Yeah, I always see that as a question as to whether you want to live in a better world, or do you want to have a slightly better place in a shittier world.
…I tired a quick thought experiment. Warning: the rest of this post will contain the use of the f@ck word, repeatedly.
There was a classic scene in the television show called the Wire where the two characters, Bunk and McNulty, have a conversation in a crime scene where the only word they use is the word “fuck.” Here’s the transcript of the scene:
And here’s the scene itself: (Spoilered because the link contains excessive use of the f-word, as well as a photograph containing brief nudity)
I set ChatGPT the task of recreating this scene:
The AI is really struggling here. And this is why I take any predictions that AI will be “better than a human script writer in a couple of years” with a huge grain of salt. I can’t see that happening. It will be “better” in one way only: speed. But what the AI is missing is this:
‘The Wire’: An Oral History of the ‘Fuck’ Scene.
That last quote is important. “everyone understood exactly what we were doing at every moment, even though we were using just that one word or [a] variation thereof.”
ChatGPT doesn’t understand any of this. It can’t write the scene properly because what its lacks is the life experiences that the writers and the actors and the directors bring to the table. David Simon was a crime reporter before he moved into television. He’s been on crime scenes. He knows cops, what they say, what they do. And without what he bought to the table here, if he hadn’t heard that cop stream of profanity, if the detective he was with hadn’t said “this would be a great scene”, if everyone didn’t understand the subtle differences in tone and inflection that made everything understandable in that scene even though the only word they said was “fuck”, then this wouldn’t have come together.
AI can’t replace this. Because “garbage in, garbage out.” If you take the David Simons and the JMS’s and the Lindelof’s and the Shonda Rhimes and the Waller-Bridges out of the writers room, and if plot outlines are created by producers and passed onto an “expert AI prompter” to create the scripts then handed to a team of junior writers who “tidy” the scripts up, you lose the magic.
I’m sure that AI will improve. And a better person at writing prompts than I will get something much closer to the intent of the scene. But if your prompts get you close to this scene…you may as well just write the scene.
You seem to have been taking it very seriously, while I read it as absurdist comedy. Which I thought it did brilliantly.
I often think something similar for the images I generate–they would make great covers/illustrations for a science fiction stories, if only somebody would write them…
I don’t understand why people think that what we see now from AI is anything like what we will see in a few years. AI is advancing very quickly, and not just in speed, but in complexity.
Will it surpass human writers in two years? Probably many of them, if not most. Will it surpass all human writers in two years? Probably not.
Give it ten years, or twenty, and you really don’t think that AI will have improved substantially by then?
What if you replaced them with 5 year old copies of those writers. Would you say that their inability to create such a complex scene means that they never can?
AI will also gain experiences, anything a human can learn, an AI can as well. And it can do it faster, and it can then copy those experiences so that not only one agent understands what is going on, but all of them.
Anyone underestimating AI is going to be left in the dust. It’s not just the writers who will be replaced, but most of the executives and managers as well.
Typically, the idea would be to have a senior writer, one of your Simons’s or JMS’s et al to produce the prompt and to tidy it up. The junior writers get laid off.
Obvious downside to this is that your senior writers will eventually retire or die, and since you don’t have any junior writers, you don’t have anyone with experience to take on the position of senior writer.
But by then, AI may be good enough that it doesn’t really need that either.
I know the scene well, and I don’t think that it was the writing that carried that scene, but the acting.
Anyway, this strike isn’t going to change anything. The production companies that agree to the terms are going to hobble themselves, and new ones that use AI will out compete them. They will be able to make stuff faster and cheaper, and not every scene of The Wire was the same quality as the “f@ck” scene, and not every show that people watch is the same quality as The Wire.
Shows like Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men being as popular as they were should show you the quality that people are not only willing to accept, but actually seek out.
True, but why should it be considered a bad thing for workers to push back against such exploitation?
“I can find enough people to work for starvation wages and shitty conditions so that I don’t have to offer anything better to anyone” is not a management position to which workers are ethically or practically obligated to acquiesce.
