Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking

[Bobby Henderson]

If the Hollywood insider is right, then sooner or later there is going to be a Silicon Valley Bank moment for Netflix, Disney+, or at least one of the other big streamers. You can only hide a chronically loss-making business from investors for a finite length of time. Disney+ is an interesting one: it lost hundreds of millions again in the last quarter, but Iger's line is that this is part of the plan, and that it will start to show a profit in (IIRC) Q1 of 2024. He's obviously managed to convince his board, because they just extended his contract for another two years. But it doesn't, I wonder if that will be when the house of cards starts to fall?

These companies are out of touch with much of the general public. I would even say a bunch of those Hollywood writers and actors are out of touch as well. They seem to think everyone in the middle to lower income classes have limitless amounts of cash just laying around to blow on shit like streaming subscriptions. It's just like they think the same people can keep absorbing price hikes on groceries, rent and anything else. Consumers often stubbornly keep paying for goods and services they can't really afford. At some point the habit becomes impossible to sustain and they finally figure out a way to do without. It's not a bad thing to do without a Disney+ subscription.

California represents the worst of America's bubble economy and over-done price inflation (NYC could arguably be tied with California). I don't know how badly the average striking writer or actor is struggling financially. Enough "little people" are getting squeezed bad enough California has been losing population.

kinda ironic...the amazon strikers dont have the union printers label on their signs...they must have used non union print shops!!!

Anyone would have a tough time trying to find a print shop, sign company (or any other outfit making the signs those Amazon workers are holding) that has unionized workers. Maybe some big city newspapers still have union members running their printing presses.

As for the Generative AI thing: It's coming and it's unavoidable. As a writer, learn to live with it. Learn to use it for your advantage.

So-called "AI" can't truly create anything new. It only cobbles together something based on what it "scrapes" from pre-existing material (often found online). The technology also cannot tell truth from fiction, which makes it very hazardous to use in certain kinds of writing. AI doesn't care if it samples material that is public domain or copyrighted. If anyone is hoping for AI to provide something more creative than the Save the Cat formula stuff Hollywood has been feeding the public for years they're going to be disappointed. AI will only provide more of the same, just cheaper -and maybe with an odd layer of uncanny valley added to it.

While AI struggles at generating visual art it doesn't do all that bad a job auto-generating code. The developers creating this stuff could end up putting themselves out of work. Companies would just let AI write the code instead of humans if the technology works good enough. Plugging security holes in AI-generated software could be an even worse whack-a-mole job. The code could be even more of a disorganized mess. With all the developer jobs that could be lost there may not be enough human manpower for anyone to get in there to plug the holes properly.

Me, as a moviegoer, don't care if the story was written (partly) by an AI, neither do I care if the actor was real or not. For me, only the end product counts. Right now, most of what Hollywood delivers is shit, so I actually hope they're going to employ AI to fix it for them.

The primary motivation behind developing AI is increasing profits by eliminating jobs. That's why business people are so excited about it. Use AI to automate everything and watch the stock prices soar. The problem is our broader economy and very civilization depends on money spent by people -money those people earn from having jobs. Kill enough jobs with AI the whole country dies with it.

[Leo Enticknap]

I don't know how badly the average striking writer or actor is struggling financially. Enough "little people" are getting squeezed bad enough California has been losing population

A SAG-AFTRA spokeshole claimed on the radio around the time their strike was starting that the average income (from union work; i.e. that counted towards dues payments and union entitlements) of one of their members was $27K a year.

Of course that doesn't tell the whole story. A lot of, if not most, actors, musicians, artists, writers, etc. are effectively semi-professional, either working in another occupation as well, or being supported by higher earning partners in non-showbiz careers. I suspect that the proportion who make their entire living from their artistic work is relatively small. Of course there is a vicious circle aspect to this situation, as it enables employers to pay less than they would otherwise have to. As I understand it, most of the households who have been leaving California consist of those working in more mainstream professions, for which job opportunities are readily available elsewhere. The last family I actually know who did so (former neighbors) consists of a sheriff's deputy and a physician's assistant and their two kids: they moved to Provo, UT. That is not so easy to do for a TV scriptwriter or an actor, which is likely part of the reason they are so determined about this strike.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Thanks, Marcel!

