As I often say — I’m always, always wrong. But it definitely seems as though it’s at least possible that we’re in something of a waiting game when it comes to the current WGA strike.
And the two sides, tragically, are waiting for different things.
The WGA is waiting for the Suits to come back to the negotiating table, while the Suits are waiting for LLMs to advance to the point that Hollywood writers are…moot. So, rather than “September” being the deadline as one very young and naive striking WGA writer proposed, I think we have a far more open-ended situation on our hands.
It could be 18 months before there’s any resolution to the Writers’ Strike and the resolution will be that technology has reached a point where the Suits feel like they can just ignore the WGA altogether. And, rather than thinking about a WGA strike, they’re thinking about how many programmers they’re going to have to pay in place of them.
Like I said — I’m always, always wrong. So, I suppose it’s possible that something will happen and the Suits will come to some sort of agreement with writers. But..I couldn’t count on it.
I’m really struggling with a few scenes in the second draft. Two scenes in particular at the moment have pretty much caused everything to come a screeching halt.
I’m going to have to give them a lot of forethought tonight before I hopefully can turn around tomorrow morning and write them out. Not even using AI has been able to help me with these scenes because what I need from them is too complicated and, in a sense abstract.
So, I’m just going to have to go back to the old way of thinking really hard and struggling with how I can fill the scene with all the information that I need within it. Another problem is subsequent scenes really depend on what I lay out in these two scenes, so it’s difficult for me to just breeze past them and come back to them when I feel better.
Ugh.
Anyway, I continue to be impressed with how effective AI is in aiding me developing this novel. It’s definitely, in general terms, speeding up the process. But’s far from perfect.
I still have to actually write the novel out. But it definitely is filling a gap that I’ve long had because I have no friends no no one likes me. I no longer feel like I’m doing all of this in a complete creative vacuum.
The last I checked, Google has a nearly-complete archive of Usenet from its founding until at least around 2000 when everything went to shit there because of porn spam. It would be dumb for Google not to include Usenet in any Large Language Model dataset.
You would have to tweak it some, of course, but there are about 20 years of high quality words to use to train your LLM to be found with any Usenet archive. A lot of is outdated and full of vitral, but there is also a lot of human interaction and humanity to be found there, as well.
This is so much the case that if you were to include Usenet archive information in your LLM training dataset, you would probably endup with a very human-like LLM. I don’t know, maybe Google is already using their Usenet archive. Usenet was very popular back in the day.
Given how many Usenet servers there were at one point, I’m sure if you were working on an open source LLM that you could probably find a few million words to train your open source LLM by scooping up all the archived Usenet posts you could find.
Or not, what do I know. But it is an intriguing use for all those words that are now just forgotten Internet history. For everyone except for me, of course. 🙂
I’ve spent much of the day today using ChatGPT as an impromptu manuscript consultant as I gamed out scene summaries and, in general, it was a struggle. A fun, interesting struggle,but a struggle nonetheless.
But key takeaway is how dangerous LLMs are to the future of traditional Hollywood. It may not be ChatGPT. It may not be Bard. But at some point in the near, near future, the very idea of human-produced recorded entertainment may seem rather, well…quaint.
And, remember, for all the talk of how ChatGPT can “hallucinate” when you ask it a question, what is fiction, but a usually some neurotic human “hallucinating” a truth that makes them feel better for having a weird childhood. Or losing their parents at a young age.
You name it — fiction could be described as a “truthful hallucination.”
In fact, if I were to design a LLM for Hollywood studios, that’s what I could name it — Hallucination.
In short, LLM — which aren’t even AI — are really good at bullshit. They aren’t at the moment, very good at writing without a lot of hand holding, but that will come soon enough. If you combine LLMs propensity for bullshit with just a bit more abstract thought and, well, there you go end of (the human told) story.
As I keep saying, it could be — after we have a civil war / revolution in starting late 2024, early 2025 — that we wake up one day and Netflix is more about being a database of body scans of Hollywood stars than it is any sort of movie studio. I just don’t see “mass media” as we currently conceive of it lasting much longer.
By 2030, Hollywood could be a quaint memory, replaced by Broadway and local community theatre which is where everyone goes to if they want to see any sort of human-generated story. Otherwise, they just plop down on their couch and vedge out to a very unique, very personal story that was specifically created by a scan of their face by a device on their TV or phone.