That seems to me like an idiotically and gratuitously punitive position to take. I think we all understand and accept that not all careers will be equally lucrative, but I think it’s hugely detrimental to creatives, the arts, and society as a whole for us just to complacently accept the view that “being a creator in the arts automatically implies doing a shitty job for shitty wages, if you don’t like that then don’t work in the arts”. Yeah, look how well that attitude is working for us with schoolteaching, to take another example.
This is another pious libertarian orthodoxy (“whatever management wants to do must be complied with or the company will go under!”), but it’s not necessarily true. I don’t think anybody’s trying to prohibit writers themselves from using AI if and as they want to, so their employers are not going to be shut out of the benefits of AI use.
I neither invoked such an orthodoxy, nor find your phrasing of it accurate. It’s more just acknowledging of reality.
Having union jobs was great for the US, but it also mean that manufacturing overseas was cheaper, which meant fewer union jobs in the the US.
Same issue here, having union writers is great, for the writers that have jobs, but it also means that companies that don’t have union writers will have an advantage. So fewer companies that use union writers will stay in business, and there will be fewer union writers.
There’s only so much protectionism you can do before the market simply shifts elsewhere.
The point is that AI is useful as a leverage tool, increasing productivity. And if it allows one writer to be ten times more productive, that means you only need 10% of the writers.
We see it in every industry that automates or computerizes. In the 80’s tons of accountants got laid off because a person with a single copy of Lotus 1,2,3 could do the work of an entire floor of people with physical double entry ledgers.
I don’t think that we will be getting rid of writers anytime soon (though “soon” there may be looking at a 10 year horizon at best), but we will probably be laying off 90% of them.
And keep in mind that along with writers, AI is going to be replacing 90% of the management staff as well.
The main thing that made “Third World” manufacturing so much cheaper than American was Americans’ much higher standard of living. (Also massive fossil-fuel subsidies that made low-cost manufactured goods shipped halfway around the world cheaper than American-made versions from the next county.)
If you’re talking about writers of generic boilerplate copy, especially people whose native language isn’t English tasked with producing, say, ad copy or assembly instructions in English, I completely agree.
If you’re talking about long-format creative work like writing a TV show, I’m not at all so sure. Again, I definitely see how managers who imagine that creative writing is just a matter of getting a certain number of properly formatted reasonably relevant words into a document may be spoojing themselves at the notion of getting a chatbot to perform that task instantaneously for free, but I’m not convinced their optimism is warranted.
What the WGA seems (not unreasonably IMHO) to be concerned about is the prospect of managerial optimism on the AI front leading to firings of writers and enshittification of the medium before the complicated reality dawns on them.
Managerial optimism about particular technological advancements isn’t always warranted in the near term, as leaders of several autonomous-vehicle startups could tell you.
I was driven by Sony Studios (which I still want to call MGM) yesterday morning on my way to the ER, and I saw the picketers. I gave them a big thumbs up.
I’m sure they’d be upset, just as someone gets upset if they get fired from a job for any reason. The question is, should not upsetting people override doing things better? If you do a job at half the efficiency of someone else, should I keep you on anyway to keep you from being upset over being fired?
Plagiarism is a specific thing, having to do with directly copying someone else’s work or a major part of it and claiming it as your own.
‘Parasitizing’ isn’t a thing.
An AI producing an artwork after having looked at someone else’s artwork is no different than a human doing the same. So long as the art is different, it doesn’t matter who influenced the artist. Some jhuman artists are clearly from certain ‘schools’ that lean heavily on the work of previous artists. Why isn’t that plagiarism or ‘parasitism’?
Ever heard the phrase “If I can see farther than most, it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.” It’s a reference to the fact that everyone leans on the works of the past. Why should AI be different? It isn’t actually copying and storing those works, you know.
How so? Are you admitting that you want your retirement fund to be a fiduciary maximizer of your investment, as opposed to being a quasi combination of investment and charity?
Why wouldn’t you just maximize your investment and use the money to invest in the charity of your choice?
Can you point me to this definition? Or is this your definition?
You mean they went out of business because their business models became outdated and others came along and offered better products, or the same products for better prices and more convenient shopping?