You're welcome. If you have more questions, I'm always glad to try to give a somewhat meaningful answer.

So-called "AI" can't truly create anything new. It only cobbles together something based on what it "scrapes" from pre-existing material (often found online). The technology also cannot tell truth from fiction, which makes it very hazardous to use in certain kinds of writing. AI doesn't care if it samples material that is public domain or copyrighted. If anyone is hoping for AI to provide something more creative than the Save the Cat formula stuff Hollywood has been feeding the public for years they're going to be disappointed. AI will only provide more of the same, just cheaper -and maybe with an odd layer of uncanny valley added to it.

I've been tinkering with technology as far as I can remember. When I got my hands on my first computer, I had to program it. I've studied early forms of "neural networks" back in University. And I've always wondered if machines would ever be able to "think" and to be be truly creative, like human beings. Most of the time, I had the feeling we would never get there, science fiction would forever be fiction.

I'm not so sure anymore...

The concept of creativity isn't really fully understood. We don't exactly know how our brains conjure up new material. What we have learned though, is that it's impossible for our brains to be creative without receiving any input. Creativity cannot function within a vacuum. A creative brain needs stimulation, it needs external input. So, are our brains really so much different than our digital replicas?

Those neural networks now responsible for what we call "Generative AI", are, for a great deal, based on what we've learned from the same neural networks inside our brains. And while we're not yet able to recreate fully sentient simulations, we've been able to at least partly recreate quite a few other things, including vision, speech and now also "human" text generation.

I've been studying those "Large Language Models" for a while now. While it's hard to qualify what's happening as true creativity, especially since we lack a full grasp of the definition of it, it's certainly not a simple copy/shuffle/mingle/paste machine anymore. Although those things are essentially "word prediction machines", it happens to be that our brains operate in much the same way. I'm pretty convinced we're gradually nearing a situation, where "the simulation" becomes indistinguishable from "the real thing". At that point, I'd say that our machines will become more "creative" than we humans are.

Weather or not AI is being used to create the same templated "Save the Cat" stories or not, is largely dependent on who control them. AI isn't sentient (yet), so it will simply obey your instructions. Over the past months, I've had LLMs create plenty of stories, none of them that were based on any story beat templates by Blake Snyder. While the AI may have been trained on a lot of stories following a general structure, it's entirely up onto you if you want to have it follow that structure or not.

While AI struggles at generating visual art it doesn't do all that bad a job auto-generating code. The developers creating this stuff could end up putting themselves out of work. Companies would just let AI write the code instead of humans if the technology works good enough. Plugging security holes in AI-generated software could be an even worse whack-a-mole job. The code could be even more of a disorganized mess. With all the developer jobs that could be lost there may not be enough human manpower for anyone to get in their to plug the holes properly.

I'm not sure what you call art, but I do know a few people that create stuff that could be considered art for a living, my wife among them. Quite a few of them are pretty worried by something like Midjourney. Although many of the images generated on there are far from perfect and often suffers from quite a few "uncanny valley" artifacts, it can create rather mind-blowing images with just a few lines of human input. This output doesn't need to be the final product, but can serve as input for some bigger project. So, my wife now considers it more of a time-saver for some brainstorming, rather than a potential job killer, at least for now...

As for code generation: It can be pretty useful for that purpose. For me, personally, I'm actively using it to eliminate boilerplate code and to build rather obvious functions. It's also pretty good at finding errors in stuff like SQL queries. So, it really is more of an assistant than a replacement. It saves me a lot of time though, which, in my case, is pretty welcome. But I can see how an evolution of this can be threatening to quite a few jobs.

The primary motivation behind developing AI is increasing profits by eliminating jobs. That's why business people are so excited about it. Use AI to automate everything and watch the stock prices soar. The problem is our broader economy and very civilization depends on money spent by people -money those people earn from having jobs. Kill enough jobs with AI the whole country dies with it.

