you imagine it to be. It would lead to a drop in script quality because non-union writers based in the US simply don’t have the experience and skill level to be able to cope with the scale and pace of an already stretched writers room, and non-union writers outside of the US lack the lived experiences that US writers would have.

The option is actually very much there. Its part of what this strike is all about. You might not like it, but people are allowed to negotiate. They are allowed to say “no, we don’t think this is acceptable.”

This isn’t a matter of “competitiveness.” AI can’t compete. End of story.

What does “better scripts than they used to” even mean? What is your benchmark here?

Because in order for your argument to work, you need to have a benchmark. You need to define what you are talking about here first. I can’t imagine “rapid script prototyping” would produce a better script than a well-staffed writers room breaking a story over a couple of weeks. In a writers room, the writers will fight. They will passionately argue that a character should live, or should die, and others in the room will argue why they are right or they are wrong.

AI doesn’t argue. It does what it is told. There is no friction here. That human element, the ability to take a story in an unexpected direction, to tell a tale that is a reflection of a lived reality, these are things that an AI aren’t able to do.

Why?

Is this your benchmark? Speed? To create great television you need to be fast?

I don’t think you are correct. Writers for television have always been fast. The existence of daily soaps and 24 episode seasons are a testament to that. But episode counts are coming down. But that isn’t because writers aren’t “writing fast enough.”

If you understood the WGA position, you would understand that no, they are not “fighting to stop AI from being implemented at all.”

And it isn’t whinging. If the studios have their way it will take jobs away from writers. As someone wrote on Twitter today:

That option is very much not off the table.

AI can be useful.

But you keep missing the bigger picture here. Which is why people watch television or go to the movies or read books or go to art galleries in the first place.

Not everything is tangible. I can’t explain exactly why I love the art that I consume, except that in some way, it resonates with me.

This is what storytelling is. Its a product of :: waves hands :: everything. Why did John Rogers describe this as a “suicide run?” Because if you remove people from the storytelling process, then you end up with stories that don’t matter to anyone anymore. They won’t resonate. You can’t relate to an algortihm.

This is what you don’t seem to get. You won’t get Breaking Bad or The Leftovers or Ted Lasso or Severence with an AI-lead writers room. What you get is whatever it is that the studio heads think will make them the most money. It will drive the talented people (in all departments) out of the industry. It will make film and television more boring and ultimately lead to less growth, less money. A suicide run.

False dilemma. The writers have adapted. They adapted to “mini-rooms.” They adapted to reduced seasons. They adapted to effectively getting kicked off set. They’ve adapted to being paid effectively poverty wages.

The WGA conceeded a lot of ground in 2020 when the pandemic and a falling stock market took industrial action off the table. Things are orders of magnitude worse now.

I would much rather Netflix had a policy for sustainable growth, and had open and transparent policy around streaming numbers so I could decide for myself if they were making the right decisions when they canceled a show after a single season. If Netflix decided to pay writers a livable wage that wouldn’t upset me at all. Thats what every business should be doing, don’t you agree?

Rubbish. They know exactly where this is going. They know exactly what the studios want to do.

Editorial photography.

I can use photoshop to edit a photograph I’ve taken to make the subject of my photo look more demonic. And in doing so, it would bring more eyeballs to the newspaper that was publishing it to make them more profit.

But I’m not allowed to use photoshop. Not for anything transformational. I can make basic exposure and contrast adjustments. But most editorial rules and guidelines don’t allow anything beyond that. The technology is “shelved” because the consquences of allowing that technology could lead to extremely bad outcomes.

As John Rogers eloquently stated: a suicide run. This is where it leads too. Crush the writers. Then crush the armies of production people, cameramen, gaffers, lighting techs.

Yep. Thats the goal here. The end result won’t be “Youtubers producing movies that look like big budget spectaculars.” Because that is already happening.

The end result will be boring movies. Boring television. Unfunny comedies. It would lead to a decline in audiences, decline in growth, decline in profits.

Suicide run.

You’ve heard of Youtube Originals, right? Remember what happened to them?

LOL.

