After the Hollywood writers’ strike, AI-generated television is inevitable

[Frank Angel]

In the end, anything AI creates will be judged the same way anything humans create is judged -- how much it makes at the box office (or the streaming channels) for its investors. If it's a hit and money roles in, then AI will, for that project, be lauded as a huge success. But if it creates a flop and everyone loses money, then it will be mocked and ridiculed by the critics and the public (the fickle public whose tastes, we all know, can change on a dime) just the same as flops created by humans are mocked and ridiculed. There is no guarantee that AI-created content will intrinsically be successful. A critic will be merciless on a dog of a movie no matter who or what created it. But then again, in 2040, the difference may be that the AI creator will just have the robots under its control kill the critic.

As for the copyright issue -- the life of the author plus 70 years...so what's the life of an AI algorithm?

[Martin Brooks]

What might the “inevitable” look like for Hollywood writers? It’s not inconceivable that formulaic TV shows like sitcoms and police procedurals could be written entirely by AI. The same goes for love-channel movies that follow well-worn storylines – boy meets girls, boy turns out to be a sociopath, boy bumps up against girl and her BFFs and ends up in jail.

Doubt it, at least not with the current state of the technology. A family member is a singer-songwriter. I fed one of the A.I. programs her song titles and asked it to write the lyrics. It wrote completely ridiculous lyrics akin to a really bad Hallmark Card. A.I. might be able to write a derivative script for a low-rated basic cable station, but at least so far, it can't write something even at the level of another broadcast network police procedural.

[Randy Stankey]

Excerpt from an AI generated television script, in the era of COVID-19:

Welcome, folks, this is Ed Sullivan and I've got a really big moccasin for you, tonight!
First up, we've got that new band you've all been waiting for... The Stochastic Parrots!
They'll be playing their latest hits, "I Wanna' Wash Your Hands," and "I Saw Her Gasping for Air."

[Ed Gordon]

In late August, Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper company, rolled out a new artificial intelligence service that promised to automate high school sports coverage across the country. And within a matter of days it had gone horribly wrong. People on Twitter quickly discovered that bizarre phrases like “close encounters of the athletic kind,” or how one team “took victory away” from another, had shown up on Gannett news sites in Florida, Indiana, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. As Scott Simon explained on NPR, in some of these AI articles there were robotic place holders where there should’ve been a mascot’s name.

Link: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts...ett-journalism

[Marcel Birgelen]

Doubt it, at least not with the current state of the technology. A family member is a singer-songwriter. I fed one of the A.I. programs her song titles and asked it to write the lyrics. It wrote completely ridiculous lyrics akin to a really bad Hallmark Card. A.I. might be able to write a derivative script for a low-rated basic cable station, but at least so far, it can't write something even at the level of another broadcast network police procedural.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Ghandi was probably one of the wisest men ever to step the surface of the Earth.

I see many people making the same mistake with AI: They underestimate the potential impact and they misjudge the current state of the technology. For example: They ask ChatGPT to come up with some random stuff, out of the blue, without context. The stuff it comes up with doesn't really fit the bill and they conclude that AI "isn't there yet". Yet, what they forgot is that if they would've given the same instructions to some random human, without proper context, they'd probably gotten an equally bad result, or probably even no result at all.

Even if we would stop development of AI right now, if we would fully use what we have available right now, the world is in for a change. You shouldn't believe just me, I'm just a random individual crying wolf (although, I've seen things that scare me.) But maybe you should take notice of those very smart people that recently quit some high-profile jobs at e.g. Google, because they were afraid of what they were producing.

[Bobby Henderson]

My biggest immediate concern about "AI" (whether it works or not) is business people all over the world already are trying to figure out ways to use the technology as a tool to eliminate jobs. That's one reason why there is so much hype about it in the media. It's a "gold rush" to worsen an already bad situation with income inequality. The douchebags want to use AI as a weapon to concentrate even more wealth within the top 1% class while taking more and more from everyone else.

As others have said, this AI tech raises all sorts of moral issues. Writers and actors had good reason to strike over this stuff. There are more sinister sides to AI. Apparently there are AI-driven smartphone apps that can seamlessly graft one person's face onto another person's nude body. A bunch of women have been victimized by this style of revenge-porn shit. BTW, doing that kind of stuff is a felony-level crime already.