I think that anybody who has the willingness to use the grey matter up there for some thorough thinking, while putting those political and ideological constrains away for a minute, will agree that mankind is facing a few major challenges the coming decades. The way we react to those challenges will largely shape the future of humankind on this planet. I'm not going to name them all, but this "AI" thing and the general idea of automation and replacing human labor with automated alternatives will be one of our biggest challenges. It's useless to try to fight the advent of this technology, it's far more useful to fight for how we use it. It has the potential to raise humankind to a new level of freedom, but it also has the potential to enslave us all for the benefit of just a handful. Avoiding the latter part should be our focus, but politics doesn't care and neither does the general population. It will probably turn out like it always does: We start to fix it, once it's practically too late... just look at this thing called climate... it was decades in the making and even while half of the world is currently melting away, there are still people putting their heads in the red hot glowing sand.

[Bobby Henderson]

Just out of my own selfish interest as a middle-aged member of Generation X the possibilities of what could be happening by the time I'm reaching retirement age 15-20 years from now really scare the hell out of me. We have a lot of structurally not-sustainable conditions present in the United States.

The WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike and worries how AI could affect the movie industry is just a blip compared to much bigger picture problems. AI could be a catalyst to worsen those bigger picture problems.

The United States depends on a demographics Ponzi scheme of sorts for its public and private retirement systems to function. For the scheme to be healthy it needs far more working age, tax-paying people paying into the system and fewer older people drawing from it. The United States is heading towards an inverse of that balance at an ever accelerating rate. Job losses caused by proliferation of AI could push the accelerator right to the floor board. That's because we've turned parenthood into a ridiculously expensive lifestyle choice. For people in the lower and lower-middle income classes having a child is an instant gateway into poverty. No one wants to live like that by choice, much less try to raise a child in those conditions. So a growing number of younger adults are choosing to opt out of the whole parenthood thing. We as a society are more isolated now; socializing more via artificial means than in-person. More women either by choice or financial necessity are having to make their own money and careers. Men today just aren't as reliable to be "providers" as they were in the past.

We take it for granted there will always be plenty of workers to fill the open positions in all sorts of job categories. We assume there will be enough people enlisting in our military. We assume there will be enough people working the kitchen grills at the McDonald's down the road.

Virtually all "rich" developed countries in the world have slipped into negative territory with their total fertility rates. European nations (and Russia) have been below the replacement rate level considerably longer than the US. Far East nations (China, South Korea, Japan) have among the lowest birth rates in the world. Cost of living, cost of education, etc are all factors driving this demographics issue.

Just like we take it for granted there will always be "bodies" to fill job positions we also take it for granted the "world order" will stay as it has been for the past 50 or so years.

The African continent is the one place left on the planet that still has high birth rates and a disproportionately large youth population. That demographic situation could translate into both economic and military power. Africa is not exactly a safe, stable place geopolitically speaking. If nations in North America and Europe can't stabilize their demographics picture their civilizations will eventually crumble. The money math cannot be denied. As those nations are growing older and deteriorating they'll be vulnerable to some "emerging" world power in Africa stream-rolling right over the top of them.

[John Eickhof]

Actually Bobby, the former Printers and Typesetters Union is now the GCC Graphic Communications Conference under the Teamsters Union Find A Union Printer - International Brotherhood of Teamsters there are literally hundreds of union print shops across the USA! in both small and big towns! It would not be very proper for a union group to use non union signage or literature! thus obviously Teamsters would keep them alive! When I was on the picket lines years ago (1980s united artists and syufy theatres ) all our signs and information brochures were printed by Union printers in northern Californiua...

[Bobby Henderson]

I did a quick search with the link you provided, just looking at my local region of Oklahoma and Texas. No shops in OK and 10 in all of Texas.

[Martin McCaffery]

Two in Alabama

[John Eickhof]

with the advent of fast shipping by ups fedex and others it isnt necessary to have a print shop in every town or village, these are full service printers not just your local zip print copy center, they utilize large offset printers, do a search of print shops that will print signs or books in oklahoma...probably not to many!