Independent producers already produce great movies at a fraction of the price of a typical “Hollywood Blockbuster”, and many of those movies are very profitable. You aren’t reinventing the wheel here.

And streaming services are very expensive to set up and run, but the biggest hurdle to overcome would be having enough shows/movies on your service to have people even consider signing up for you. It is MUCH simpler to use other platforms and use things like Kickstarter and Patreon to fund it, like Viva La Dirt League.

Well AI can’t actually produce scripts as good as writers. But that actually isn’t the issue here.

They are striking now because they didn’t strike in 2020 in a good faith gesture due to the pandemic. They won’t do that again.

There is nothing in the WGA proposal that would prevent the streaming services from “innovating.” Having an algortihm write a script isn’t exactly an innovation. And you haven’t explained what “better” means either.

42

Bullshit right back at you.

I’ve carefully studied the history, not just of writer’s strikes, but of worker/corporation battles in this country back to the rising industrialization after the Civil War. In the broad sense it is never true that companies would not be profitable businesses if they paid their workers a larger share of revenues. It is true that shareholders demand a return on investment, but the notion that shareholder return must be maximized over all other competing interests - worker salaries and benefits, pensions, safety, environmental friendliness, civic responsibilities, diversity - is a recent development. (Usually said to start from writings of Milton Friedman. Fuck him. If he isn’t the actual villain in this particular case there’s plenty of reasons to fuck him anyway.)

I’m not going through the history of corporations case by case, but the best broad refutation of this notion is the history of paternalism. Many of the most vehement foes of unions were also the most paternalistic. George Pullman, Henry Ford, George Eastman. They voluntarily gave their workers sets of benefits that distinguished them from competitors and also cost them maximum profit. Most of the movie moguls who were the enemies in the creation of the Screen Actors Guild and the other Hollywood Guilds were also extremely paternalistic, handing out benefits with one hand and ruthlessly oppressing workers with the other.

The Screen Actors Guild was founded in 1933. Hollywood was not decimated by the horror of forcing producers to bid competitively for talent. Instead it went into a Golden Age of product that coincided with tremendous profit for the studios.

There has never been a time in American corporate history in which money would not have flowed into likely companies because they diverted some small fraction of the profits to other than stockholders. I will concede that out of the millions of corporations (and other legal structures) that have formed since the Civil War one can find some - many - who have failed because they were not profitable. A close study, however, will find that the vast majority of them had manifold other problems that overwhelmed worker pay as the finishing stroke.

Of course corporate entities are the necessary legal device to amass huge sums of money to form vast firms that have and will transform society under capitalism. I am a capitalist despite the enormous flaws of capitalism just as I am a democrat despite the enormous flaws of democracy. Friedman’s Folly of insisting that shareholders must be considered not just first but only is a serious flaw in capitalism. People seem to be on the brink of discarding it as a principle. Long past time.

As for AI and writers, that is what writers call a red herring. AI will come, will be adopted, and will be adjusted to. Nothing in that sequence precludes writers today making as much money off their skills as they can squeeze out of the suits. Who, in any study of corporate psychology, wield power for the sake of their egos over any fiduciary necessity. Read any history of business. Read especially any history of Hollywood from its beginning until today. Corporations reward psychopaths and therefore attract and promote them. They can no longer be defended, and even businesses are recognizing how deleterious they are for the corporations. (Note my cites are from Fortune and Forbes, hardly leftist anti-corporate entities.)

The Future will come because that’s what it does. There is no Iron Law or Invisible Hand that decrees that a disproportionate share of its profits go to executives or shareholders. Support the writers. They’re on the correct side of history. They have always been.

43

But that’s terrible. I mean it’s absolutely horrible. I don’t even really like Friends, but at least the writers tried to make their characters human beings, albeit ones with broadly drawn quirks. This just recognizes the quirks but forgets that they are an aspect of human characters.

44

…yeah, the thing is this is how Sam’s “rapid script prototyping” would work. It would start with the studio suits deciding “what the market wants” based largely on pre-existing prejudices and bias.