Consumers voted with their feet on all of those, and for good reason. It wasn’t ‘vulture capitalism’, it was just capitalism - people investing in a better, cheaper way to do things, and making it happen.
You realize that K-mart faced the same criticisms, right? They were responsible for killing the corner drugstore, the neighborhood hardware store, etc. Do you think the introduction of K-Mart was also ‘vulture capitalism’?
Was it Vulture Capitalism when Netflix killed Blockbuster? Should we have prevented Netflix from crushing a huge business and putting tens of thousands of people out of work?
Then why do so many people choose it? To ask the question is to answer it: People choose the gig economy because of flexibility, being able to be their own boss, etc. The unemployment rate is below 4%. If you don’t want to be a gig worker, don’t be a gig worker. The idea that a government should pass a law to stop you from working a job you chose for ‘your own good’ is despicable. Everyone has their own unique goals and requirements.
I never said that technological change always comes from a profit motive. For example, plenty of technological change has happened as we’ve tried to kill more people in war.
Oh, they absolutely should be able to. They aren’t essential workers. Strike away. I just question whether or not their demands should be accepted. Trying to keep AI out of writing seems like a fool’s errand, and either AI won’t help, in which case the strike is not needed, or AI would help greatly, in which case shackling themselves to human-only output could severely harm streaming services compared to their competition.
I like Yousef Karsh’s photography. It’s influenced my portraits. I often try to set up lighting and conditions to come close to what Karsh did.
Do I owe something to Karsh’s estate? I wouldn’t be taking the portraits I take in tyhe way I take them if I hadn’t studied Karsh.
If an AI learns the same way, then comes up with unique photos of its own, how is this any different?
The thing is, the WGA wants to get on this early before it’s too late to draw the boundaries. Someday, of course there will no longer be any boundaries, but in the meantime–“an ounce of prevention” and all that.
Are the writers themselves allowed to use AI? Maybe not for final output, but for drafts, outlines, character sketches, storyboards, etc? If so, should the writer take a pay cut if AI makes them twice as productive?
Sauce for the goose, and all that.
When did building business infrastructure (e.g. maintaining a skilled labor force that attracts sufficient newcomers to remain self-sustaining) become a “charity”?
You know, most attempts at presenting a straw man argument dress up the straw man sufficiently that someone just might possibly mistake it for a real person, but you do you…
…its very much like the “self-driving car” situation. We’ve been promised that “full self-driving” would be “just around the corner” since 2014. But it isn’t for a variety of reasons. The “fantasy” and the reality are two different things.
So I see AI script writing developing the very same way I saw full-self-driving develop: the tech-bros will say that it will “change the world”, and in many places, like copy-writing and some areas of design, it might have significant impact.
But when it comes to telling stories? There are significant barriers to overcome, and those some of those barriers are exactly the same as you see with self-driving cars. AI doesn’t have an imagination. Outside the parameters of its algorithm, it literally can’t think outside the box.
What does this even mean?
No I mean seriously, what are your benchmarks here?
I’ve already conceded that the AI scriptwriter would be faster. The AI literally put together the Wire script in seconds. AI wins here. It’s faster than every other scriptwriter in the world right now.
So what are the metrics here? And who is setting those metrics? Because obviously if the “success” or the “failure” of AI scriptwriting is determined by the studios, then they will withhold any information (like they are doing now) that says otherwise.
I’m sorry, but how are you imagining that this would work? How do you copy a writer?
This isn’t something that will happen in our lifetimes. We are not going to have an AI be able to experience the same things that David Simon has lived through. An AI will never do a ride-along with a cop. Will never smell the stench of a crime scene, feel the tension during an interrogation.
The AI might learn about these things. But where will it learn it from? From writers like David Simon. The people that have actually done this shit. And the AI will never write about this shit as good as a human will because it doesn’t understand it. It hasn’t lived, or breathed, or felt any of these things. And when it comes to telling stories, this makes all the difference.
The executives are very much not going to give away their jobs. They won’t be underestimating AI. They will embrace it, and use it to substantially profit from it right up until the point the industry becomes unsustainable and collapses.
