I feel kind of sorry for the major Hollywood trade unions. It definitely seems like they’re kind of fucked. I say this because I’m using ChatGPT and Bing to develop my first novel and the potential is definitely there. I say this because I sometimes have to fight with these LLMs and remind them that *I* am the fucking writer.
In the not-too-distant future, Hollywood will look like this: well paid Suits, ok paid programmers and…interns who are “prompt engineers.” And even the idea of a prompt engineer is will seem quaint when, soon enough, we reach a Her-type future in which people have digital assistants who know everything about them to the point that there will be no need for a “prompt engineers” in the first place.
With that in mind, all the Suits have to do is just cool their heels and snort coke off hooker assholes until AI advances to the point that that they end writing as Hollywood professional, period. The way things are going, the WGA (and SAG?) strike would only have to last 18 months before AI makes writing in Hollywood very very very moot.
I say this as a writer who loves writing, is writing a novel and wishes to be a screenwriter in Hollywood one day. But just like you can’t go to Windows on The World to eat anymore, the day may come when….being a professional writer or actor or director in Hollywood is just a quaint memory…..
Here is what I think is the endgame for the streaming industry. At some point in the near future — probably after we’ve either transitioned into a MAGA autocracy or wrapped up a civil war / revolution — Netflix will be morea database than an entertainment provider.
Simone is the future of Hollywoodand celebrity culture.
Because of advancements in AI, you will sit down in front of your TV or cellphone and you will be scanned for your particular mood at that specific moment. Then AI will spit out a six episode TV show or a 2 hour movie that fits your specific mood at that specific moment. It will use the bodyscans of your favorite actors to produce these completely AI-generated forms of entertainment.
So, there will come a point when Hollywood just feeds off the popularity of stars from the last 100 years, never generating any new ones because there won’t be any need. Unless, of course, someone really makes name for themselves on Broadway and they get a body scan so they can live passively off the licensing of that scan on streaming and other forms of mediated recorded entertainment.
But, wait, there’s more!
Soon enough, even having any form of human actors will be quaint and moot. All your favorite stars will be AI generated. They will be human like that all those dystopian 1990s movies about people developing parasocial relationships with faux Hollywood stars will seem very prescient.
And, what’s more,give us 20 years and all of your favorite Hollywood stars could be fucking androids. Unless SAG gets its act together, the only actors making any money professionally will be those on Broadway.
Otherwise, lulz.
We’re careening towards a very strange and weird future — especially when it comes to entertainment.
There is so much to unpack about Blazing Saddles. And I’m lazy and don’t want to give this post the proper research, so think of this as more of a off-the-top-of-the-head vibe check than something you might find on, say Vox.
Anyway, the misguided discourse about Blazing Saddles is it “couldn’t be made today” because it uses the N-word and all that. The people who say such things usually are older, white and get “triggered” by just the mere mention of the term “woke.”
But that is A LOT going on with this movie.
The chief thing is the context in which the movie was made. The movie was intended to be a critique of white racism. And, yet, because it came out a long time ago and because of how Blue and Red no longer interact with each other unless they’re screaming at each other, Reds think that the fact that the movie “couldn’t be released today” is a sign of the decline and fall of Western civilization.
This brings up to interesting questions.
One is, would these “anti-woke” MAGA people feel the same way if, instead of being “triggered,” “cultural Leftists” embraced this hypothetical version of the movie being released today? I mean, white people — and specifically the type of people you consider MAGA — are portrayed in the movie as racist morons. The very thing that MAGA is very, very touchy about being considered today. So, the pining after this movie on the part of MAGA is a result of a lost of context — they’re taking broad, anti-racist satire at face value and liking what they see.
Which brings up the SECOND point.
Given the misguided and conflated understanding of the movie that MAGA has — that it being released was a symbol of when America was “great,” what does that mean about MAGA? Why is MAGA so eager to be able to say the N-word if they don’t think of themselves of racist? Why are MAGA people so angry and aggrieved all the time?
The answer is, of course, that MAGA is a symptom, a side effect of the loss of power by straight white Christian men. (I fucking hate MAGA, by the way.)
Anyway. You could pretty much write a 10,000 word New Yorker article about this movie and still not convince some MAGA people that they’re missing the entire point of the movie!
What I can compare it to is how women’s fashion magazines sometimes have nudity, but all some dudes see — despite the context — is “tits and ass.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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