So, as I understand it, the Directors’ Guild of America membership is on the cusp of approving a new three year contract with the studios. They pretty much licked that particular boot without saying a word.
Soon enough there won’t be anyone left in Hollywood but suits, programmers and a few “prompt engineers” who are little more than interns. And that last category won’t last very long when technology to generate entire movies without any prompt at all comes along.
We’re probably going to have to go through a civil war / revolution starting in late 2024, early 2025 before we get around to that, of course.
What the three major creative unions need to demand is hard and fast carveouts for what a human can do that an AI can’t do. Or something like that. If they don’t do that, Hollywood as we’ve known it for 100 years won’t exist anymore. It will be a regular bonfire of the vanities.
In fact, I think it’s possible that Hollywood will be the first victim of the Petite Singularity that seems to be careening towards us at an alarming rate. It could be that it won’t be high paying, blue collar trucker jobs that will go — poof! — it will be deep blue writing jobs in Hollywood.
It’s all happening so fast that the system just isn’t prepared to handle the abrupt change. There just isn’t going to be any need for directors, or actors or writers. It will all be done by AI of one type or another.
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.
I’ve never been good at all the done-but-never-used development bullshit that you’re supposed to do when writing a novel. But now, with ChatGPT, I find myself spending way too much time asking ChatGPT the most off the wall questions about the universe I’ve come up with in an effort to spark some inspiration.
And, it’s really good — to a degree — with fleshing out character studies of characters
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry at how MAGA (and the far Left RFK, Jr) are using the news of credible evidence of UFOs to tout their bonkers conspiracy theories. It’s very, very fucking annoying.
Has no one learned the idea that correlation is not causation?
Just because things are similar, or seem to be acting in conjunction with each other, doesn’t mean the fuckinig are!
But this crazy, bonkers rhetoric on the part of professional idiots has gotten me thinking — what if Hard First Contact came? What would be the political reaction?
It seems to me that after the shock wore off, the center-Left would be interested in finding out more about the ETs, while the center-Right would grow hysterical and probably eventually want to either blow them up or convert them to some sort of weird interstellar Christianity.
I wish I was kidding.
But America is sooooo fucking divided and growing more so every day that there simply is no way that anything — ANYTHING — will force us to get our act together.
That’s why late 2024, early 2025 COULD be a rather monumental moment in time. I’m always — always — wrong, so, lulz, we may just muddle through things like we always do…..but I am worried.
It seems like either a full-blown descent into fascist autocracy is going ot happen as part of the 2024 – 2025 timeframe, or we have a civil war (Reds)/ revolution (Blues.).
At the moment, I think we’re probably just going to slide peacefully into autocracy and that will be that. If we’re lucky. And it will probably all be so subtle that we don’t even realize it.
Now, let me be clear — if push comes to shove, I have Adam Conover’s back. I find him funny and interesting and he has a great way of debunking things we all assume to be true.
But.
When it comes to AI — or specifically Large Language Models — he comes across as full of shit. I say this because he acts like LLM are being pitched to movie studios like they’re the infamous “piviot to video” that all but destroyed the online news industry.
The issue for me is — he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to the end-user experience. I’ve started to use ChatGPT to develop the novel I’m working on and it’s clear to me that huge swaths of the knowledge economy are about to be vaporised.
Maybe not with ChatGPT 3.5, but definitely by the time, say, ChatGPT 5 or 6 rolls around. What I find interesting about ChatGPT 3.5 is it’s willing to give me advice about how to write a novel. Now, I am using that advice as a stepping off point for the novel, but because the mass of men are very stupid and very lazy, it definitely seems as though there will come a time when most writing is done not by humans, but by AI.
And that doesn’t even address the issue of how ChatGPT is something of a “blackbox’ — we don’t know HOW IT WORKS.
AND, what’s more, we haven’t even gotten to the really dangerous shit, which is Artificial General Intelligence. That definitely seems to be on its way.
If anything, Conover should set aside the overwrought humor about how movie execs are being sold a bill of goods and start to think seriously about how the WGA can demand specific, concrete carveouts for human writers going forward.
It seems to me that the crux of problem with CNN is there is No Center. One side wants me to believe the sky is green while the other side sees that the sky is blue.
Pick a side, CNN. Or a side will be chosen for you.
If they went all-in with MAGA, then they would be really popular. If they went all-in with anti-MAGA, they would be popular. But this issue of trying to play it straight down the middle is bulshit.
Things fall apart. There is no middle. Any attempt to square the circle of modern American politics by doing such a thing is a fool’s errand. Get with the program. CNN needs to accept that Blue and Red are receding away from each other at an alarming rate.
If they keep trying to place themselves in “the center” they’re just going to be fools. Like I said — pick a fucking side. Only by doing that, CNN, will you find any success. I’m serious. You’re fooling yourself to think there is some magical “center” you can reside in that will make you respected by both sides.
I’m tentatively willing to suggest that the Apple Vision Pro may be A Big Deal. If you fused XR technology with AI technology — that’s a big fucking deal. And, yet, I don’t know. The jury seems still out to how big a deal it will all be.
