Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

History Repeats Itself: Being One of “Those” People — An Early Adaptor

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The only reason why I didn’t endup a billionaire as part of the Internet / Web revolution is I’m writer of words not of code. But for that, I would be living a life of hookers and blow to this day.

So, with the advent of the LLM revolution, I find myself in a similar situation because I’m becoming a regular fucking “prompt engineer” because of how I’m using LLMs in the context of developing my novel.

As I’ve said before, I usually flesh out scenes before I write them in the guise of a Scene Summary. Using LLMs, I’ve managed to reduce the time working on a scene summary from a few hours to a few minutes. Of course, I had to get over my natural inclination to just obsess over making the scene summary perfect. I’ve generally decided that when the scenes summary is just good enough to get the job done, I move on to the next thing.

But I think any advantage I have because of developing a novel via LLMs will be brief and ultimately moot. I think in the end the entire notion of professional writing is going to be so revolutionized that it will be like the transition from horse and buggy to cars.

There may still be writers, but probably any professional writers will be artisanal in nature. They probably will be playwrights. Every other form of writer will be mooted by the eventual rise of Her-like technology. Actors, director and writers in any form of *recorded* media will be mooted pretty soon, the way things are going.

There may be some entropy in the system that slows this down, but given how the DGA gave up so easily and the the Hollywood Suits have the high ground when it comes to the WGA — things aren’t looking so great.

But I am known for my “hysterical doom shit” and it’s possible that I’m wrong. I’m wrong all the time, afterall.

Yet, I do think we need to realize that if LLMs are helping some dumbass like me be a much better novelist by helping me develop faster, that a lot of people a lot lazier than me are just going to shrug and let LLMs do all their writing for them and, in the end, Netflix will be more a database of actor body scans hooked up to Her-like technology than it is a studio.

Anyway. Enjoy these waning days of Hollywood while you can.

No, ChatGPT, *I* Am Still The Writer

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I see ChatGPT as a great — wonderful even — development tool when it comes to writing this novel. I’ve gotten pretty good at using it to speed up the process of writing scene summaries.

I use scene summaries to give myself something of an agenda before I sit down to write out a scene. With ChatGPT, what could have taken hours…now can be done in pretty much a few minutes.

The problem is, of course, that people are very fucking lazy and hackined and would rather just lulz the entire writing process to the point that they don’t actually have to write anything at all. This is not only very, very lazy, it kind of misses the point of writing to begin with — writers tend to be pretty fucked up and need an outlet for all their bent up neurosis.

But “normal” people — IE, Hollywood suits — who want to cut out all the expensive, weird people who produce fiction will see LLMs — and eventually AI — as a way to pretty much end the very idea of writing as a profession. Writing will go the way of the horse and buggy.

Combine the natural tendency to load freaky weirdos up with drugs to make them “normal” and there is a good chance that the future will be bleak place for writers. Not only will we all be turned into drones living off of UBI, but we’ll have reached some sort of post-human future.

Ugh. Fuck that.

Anyway. ChatGPT is a great tool. But for me, at least, it’s just a tool.

Hollywood Suits May Just Cool Their Heels Until AI Makes Most of The Industry Moot

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Let me be clear — I’m always wrong.

But all this talk about how the WGA strike may last “until September” is rather silly. It seems to me that Hollywood suits have the high ground and they could very well just cool their heels until AI advances to the point that the WGA becomes…moot.

The issue is that if LLMs were being used just to help development, then it would be just like using a search engine to help develop a novel, movie or TV show. But, surprise, because people are lazy and stupid, within 18 months it could be that writers, actors and directors may become very, very moot because AI will have advanced to the point that that is a real possibility.

If I had any control over such things, I would not ban LLM so much as demand specific broad carveouts for humans. There should be specific Hollywood jobs that HAVE to have a human do them — no AI.

But it definitely seems as though that won’t be the case. The momentum is there for Hollywood to be “Moneyballed” to the point that a huge swath of the Hollywood industry will be mooted.

What the suits want is there to be a lot of Suits, a few programmers and then some very, very, very poorly paid writers who just prompt movies — until that becomes moot, too, with technological advancement.

Anyway, the point is — unless something changes, all of this going to happen so fast that the system can’t catch up and Hollywood will collapse into itself into some sort of AI singularity.

So it could be not until September of this year, but September of NEXT YEAR before the Writers’ strike is over. And when it’s over the WGA may be rather mooted.

Never Fear, DGA, AI Will Make You Moot, TOO

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Good luck, my fellow creatives.

Building The Perfect Beast: ChatGPT is a Dangerous (and Dumb) Threat To Hollywood

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Has Adam Conover Jumped The Shark Because of His Take On ChatGPT?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

What Are You Thinking DGA?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I just don’t get the Directors’ Guild of America capitulating to the Hollywood studios without putting up any sort of fight. The issue of AI generated art — especially movies –isn’t going away and unless there are uniform, specific carve outs for humans….any agreement with the studios is moot.