Then: they rapidly prototype the season outline:

The outline gets handed to an expert “prompter” who turns each synopsis into a readable script.

The script then gets handed to the “writing team” which doesn’t do any writing at all. They won’t have time to write because its really just a guy punching up dialogue in between Doordash deliveries.

Then it goes into production where they will try to make the script work. Experienced writing teams understand what happens when a script goes into production. A chatbot does not. And if things haven’t fallen apart before things go into production, they will when it does.

Because the script is the blueprint. Its the thing that holds everything together. Everybody working on the same page, from art direction to props to cinematography, the shooting script is at the centre of the process.

45

Sometimes. But growth has also brought a great many developments that do the opposite of maintaining and improving human lives, as in the case of climate change and other environmental devastation.

The true challenge for modern humanity is to figure out when and how to encourage growth, and when and how to avoid it. We won’t help matters by just slavishly assuming that the goal of maximizing profit must be prioritized in all circumstances, or that workers aren’t allowed to exert pressure on management to obtain more of the profit for themselves.

Demanding that the company must never be fettered in its quest to maximize returns for shareholders, and blindly trusting that markets will handle any negative consequences, is a lazy and stupid approach to take to the difficult complex questions of how best to increase human prosperity. I’m not in the “kill all billionaires” camp by any means, but I’m not in the “whatever the billionaires choose to do is good for humanity and must be enthusiastically endorsed” one, either.

This is a well-known piece of pious libertarian orthodoxy (along with the assumption that strikes and workers’ collective bargaining are by definition bad), but it’s horseshit. Humans have striven and innovated throughout our entire history as a species, not just during the past few centuries when we developed a global industrial economy and modern capitalism.

ISTM that this is an extremely distorted take on what Exapno_Mapcase is actually saying. Nobody’s arguing that for-profit companies should ignore shareholder return and take profits out of the equation altogether. But nobody’s falling for your fallacious argument that there’s a stark binary choice between always maximizing profit at workers’ expense, and eradicating profit entirely.

In any case, AFAICT this harrumphsplosion about heretical attitudes toward corporate monetizing of technological advances is largely beside the point with respect to the current WGA strike. The central issue, AIUI, is one that the Guild has been complaining about since long before chatbots were the current buzz: namely, prolonged grinding down of writers’ compensation and working conditions.

46

Generally this sort of thing happens because there are enough people willing to work for the low compensation and in the terrible working conditions that produce things at roughly the same quality as those that choose to not work at that rate. Thus, it sounds like more “damn foreigner stole my job” than a legitimate grievance. If you don’t like the market rate of pay, one choice is to quit and do something else.

Collectively bargaining is simply taking the role of another goliath trying to throw its weight around the room at the expense of those who are willing to work for the prevailing wage but now can’t because the organization they were forced to join in order to find any work has told them that they can’t actually work for the prevailing wage because more powerful people think they can get a better deal.

It’s been said quite often that the writers here are not a dime-a-dozen types that more can be found of easily. If people just left the industry when they felt the pay wasn’t worth it, and then studios raised salaries to get them to come back, it wouldn’t be a problem. That people aren’t doing this and the studios reacting in that way heavily suggests that the writers are dime-a-sixpack, which while not as cheap as possible, and that it requires a great deal of talent to be reasonably good at it, there’s just an overabundance of people that want to be writers and are good enough compared to the demand.

For years the corporate masters in other industries were able to keep wages down due to beyond-trivial unemployment, and now that the tables have turned and unemployment is unhealthily low, pro-labor groups mock how the executives complain that no one will work any more. This seems to make them forget that some industries still might have this sort of power over their employees.

I feel people that are talented should be individually able to bargain for greater salaries pointing at how productive they are (and in the industry in question, how popular those products are). Having to collectively bargain is a sign of weakness in my mind. I admit that there certainly is a power imbalance at work in many industries, and in those industries where work takes a heavy toll on one’s body through manual exertion, it makes sense to have worker protections and labor unions to protect the health of the employees. I just don’t see it necessary in an industry that if all the people involved were wiped off the face of the earth it would have literally no impact on anyone else’s ability to survive, unlike with a steel plant where the products are extremely important in myriad different ways. Maybe some real estate owners would feel the pinch with fewer paying tenants, but those types should know the risk involved in owning real estate and I doubt any would go hungry. I have literally no sympathy for anyone who could simply quit and get a job doing something else that’s paying great wages because there aren’t enough workers in the rest of the economy, but stays doing their shitty job for shitty wages because they like being a creative person.

