You fundamentally misunderstand what I’m saying. Copyright law is designed to keep artists working, because without it, the cost of making money off someone else’s work is so low that prices will drop so low that no one will be able to afford to make original work.
Perhaps you could write Post-Scarcity Capitalism, a follow-up to Bookchin’s work to show how Netflix will fuck over its writers once their products are no longer scarce, and how post-scarcity societies concentrate wealth even further.
…and yet: Zuckerberg lost 13.7 billion dollars on his metaverse gamble and hasn’t been sent to the breadline. Hasn’t been handed the golden parachute. Hasn’t been told to leave. Ted Sarandos was co-ceo in 2022 when Netflix lost just under a million subscribers in a quarter, had millions lost in it share prices, and is still co-ceo today. The real world is full of examples of executive incompetence that hasn’t resulted in what you claim would happen. There isn’t a direct “you fucked up your fired” relationship.
I put “making money” in quote marks for a reason. The person in the studios who is responsible for saying “lets fire all the writers” will never be held accountable because that won’t be a decision made at the VP level. You won’t find the name of the person who first decided writers shouldn’t be on set in 2020. And even if you did: there won’t be a single metric that would show this was a mistake, let alone a fireable offence.
This is a risk/reward situation, Zuck lost $14B trying to earn $140B+. That’s the type of risk investors want you to take.
You eliminate the writing room for HBO’s big new show, you’re risking tens or hundreds of millions in order to save $1M. There’s no upside, at least the upside is rigidly fixed at the cost of the writing department, and the downside is all the revenue from the entire show, and cost overruns from having to reshoot. Nobody takes that risk unless AI is proven to be as good as humans.
If it ever becomes proven that AI is as good as humans, no union would be able to save the writers.
…and no investors are going to be complaining about the studios embracing AI. No matter how big of a disaster it turns out to be.
They won’t be “eliminating the writers room.” They will be reinventing them by adopting the latest in innovation: the Artificial Intelligence.
The PR writes itself. You just have to read this thread. Investors will lap it up. Shiny.
What revenue? How much money does a streaming show make? Those are numbers the studios aren’t releasing. There won’t be any cost overruns. There won’t be any reshoots. Shows will get a single season and get cancelled. Thats how Netflix is doing things now.
They won’t see it as a risk.
AI will never be as good as humans.
But the studios don’t need AI to be “as good as humans” to put hundreds of writers out of work.
They will when HBOs shows change from this to this.
Netflix didn’t pay $30M per episode for Stranger Things because they don’t know how much money streaming shows make. They could have saved $270M by just cancelling it. They kept the show because their survival depends on keeping subscribers, and you don’t keep subscribers by putting out lousy content. They will pay to keep subscribers, they will even pay WGA writers if having WGA writers helps them keep subscribers.
That all depends on what the upper level of AI development turns out to be. The top possible AI may be rather low end, in which case you are right. Or the top AI may approach weekly-godlike status, in which case the most brilliant fiction imaginable will be trivial to it. Only time will tell.
I could see AI being used to come up with ideas for shows rather than whole scripts. Currently if a writer’s room is growing stale, they may decide to bring in new people to bring in some fresh ideas. But with AI, the writers could ask the AI to come up with dozens of ideas. They don’t need to bring in new people. They can get a batch of ideas from AI and then decide which ones work and flesh them out. In a show like Saturday Night Live, having AI come up with sketch ideas seems like it could be very useful. As it is now, many SNL sketches are hit-or-miss. It seems like AI could do a similar job. The writers would still need to write the scripts, but the AI could come up with a pool of sketch ideas to build from. I could see established writers protecting their jobs by using AI to come up with new ideas rather than hiring new writers which may push them out of the writing room. It seems like the Writers Guild would want to prohibit that use of AI as well, as it would reduce the writing jobs for new writers. If you are a member of the Writers Guild, then you yourself are also prohibited from using AI to aid with writing.
…why would they change from Succession to Super Friends?
They will make a variation on Succession. It will follow a formula. It will tick all the “prestige drama” boxes. They may even bring in a high profile non-union writer to “helm” the show.
But it won’t be a fully staffed writers room. It will be some variation on the scenarios already outlined in this thread.
So tell us then: how much revenue did Stranger Things make for Netflix?