I’m not sure the executives would see it that way. For starters: there isn’t single senior writer at this level in the guild right now who would work in this system. They are writers for goodness sakes. They write. Its what they do. There may be some utility to using AI in some capacity, and the WGA haven’t discounted this. But none of the writers at this level are stupid enough to think that taking a position like this will do anything more than bring the whole industry down. Because:
This isn’t “just a downside.”
It’s the entire point of the strike.
What the guild are fighting for is a system that means that a writer can afford to be able to do this for a living, and to ensure that the pipeline for new writers doesn’t get shut down.
The AI thing is just kinda the icing on the cake. The damage is already being done. AI would finish the job.
The system as it worked as short as ten years ago meant that writers had some measure of job security, that there was room and scope to be innovative and creative and also allowed junior writers to learn on the job.
But over the last few years, and especially since the start of the pandemic, the studios have been trying (and largely succeeding) in changing those dynamics.
And probably the easiest ways to show exactly how that is happening is to look at what is happening with the Marvel TV shows.
In the traditional model you might get a writer or a writing team pitch an idea for a show, and if it goes into development, a Showrunner is appointed, they build a writers room, and they start the process of breaking the story. Breaking the story is a critical part of the process. It’s how the show defines itself. It’s how a script or a show becomes more than just the log-line.
From there different writers would get allocated their episodes to write…but that doesn’t mean that the writer then disappears to a log cabin and knocks out their scripts overnight. The continue to break the story…this time instead of the breaking the direction of the show they are breaking down the direction of each script. They work through many the plot beats together, making sure the themes and the tone and the characters match the blueprint.
When the show goes into production, the Showrunner is still in charge. The Showrunner in television is the boss. They almost always come from the writers room. They are responsible for the show. In film the director calls the shots. When we think of film, we think of the Steven Speilbergs or the Alfred Hitchcocks, we don’t think of the Matt Charman’s or the Joseph Stefano’s.
In television that dynamic is reversed. Its the J . Michael Straczynski’s or the Joss Whedons that are the household names, not the David J Eagles or the David Grossmans.
In television, the Showrunner manages the production. They keep the story on track. And the writers are still very much part of the production. In the traditional model, one of the writers was always on set, typically the writer of that particular episode, but not always. And the reason for this was two-fold: it allows the script to be re-written or new lines added as need be, and it gives the writer valuable experience in what actually happens when their script goes into production.
So what model do the studios want to move towards?
There is a move to make a clear demarcation between the writers room and everything else. And we can see this most clearly with the Marvel TV shows.
Each Marvel show gets allocated a couple of executive producers. For the Falcon and the Winter Soldier it was Alonso and D’Esposito. For Ms Marvel it was Alonso
and Winderbaum. They oversee the production, taking on many of the roles that you would typically see being done by the Showrunner.
And the way each show was produced was much closer to a feature film production than a television show. The scripts would get written, then handed to the production team where the directors would take over. The “Creator” of each show doesn’t really fill the role of Showrunner any more. They are the Head Writer, they lead the writers room, they hand over the finished scripts to the production team then the director takes charge, with the executive producers overseeing the process.
On paper, this could work. And I think that the best of the Marvel TV shows (IMHO), Wandavision and Loki, show how it could work. Both of these shows (along with Falcon and the Winter Soldier) only had a single director, Kate Herron for Loki, Matt Shakman for Wandavision and Kari Skogland for FATWS.
And that singularity of vision made a strong difference because as a story, Wandavision and Loki both held together tonally from beginning to end. So in theory, this model could work.
But the realities of making a television show quickly caught up with Marvel. Episodes of television have to go through a pre-production process, then go into production, then into post. So in television you would have all of these things happening at the same time. One director would be working pre-production, another director on location shooting the show, another director working with the editing team helping them to put it together.
And so the television show Ms Marvel didn’t have a single director. It had three different directing teams, all of them extremely talented and very good at what they do, but they weren’t singing from the “same songbook.”