47

…I’m sorry, but how are you imagining that this would work? Especially considering that one of the very things the guild is fighting for here is the fact that streaming services are withholding the very information that shows “how popular those products are?”

And how do you overcome the very real biases that you get in individual negotiations? Hollywood already has a significant diversity crisis. We know that white men have significant advantages when it comes to the bargaining table. We know that in 2022 women only comprised “24% of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films”, even when 50% of film school graduates are woman. Individual negotiations wouldn’t fix this. It would make the gap worse.

There are 20,000 members of the Writers Guild. The idea that there should be 20,000 individual negotiations each and every doesn’t make any sense.

That isn’t something either party would want. This isn’t a “sign of weakness.”

I don’t think that “if all the people involved were wiped off the face of the earth it would have literally no impact on anyone else’s ability to survive” is a really good metric for determining what work has value in a society. We could wipe all the homeless people from the face of the earth tomorrow. We could wipe all the Black people from the face of the earth tomorrow. Both of these things could happen and it “wouldn’t have any impact on anyone else’s ability to survive.”

But that isn’t the way I think our society should work.

Its like, they aren’t demanding your sympathy. You might think that their job has no value, and thats fine. You are entitled to express your opinion.

But this is real work. And like every other person who has invested in a career is really isn’t as simple as “just quitting and getting another job.” It isn’t just because they “like being a creative person.” Its that they are skilled at being a creative person, they create something of value that generates a tremendous amount of wealth, and is enjoyed by millions of people all around the world.

That shit might not mean anything to you, but it sure means a lot to the studios, and it means a lot to people like me. I just finished watching the show “Totally Completely Fine” starring Thomasin McKenzie, written by Gretel Vella. And I pretty much bawled through the whole thing.

And you know, I come back to what you said about how writers have “literally no impact on anyone else’s ability to survive.” And I think about shows like Totally Completely Fine, and the Leftovers, and Station Eleven, that I’ve watched at times in my life when I’ve been in very bad places, and I’m just going to say you are flat-out-wrong here. We’ve been telling stories forever. They mean something.

48

That’s like seeing a singing dog and complaining that it was a little flat on the high notes. I was absolutely flabbergasted that an AI could produce something as coherent as that in the first place, not complaining that an early-generation AI can’t write exactly as well as an established professional human writer.

49

I’ll be concise. This is lunacy.

Admittedly, the suits in the business have loved this thinking and have tried to insist upon it since the two-reel movie was invented. Perhaps you might ask yourself why that is.

50

…a really good article from Ed Zitron that addresses some of the points made in this thread.

51

I hate this sentiment with the burning fire of a thousand suns. The arts are important. They are absolutely vital to a healthy human existence. And writers are artists.

Take away all the TV shows you watch, all the novels and biographies you’ve read, all the movies, all your favorite music, plays, paintings, sculptures, comics, hell even the fabulously plated meal you had at that nice restaurant. What do you have left? Not fucking much. Good luck having a meaningful life staring at a fucking steel beam all day.

Gods I’m sick of people shitting on the arts and artists.

52

I think there is a more insidious side to this.

No one really thinks all writing (and art) will disappear. They instead tend to just not value the arts because “anyone can do it.”

I have seen this with writing in particular but it can apply to most any art you can think of. There seems to be a sense that anyone with a 5th grade education can write so why pay someone to do it? Everyone can do it! It’s a cheap skill.

Of course, we should know that really exceptional wiring is hard to come by and should be valued but companies seems to HATE paying for good writers. Be it movies or TV shows or PC games. Why pay someone $100k to write something when you can pay someone nothing to write something?