Some companies, such as Adobe, have guardrails built into their application's AI-driven features. The latest version of Adobe Photoshop has a feature called Generative Fill. You can start out with a blank canvas and then type a suggestion into a text prompt to fill that white space with something. Or you can select an area on a photograph and tell Photoshop to put something there. The feature sort of works, but not all that well. I'm guessing the feature will be "trained" a lot more and the improvements will be delivered in point release updates. The Generative Fill feature works better if you're trying to expand an existing image outward on a larger canvas. But there is a 1024px X 1024px limitation. You'll get the best results by staying within those bounds, or if you're working on a high resolution image you'll have to expand parts of the canvas one block at a time (that can be automated via actions). Anyway, back to the feature's guard rails: there is a lot of words and phrases that are flagged. Just for fun I tried to get the Generative Fill tool to fill a blank canvas with a vomit texture. It refused to do so and brought up a disclaimer box about it.

AI is not the same as Artificial General Intelligence. That's where the machine becomes self-aware, has its own thoughts, motivations, wants, needs, etc. We're still quite a way off from developing that (hopefully). If a computer does achieve true AGI it's not a given we'll have a Skynet-driven apocalypse. It might be more plausible that a AGI-driven computer system would work to disarm humanity in an attempt to save it from itself.

[Frank Cox]

Writers and actors who go on strike over AI are in much the same position as the Luddites in 1811.

You can hold this sort of thing back for a while (maybe) but if it really is a more efficient or cost-effective way to do things, those things will be done that way sooner or later. Most likely sooner than later.

I produce a widget (or a screenplay) for a cost of $x. You can produce a similar widget for $x/2 using a powered loom or AI. I get with the program (see what I did there? ) or go out of business.

[Marcel Birgelen]

What Frank said... and, my 1.5 cents:

I don't think that there is any way to turn back the clock and make AI go away. As such, I think the best way to handle is, is to embrace it to the full extend and make sure EVERYONE has access to the technology, not just the douchebags in the 1% of the 1% club that will only enslave us more into their concept of a "free world".

For now, you should see AI as a new tool and embrace it as such, that's true for Hollywood writers too. You cannot make this go away, so make sure you can and do use it.

Eventually, AI may replace entire fields of work. If stuff continues to evolve the way it does, that's probably unavoidable. I'm not really a socialist, but with a still half-functioning brain I can see how this creates problems in the future, maybe even not so distant future... I do think that people and therefore the governments that rule them should really think about a long-term strategy, where there aren't jobs for everybody, yet we still need to give those people the means to live.

Wealth isn't just created by labor and if wealth is created practically automatically and without any intrinsic labor costs, maybe we should think about "new" ways to distribute wealth to the people, or otherwise many of those dark themed science fiction stories will loose a part of their fiction aspect...

[Paul Finn]

I'm reminded about the Digital Cinema evolution. Remember that? It WILL happen, for better or for worse, regardless of what your position was. . . . . . Paul Finn

[Ed Gordon]

In 1945 Turing predicted that computers would one day play very good chess, and just over 50 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue, a chess computer built by IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), beat the reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match. While Turing’s prediction came true, his expectation that chess programming would contribute to the understanding of how human beings think did not. The huge improvement in computer chess since Turing’s day is attributable to advances in computer engineering rather than advances in AI: Deep Blue’s 256 parallel processors enabled it to examine 200 million possible moves per second and to look ahead as many as 14 turns of play. Many agree with Noam Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who opined that a computer beating a grandmaster at chess is about as interesting as a bulldozer winning an Olympic weightlifting competition.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/technolog...ence/Reasoning

[Frank Cox]

I agree with that statement.

Earlier in this thread I mentioned that I used to play chess against my computer and sometimes managed to beat it.

Today I have Stockfish on my computer (and my phone) but rarely bother to play it because it's unbeatable. Turning the difficulty down to where I could beat it seems pointless.

When I feel the urge to play a rousing game of chess (is there such a thing?) I still play Sargon or Chessmaster or occasionally I'll put batteries into my Radio Shack chess computer and play that. (That's a fun thing since it's a "smart chess board" - you use regular chess pieces and just press down on where you're moving from and press down on where you move to. Radio Shack 60-2216)