The two episodes directed by El Arbi and Fallah (episode 1 and episode 6) work really well together. So do the episodes by Obaid-Chinoy (episodes 4 and 6), and to a lesser extent (but not in any way her fault) the two episodes by Menon (episodes 2 and 3).
But as a whole? The show doesn’t work. Entire character arcs are introduced, played out and ended in the blink of an eye. Tonally things are all over the place. The playful sense of delight that we get in the first episode just disappears and doesn’t really come back until the finale.
Its a mess.
Because the “showrunners” here, the executive producers, are working from within a box. They paint with a broad brush. Fortunately they are fans of the genre, very experienced at what they do, so what we got wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
But they literally don’t have the same skllset that a Showrunner from the writers room would have. And part of that job is making sure that once a show goes into production things adjust and pivot and are tweaked so that the story continues to make sense. They see the bigger picture because they created that bigger picture. The directors can’t see that picture, because they are only seeing what is happening in the episodes they direct. And the producers can’t see that picture because that isn’t what they are good at.
And the thing is…I LOVE Ms Marvel. I think the show is great. Its one of my favourite Marvel things ever. And one of the reasons why it works for me is that despite the fact the story just falls apart, there is a genuine passion for telling comicbook stories baked into the Marvel infrastructure, they had rediculous amounts of money (in TV terms) that were spent on every episode, and that Marvel have made a genuine and ongoing committment to giving opportunities to and allowing diverse talent (both in front of and behind the camera) to step up and tell their stories.
That wouldn’t be how it worked outside of “fandom” lead studios like Marvel and Star Wars and (now with James Gunn) DC.
It wouldn’t be the Senior Writer who would be at the top of the production any more. Because none of them will cross the picket line. It will be, just like with the Marvel shows, the executive producers. Writers won’t be doing the pitches: new shows will be pitched at the EP level based probably on whatever it is the algorithm spits out. Breaking the story will also probably be done at this level, with the EP and a group of consultants tweaking the plot outlines to maximize whatever they determine is their metric of success, be it “watch minutes” or “impressions” or whatever the heck they come up with.
Its only then that it would get handed over to the writers. And it probably won’t be a “writers room” as we know it today. We’ve already seen the rise of the “mini-room.” What it will evolve into (if the studios get their way) are underpaid junior writers who are largely disconnected from the larger process using AI to flesh out the plot-outlines handed to them from the EP’s into a somewhat shootable script.
We won’t be getting the Sopranos or Lost or The Bear or Abbott Elementary anymore. Because the intent here is to cut costs to the bone. And at the moment, with all of the cuts the studios have already put in place, many writers are struggling to put food on the table. The writer for the TV show the Bear had no money in his bank account and had to get a bow-tie on credit when he turned up to accept the prize for best writer at the WGA awards. Thats with the system as it is now. If the studios get their way then people like Christopher Storer end up having to walk away from the industry.
And the other thing that will get killed if the studios get their way is that there will be no path for anyone who isn’t independently wealthy to ever work on a television show. It will utterly destroy diversity. Film and television are already the domain of largely white men. And you will only ever be able to work in film or television if pay is not a factor. We’ve seen how this plays out in industry after industry. And the end result is homogeneity, not just because much of the writing tasks will be undertaken by a computer, but also because diverse and marginalized voices will be locked out of the system.
The scene would never exist if not for the writers. Television isn’t improv. The script is the blueprint. It what drives the entire production.
The script is what everybody works off to create a televison show. The Art Director uses it as the basis of how to create a set. The Prop Master uses it to figure out what is needed in the scene. The script isn’t just “lines on the page.” Any production at any scale is a Behemoth, a thousand different moving parts and the only reason we ever get something enjoyable on screen is because hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, all working in a weird kind of synergy, are very good at their jobs.
But the script is at the centre of it all. And if you start changing the process, if the creation of the blueprint is handed off to in-experienced and automated architects, then that affects everything.
The goal of the strike is not to “hobble the production companies”, and there is absolutely nothing in any of the WGA demands that would result in this.
They would be able to make stuff faster and cheaper and very much more crappier. You know the golden rule. If you have “fast and cheap” you can’t have “good.” And the system the studio want to bring in will largely result in the production of even more garbage than you are seeing right now.