The weird thing is, we have repeatedly seen well written media succeed. Shows like Breaking Bad or Ted Lasso exceled because of fantastic writing. Computer games like “The Last of Us” did so well because of great writing (and became a successful TV show). Red Dead Redemption. The Witcher. Bioshock. Mass Effect. The list goes on. Yet the LAST thing many companies want to spend money on is a writer (even when their success as a company was built on well written computer games) because almost everyone knows how to write. Right?

53

Which reminds me of the cliche of the person who comes up to a famous writer and says “I have a great idea for a novel. I’ll tell it to you, you write it, and we’ll split the profits 50/50.”

I suppose now the person with the Great Idea For A Novel could get ChatGPT to do the writing, and see how that turns out.

54

Give it a few years, and it’ll probably turn out pretty well.

That said, someone with actual creative experience should be able to leverage the same AI system to do even better.

55

It’s more like seeing a dog who’s human has trained it to bark at higher and lower pitches according to hand gestures. It’s a neat trick but it isn’t singing. You wouldn’t put it on to listen to at home.

My favorite bit was when Phoebe took the avocado from Ross and bit into it. Was Ross holding a peeled avocado, getting juice and fruit all over his clothes? Did Phoebe bite into an unpeeled avocado? Does ChatGPT know what an avocado is or how humans use them? Admittedly I didn’t read much more as my brain started to hurt.

I’m not going to spend more time on this as there are plenty of threads about ChatGPT already, and as some posters have pointed out most of the writer’s complaints have nothing to do with AI, but the relevance to this thread is that if studio execs think the can bring in AI as a virtual scab, it won’t work. No one will watch the shows it comes up with.

56

You’d be surprised at what people will watch. I actually thought that was a pretty good script for a Friend’s episode, but I also think that Friend’s was bottom of the barrel lowest common denominator drek. You could put an AI on churning out sitcoms for syndication all day, and most sitcoms would be improved. People will watch it.

And we are also only seeing the very beginnings of AI. This is like saying that little Wolfgang will never be able to compose music, because at 3 months old, he can barely hold a tune with his babbles. Anyone making future plans based on the current state of AI is going to be left behind as it continues to advance, and they try to hold their ground.

To be sure, I’m not advocating for this change, I’m just acknowledging the reality of it.

57

Again, I don’t want to get into this too much as there are already threads about ChatGPT and this thread should be about the writer’s strike, which is only tangentially related to AI.

58

Fair enough, but I do think that this is more than tangentially related to AI, as it involves a large part of their demands, and they have to do this now, because if they had this strike in a couple of years, AI script writing could well be better than humans, and then they’d have no leverage at all.

59

If anyone ever asks me to explain what an excluded middle is, I might show them this rhetorical question.

But let’s try not excluding the middle:

This becomes a real question, not a bit of hyperbolic rhetoric, and the answers to these questions are:

  1. Yes
  2. No

It’s a real question. I do have a retirement account with my wife, and we’ve directed our financial manager to invest in companies that follow a set of ethical guidelines, including paying their workers well and not engaging in union-busting activities. That’s because we live in a society. We want to be able to retire comfortably; but we also want other people to live their best lives. We don’t maximize for one thing, we balance competing concerns. If we get a smaller return on our financial investment, but we get a society with less poverty, that’s a trade-off we’re willing to make.

Our current economic system strongly discourages publicly-held corporations from such multifactor decisionmaking: it tells corporations to maximize for a single variable (shareholder profit) at the expense of all other variables. It leads to excluded-middle rhetoric like yours. But it’s not the only possible system, and the sooner we transition away from it, the better.

What you regard as rhetorical questions with obvious answers are instead powerful indicators in the difference in how we see the world and ethical behavior in a society.

60

I agree with you. My “take it all away” thought experiment is just that, a way to help people who think they don’t value the arts to see that they actually (probably) do. So many people (in the US in particular) are constant dismissing the arts as a career, as a vocation, as a thing of value at all. It’s a real pet peeve of mine (as is probably obvious) and I could go on and on about how important the arts are to our lives, to education, to our society, to local economies, etc. but I will spare you all, since I am getting into hijack territory.