Just from me fucking around with ChatGPT for development with my novel, I can tell that very, very soon, 99% of all entertainment is going to ge AI generated. The lone 1% of art that humans continue to generate (that is popular) will be seen as quaint and artisanal.

Only people with taste — and a lot of money — will give a shit if this or that piece of entertainment was generated by a human or AI. I just don’t see the traditional Hollywood system lasting much further out than maybe 5 or so years.

Unless there the studios are willing to accept specific, broad carve outs that make certain elements of entertainment the exclusive domain of humans….that’ it. It’s over.

The best that any human in entertainment can hope for is they’re an actor who can make money passively off of a body scan. And there will come a point when even that will be seen as quaint — AI will generate entire faux Hollywood stars that people will developed parasocial relationships with and, lulz, having one with a human will be seen as silly.

Throw in the rise of XR technology and, well, that’s it guys, it will be a brave new world.

The End Of Hollywood(?)

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Or not.

I’m always wrong.

A.I. May Soon Make The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Moot

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about A.I. that a lot of my fellow writers — many of the far better writers than I will ever be — miss is that most people watch and enjoy dreck. As such, whatever A.I. produces just have to be good enough to be on in the background of daily life for most people to accept it without even thinking about it.

As such, I think there is a real possibility that if the Hollywood writers’ strike lingers long enough that A.I. will not just break the strike, but render it moot. Barring something I can’t predict — I am wrong all the time, afterall — it definitely seems as though Hollywood is on the cusp of being radically transformed — “Moneyballed,” if you will — to the point that the only people making any money will be studio execs and actors who live passively off of full body scans.

And that’s if the actors are lucky!

It could be that ultimately even actors will be rendered moot as a cost-cutting measure on the part of Hollywood studios. All those 90s dystopian movies about faux movie stars generated by AI will become a reality and people will grow to have parasocial relationships with stars that don’t even exist in reality at all.

Stranger things, and all that.

If you throw in the growing likelihood of a severe economic downturn happening very, very soon because the US defaults, well, there you go. Before you know it, people will turn to Broadway and their local live theatre if they want to have any sort of human-generated entertainment.

Burn, Hollywood, Burn: Of AI & The Writers’ Strike

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There is a disturbance in the force. It definitely seems as though we’re about to experience a serious case of future shock over the course of the next few months. The entire knowledge economy could be not just drastically transformed by AI, but face serious contraction as well.

It could be that a lot sooner than you might think, the issue won’t be who gets paid for writing what, but audiences deciding that “artisanal art” has unique value unto itself. So, it’s possible to imagine a future where 99% of all art is AI generated, with the remaining 1% being created by humans who make a lot of money.

All of this might happen in the context of a real resurgence in live performances of all sorts. If I could, say, have an endless supply OK Computer era Radiohead, then seeing them live with new stuff will be something that people will pay an even bigger premium for.

Or, put another way, it could be that the average person won’t even notice that most of the entertainment they consume on a daily basis is AI generated. The entire greater showbiz industry will effectively collapse. It could be, in a sense, an extinction-level event for the entire concept of humans producing recorded entertainment.

It might happen so fast that even if the Hollywood writers’ on strike now are able to get some concessions from producers that it will all be moot. The only people in the future making money will be producers and the actors living passively off their full body scans. Otherwise, lulz.

That’s why I think for the Writers’ Strike to be successful, they need to be very, very aggressive on the AI front. They need to demand strict, clear carveouts for human writers. I would prefer a total prohibition on the use of AI to create a movie, but I think that’s probably pushing it.

As I understand it, the entire movie industry pretty much runs on hookers and blow in the sense that a lot, A LOT, of the industry is pretty much just vibes. And I could see from the producers’ point of view that the use of AI would be part of a broader effort to “modernize” showbiz.

Instead of any connection to the human touch, the vast majority of (bad) movies will be AI generated. Live entertainment will gain in value significantly and the only old-school movies that will exist will be high-end movies with a very specific vision.

But, wait, there’s more!

All of this would be happening just as movies and video games fuse. It could be that what movies exist in the future will be immersive in nature and the audience will collectively “play” the movie as a group in some sort of metaverse hellscape.

The point is — these may be the waning days of the Hollywood industry that has existed for about 100 years. It could be that the very idea of a “passive” human generated movie is going to be seen a very quaint a lot sooner than you might otherwise imagine.

The only thing I can compare this to is what is show in the movie Moneyball. A lot of how movies are actually produced is a magical mystery concoction accumulated over the decades. Or, as one producer once famously put it, “Nobody knows nothing,” when it comes to making movies.

So, it could be that because of the techno-capitalist imperative, soon enough, the back end of Hollywood will be done entirely relative to cold, hard metrics. What’s more, the very idea of “mass media” may not longer exist as everyone gets a different very, very specific and very, very personalized movie or TV show each time they sit down to watch something.

There will be no shared reality anymore. No watercooler movies or TV pop moments to share on social media. Professional (human) writers will turn to the live experience to make a living.