That’s the future, folks.
Talk about Burn, Hollywood, Burn.
At a minimum, LLMs will be a very powerful tool in developing of fiction, ranging from novels,and TV to movies. It will be a lot like how we take for granted that a writer might use a search engine to help game out a fictional story.
The danger is, of course, that because of greed and people being dumb and hackied, that soon enough Hollywood will be three types of people: Suits, a few programmers and a shit ton of interns making minimum wage. Any actors that exist will first make their name on Broadway, become popular enough to get a body scan then live passively off the income of that scan.
Programmers will replace movie directors — do you hear that DGA? You, too, will become moot soon enough if you don’t demand human carveouts.
In a sense, I think it’s too late.
Now that people understand the power of LLM and they understand that we may be zooming towards Artificial General Intelligence, welp, that’s all folks, for human Hollywood.
One reason why I doubt “prompt engineer” will last very long as a job is soon enough YOU will be prompted by an AI. Think of this as the “Her” future in the sense that you’ll have a human-like digital assistant you will have casual conversation with.
Which this leads to the idea that potentially instead of a knowledge economy, we’ll have a conversation economy. What’s more, if you hook up AI to all these Terminators that companies like Boston Dynamics are building the looming prospect of almost all economic activity being a function of non-human actors becomes very real.
I’m talking about macro trends that seem to be all headed towards the same endgame. So, knowledge workers will be replaced by natural-language conversations and blue collar workers will be replaced by what are essentially androids.
And all of this could happen a lot sooner than you might realize. It’s kind of astonishing that all of this is happening in broad daylight and none of us are thinking about all the Hollywood movies that talk about the down side of this very future.
This, of course, raises the prospect of the need for a Universal Basic Income. The only way I can think such a thing might actually happen is to “bribe” elites by replacing all taxes with a 30% VAT. So, plutocrats will get away scot free when it comes to taxes, but we Poors will get one thing we need — a UBI — in exchange for significantly higher consumption prices.
I just don’t think we’re ready for the Conversation Economy. If AI is good enough that we not only can banter with it, develop an emotional connection with, then the very nature of work as we currently imagine it will be transformed.
So, instead of 12,000 professional writers in Hollywood, you will have a fraction of that — if any. People will shrug when they can talk to their digital assistant that will create a movie or TV show out of whole cloth on the fly. Your phone or TV will scan your face to see what mood you’re in and in a split second will generate you entertainment that is specifically designed to not just you, but your specific mood at that specific moment.
Mass media, a shared reality, will no longer exist.
Now, it seems to me that the end game of that specific situation is live theatre will see a real resurgence. That will be the delineator in pop culture — most run-of-the-mill recorded entertainment will be completely AI generated but if you want a “human touch” to your entertainment you will go to the theatre or a live music show.
Regardless, we’re just not ready for what’s about to happen. It will be interesting to see if we’re going to see the rise of a neo-Luddite movement, probably in the context of the next generation of MAGA.
AI-thinker Robert Scoble suggested that one day we’ll defer even our governance to AI. I think this is very possible. In fact, I think ultimately humans could simply defer all decisions to AI to the point that AI takes over without a shot being fired.
As such, humanity won’t go out in a blaze of glory in some sort of “Judgement Day,” we’ll rather simply drift into the arms of a very paternalistic AI that makes all our decisions for us. We might have some sort of contract between Humans and our new AI overlords that is renewed every so often. But, in general, all of humanity will defer all of our major decisions to an AI (maybe an AGI after a hard Singularity?)
It’s easy to imagine a situation where we are so lazy that we wilfully give AI access to all of our WMD, and hell, even all police operations across the globe. We will do this because enough people come to see AI as “objective” that it starts to make a lot of sense to people that only an all-powerful AGI can properly manage the globe.
If you wanted to get really fanciful about things, you might even suggest that global capitalism might be replaced with some sort of techno-communism where the dream of everyone living according to their ability and according to their need might finally be reached without the whole genocide part of it.
But that’s really reaching.
And, yet, the key element remains — we’re so busy thinking that Skynet is going to blow us up that we totally miss the idea that the transition to a world dominated by AGI would be rather meh. It would start with contracts being written by non-Human actors and end with some sort of hazy world government run by AGI that pushes lazy Humans around because we’re all so busy smoking a bowl while playing video games in the metaverse that we don’t notice what is going on.
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