You miss my point. I said “those are numbers the studios aren’t releasing.” Which is true. The existence of a successful show doesn’t change that. For every Stranger Things there are multiple shows that are drek.
One of the very first things I posted here was a Twitter thread by John Rogers that talked about how the studios were on a “suicide run.” The writers know perfectly well that the streamers won’t keep subscribers if you put out lousy content.
Why is it do you think they are going on strike? They know that the studios are making stupid decisions that will destroy the industry. That is why the showrunners of Stranger Things are on the picket lines, why they have been loud and clear that they support the strike. Yes: the studios will put out lousy content. They don’t care.
The conditions for writers right now are untenable. Forget about AI for a minute: writers are literally writing for free in order to get scripts finished because the writers rooms have been stripped to the bare bones. This isn’t a few isolated cases. This is industry wide. So lets stop pretending that the studios cared about quality. The writers care about quality. The directors. The people above and below the line. Thats always been the case.
The context here is that “AI writers will never be as good as a human writer” because the AI won’t be able to do things that human writers do now, which are things like working on set and rewriting scenes on the fly due to circumstances out of everyone’s control, or to passionately argue that a character should live due to nothing more than a “gut feeling” in the stomach that this is the right choice for the story.
…so Lockwood & Co just got cancelled after one season at Netflix. This was a show that was the global No. 1 show when it launched. Top 10 in 80 countries. No 1 in 18 countries. According to data from “Netflix’s Top 20 Website” was watched for 25 million hours in its first weekend. 39 million hours week 2. Netflix reportedly were “very pleased with the show.” But they claimed “viewership didn’t reach a point that would get a new season greenlit.” *
Its one of the reasons the writers are striking: the lack of transparency from the networks. As one person put it this morning: people “watched this show for the equivalent of 7305 years in the first couple of weeks according to these numbers” but that wasn’t enough to not get the show a second season.
This is what the writers are up against:
And this is the problem with the entire concept of AI writers. It won’t be about telling a good story. It will be about creating a television show that “hits the right verticals.” A show that gets 27% on Rotten Tomatoes might be more favourable than one that gets 98% because it hitting the right target markets.
When we talk about the quality of shows, we are talking about this. You get shows that both hit the right verticals, are great quality television and super popular like Stranger Things.
But you can also have shows that hit the right verticals, are not great quality television and not super popular either. And an AI written show will more likely end up like the this than another Stranger Things. It will get what the studios want. Hitting the right demographics means they hit their self-designated-metrics which means shareholders are happy and everyone in that tiny little circle get just a little bit richer.
But that likely won’t be a good thing for the industry at large. And ultimately would be self-destructive.
*Disclaimer: this is all of course dependent on whether you believe the numbers. I’m not sure I do. If you haven’t heard of the “pivot to video” debacle, what basically happened here was that Facebook stated that “video averaged more than 1 billion video views every day.” This, along with the tendency to “follow the leader” prompted entire media ecosystems to prioritise video over print. A year later Facebook conceded they had conflated the numbers by 60-80%. I’m not even sure thats accurate. This ultimately resulted in huge job losses and major changes to the industry that we are still feeling today. I’m as skeptical now of the numbers released by the studios as I was skeptical about the Facebook numbers back then.
The CEO of Warner Bros Discovery gave a commencement address and received an honorary degree at Boston University, and it went about as well as you might expect.
You are all talking about the best shows, with the A-list writers. They aren’t going to be replaced any time soon.
The people who should be worried are the ones who crank out boilerplate soap opera scripts five days a week, or who crank out those endless direct-to-streaming cheap movies.
Not all scripts are Citizen Kane. Many are purely formulaic scripts knocked out in a writer’s room at 9 AM on a Monday, for a show no one really cares about.
Or that comment I made about the Simpsons. No, AI isn’t likely to reach the levels of brilliance of the best Simpsons shows any time soon, but it might be perfectly acceptable cranking out the kinds of phone-it-home scripts that seem to be making up the show now.
Firstly: the writers are all in this together. The A-list writers are standing side by side with soap-opera writers and those that “crank out those endless direct-to-streaming cheap movies.” Thats why the guild is on strike. You come for one, you come for all of them.
Secondly: it takes skill to crank out “endless direct-to-streaming” movies. It takes skill to crank out “soap opera scripts five days a week.”