One thing we need to understand is the context of all of this going forward — late 2024, early 2025 definitely seems to be a Perfect Storm, a convergence of sorts of political and technological tipping points. It could be that we’re going to fate not just a Fourth Turning but a Petite Singularity around that time.
Or, put another way, things are moving really, really fast on a number of different fronts.
If we dive into a severe recession by late 2024, early 2025 because of a Petite Singularity just we’re facing the existential choice of autocracy or civil war. Oh boy. That would really suck.
And, yet, I’m always wrong, so, lulz.
It could be that I’m over thinking things. But I do think that the years 2025 – 2029 will be years of dramatic transition. If we’re lucky, we transition into some sort of autocratic techno-state. If we’re NOT lucky, then, well, lulz, we will have some sort of civil war / revolution during those years and we’ll spend the 2030s figuring out what the post-WW3 New World Order will be like.
Yikes.
But that’s just more of my “hysterical doom shit.”
I think we’ll probably just muddle through. We (almost) always do.
As I often like to remind people, they say you go bankrupt gradually, then all at once and if all three major Hollywood unions go on strike there’s a pretty good chance that AI will be adopted far quicker by the Studios than it might otherwise be.
And I say this as someone who is rather Norma Ray when it comes to entertainment Unions. I’m all for them, I just think we’re careening towards a future that is pretty fucked up to the point that we either have something akin to a neo-Luddite movement or we, as a society, decide there have to be expansive and strict carveouts for humans.
The thing I’ve been the most shocked by is how AI generated art belies the idea that there is something uniquely human about art. Turns out, lulz, even something as human as telling a joke has something akin to a mathematical formulate to it that an AI can figure out.
And, remember, the issue is not that AI will generate Casablanca, it’s that whatever it generates will be JUST GOOD ENOUGH that the mass of people will watch it — or listen it while they fold their clothes. In fact, if you get all Black Mirror about it, I just don’t see traditional human-generated Hollywood surviving if the very idea of “mass” media becomes quaint.
If your TV, laptop or phone does a scan of your face to figure out what mood you’re in then gives you entertainment specifically not just to you, but to the specific mood you’re in at that very moment….well, game over.
This leads me to wonder, again, if maybe Broadway and other live theatre is about to see a significance resurgence as people with taste want actual, human interaction in their act.
Given that there is a non-zero chance that AI — or AGI — could very well mean the end of humanity, I continue to grow aggravated with people who complain that the mainstream LLM systems aren’t a cool as they used to be. One person compared the most recent version of ChatGPT to a “polite robot.”
What the fuck do these people want, the Terminator?
It seems as though a small, but vocal portion of the userbase of LLMs literally want the most hateful, spiteful possible versions of the technology so, I don’t know, they can have their personalities reflected back at them? I do think that we’re rushing towards a “Her” future where everyone has a digital assistant that has near-AGI levels of intelligence.
That, of course, will bring with it all sorts of problems — namely, it’s just a matter of time before Incels hook AGI technology up to sexbots and anway we go. You thought Incels were a pain in the butt before, just wait until they have absolutely NO contact with actual human women and they get all their creepy weirdo dreams made a reality by sexbots who are programmed to be pliant and submissive.
But again — I struggle to understand why fucking Redditers seem to want a technology that’s been compared to the a-bomb to be totally unregulated so any hateful dumbass could end civilization because, I don’t know, the wall didn’t get built?
Fuck those people. Idiots.
But it’s that mentality that we have to work around going forward. The whole issue of regulating AI — or AGI — could turn into something a lot like global climate change in the sense that it will get wrapped up in the whole Red-Blue divide and, in the end, nothing will be done about it.
Though, I have to note, if we reach something akin to the Singularity and, like….uhhhhh…no one has any jobs, then it could be that when regulation of AI or AGI is finally filtered through the Red – Blue prism that neo-Luddism will be what MAGA evolves into, leaving the idea of “light touch” regulation for the Blues.
Or something. Whatever it is, it will be fucked up.
I think it’s time to end the gender-specific acting categories at the Oscars. I believe this not because of any passionate fondness for non-binary people, but rather I just think its time.
Just like how I believe young women should be required to sign up for Selective Service, I think we should give male and female actors the opportunity to go head-to-head. I’m well aware that there are A LOT of problems with this idea. The whole non-binary issue — which is what the Little Gold Men podcast focused on — is besides the point.
We need to move past having Best Actor and Best Actress nominees, etc, so the point where men and women are judged by their ability head to head as opposed to sequestered by sex. From what I tell from the Little Gold Men podcast, The Academy is very, very slow to change such things.
I wouldn’t focus on the whole non-binary issue if I was marketing this for the broader public. I have no problem with non-binary people, but if their concerns are played up in any change of the categories then a lot of mainstream people will roll their eyes at how clueless Hollywood is.
But if you just say this is a “modernization” of the Oscars, then I think a lot of people will embrace it without all the “woke” fuss.
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