Shows like the Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men were written by human writers, lead by an experienced showrunner, with properly staffed writers rooms, all had full seasons of television and were written in the very system that the WGA are trying to defend.
If the studios win we won’t be getting more of the Big Bang Theory or Two and a Half Men.
Instead we get “Friends and the Avocado Invasion”, a 10 episode limited series only available if you subscribe to Nixflix, that will get filmed, get most of the way through post-production before getting shelved because the streaming company wants to take advantage of a tax loophole.
…I’ll point you back to John Rogers series of tweets where the context is pretty clear, the Wikipedia entry, and the case that I make below which outlines what really happened to Toys R Us.
Nope.
It was the vulture capitalism.
Nope. Because vulture capitalism is a very specific thing.
Did either John Rogers or I mention Blockbuster? If it was relevant, I’m sure John Rogers would have bought it up. He didn’t because it isn’t.
Because for many people everything is shit, and working in the gig economy is slightly less shit than anything else.
Some people do.
But the reality is working in the gig ecnomy isn’t really “being your own boss.” That’s just marketing speech. Propaganda.
I’m self employed. I am actually my own boss. I decide how much I want to work each week and set my own prices and marketing accordingly. I decide what my margins will be. I negotiate directly with clients.
An Uber driver is just a taxi-driver without the guaranteed wage, without the insurance and protections that come with having a job. And if you do anything to “upset the algorithm” they can cut that revenue stream off completely. This isn’t “self employment.” Its a loophole that has made a few millionaires richer.
One minute its “be your own boss.”
Nek Minnit: its “working a job.”
Pick a lane and stick to it.
It isn’t a binary option. AI can help. And the WGA have been explict here in ways that it think it can be useful. Those options were put on the table and part of the early negotiations.
But here is what the WGA were asking for.
- Regulate use of artificial intelligence on minimum-basic-agreement projects
- AI can’t write or rewrite literary material
- AI can’t be used as source material
- minimum-basic-agreement covered material can’t be used to train AI
A lot of this is about protecting intellectual property, including the intellectual property of writers outside of film and televsion. It would stop, for example, an authors novel being used as a basis for an AI generated plot outline and script. This isn’t unreasonable.
If you copied and pasted a Karsh photograph then tried to pass it off as your own, you very well might. Because the thing is:
This isn’t what AI is doing, and this isn’t the basis of the Getty lawsuit.
So the AI obviously isn’t always
because we can literally see the copyright watermark in some of the images that it creates.
Taking inspiration from other artists and creating your own independent work is already well baked-into existing IP laws and precedent. Scraping images from the internet without the permission of the original artist and using that as a dataset to “train” an “artificial intelligence” is not.
…here’s a great thread on Twitter from Showrunner on Supernatural and co-creator of You Sera Gamble on the reasons why and the importance of having a writer on set.
So the writers job doesn’t stop once they hand over the script. And its yet another reason why AI isn’t going to be “better” than a human script writer any time soon. We know that AI can work lightening fast. But when an actor sprains an ankle and must be seated for the rest of the scene, what would be faster: typing the revised scenario into the Chat Writing AI and then phoning the showrunner to check to make sure the changes won’t affect what happens in episode 17, or just ask the writer on set to quickly rewrite the scene?
If you have been wondering why over the last few years some TV shows seem to be “oddly disconnected” at times in terms of tone and continuity from episode to episode, one of the reasons for that is that at the start of the pandemic the studios tried to (and sometimes succeeded) in keeping the writers off set. The reality is that the executives (just like most of the public) are largely removed from the creative process. They don’t know “how the sausage is made” and it leads to decisions that actively hurt that process.
…and dammit.
(checks the NZ Writers Guild website first to make sure I’m in the clear)
I’m 50 this year. I’ve written a couple of short film scripts for film school, but nothing more than that. I’ve gotta a lifetime of experience and a copy of Fade In that I haven’t opened in a year.
:: cracks knuckles ::
Time to finally write that movie script. This thread has gotten me fired up.
Great post.
…cheers. I spent WAY too much time writing that though 