And the language learning models simply aren’t up to it. They can’t write a 22 minute filmable script yet. They won’t be cranking out “boilerplate soap opera scripts five days a week” anytime soon because they aren’t boilerplate. This is an Australian example, so not under the Guild rules:
How well does AI handle continuity?
Over in the Cafe Society thread I shared my John Wick story where ChatGPT decided that one minute the dog was alive, seconds later the dog had been mysteriously killed by the antagonist and John was in mourning, next minute the dog was alive again and helped John kill the bad guy.
This isn’t real artificial intelligence. They are language models. It doen’t know what dead or alive means. It can’t track linear time. It can’t think outside its very limited box. I haven’t been able to produce anything longer than a six minute script with the free version of ChatGPT. People experimenting with other versions and other tools are finding the very same thing. The longer it gets, the more it starts repeating itself until it all just falls apart and ends it.
While you might not care about what happens on these “boilerplate soap operas”, millions of avid soap-opera watchers do. People do care about these shows. My mum used to watch them religiously. If she was still around she would notice that the plots had slipped into a precise formula. That the dialogue had become stupid.
In the example I cited, there are 11 full-time writers and 18 freelance writers working on the show. They aren’t “formulaic scripts knocked out in a writer’s room at 9 AM on a Monday.” Again in the example I gave the writer in question was in charge of writing the third draft, after the freelancers had written the first two. Then it goes into breakdown, then it might change again, then it might even change again while the show is in production. This isn’t a “boilerplate process.”
For AI scriptwriting to be able to work at scale, it needs to be tied to powerful database software so that characters, scenes, locations, the timeline, can all keep updated. But this would still rely on human input and would be massively inefficient and prone to error. And it ignores how central the script is to the rest of the production. A human writer can very easily make adjustments based on concerns the director might have, or scribble a few new lines of dialogue if the lines aren’t working for the actors on set. These two actions become significantly more complicated if you are trying to explain this to an AI.
Its just easier and more cost effective and you will keep your audiences happy by just paying the writers.
Well, it looks like the actors are going on strike in support, I guess. But I have a solution!
What about a tv show titled “Who Wants To Run A TV Game Show?” Get a bunch of amateurs to design and run a game show, and they can draw straws to see who hosts.
Let me preface this by saying that I’m generally supportive of unions, and especially supportive of WGA writers who are engaged in a noble profession and largely underpaid and under-appreciated. Nevertheless, unions really piss me off when they become perniciously malicious far beyond the bounds of their legitimate concerns.
This is an old story from back in May but it was new to me. I found it when I was doing some searching, wondering why Season 4 of the wonderful series Evil had not yet appeared, though it had been scheduled for this summer (previous series had appeared around June). Then I found out why.
It’s the WGA strike, but not in the way one might think. Look, I’m fine with missing out on my favourite talk shows and such because, well, those shows have writers, and the writers are on strike. Fine. It’s a nuisance, I miss my shows, but it’s for a good cause. No problem.
But here’s what happened with Evil. The writers, Michelle and Robert King, had been finished with the script for a long time, and in fact, filming was nearly complete in May for the scheduled summer release. SAG-AFTRA was two months away from their own strike. So what was the problem? What happened?
What happened was that three WGA activist jerks set up a mini picket line and managed to halt production for six hours, while the crew waited patiently and didn’t want to cross the “picket line”, if that’s what you can call three hooligans with no legitimate business being there. Eventually the crew gave up. Filming was cancelled and never resumed. That was the end of that. Two months later, SAG-AFTRA also went on strike, but by that time filming would have long been completed and the series would be airing.
The point here being that the WGA is doing a lot more than just their legitimate right to take writers out on strike – they want to disrupt all film production, whether it has anything to do with them or not. And that’s not right.
Why do you say they had no legitimate business being there? I’ve been looking through WGA’s guidelines for the strike, and am having trouble finding rationales for striking specific productions. Are you suggesting these three WGA members were rogue and were picketing without WGA approval, or outside of guidelines?
The producers of course want to separate out each portion of production as a separate concern. It’s a classic divide-and-conquer technique. Union workers must hang together or they will surely hang separately.
And it’s not the writers who disrupted the production–it’s the workers who refused to cross the picket line. Blame them for honoring the strike.