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5 MAY 2023 - - There is a very well known story in the entertainment business that the most famous telegram in Hollywood history was sent in 1925, when Herman J. Mankiewicz, the future co-writer of “Citizen Kane,” urged his newsman friend Ben Hecht to move West and collect three hundred dollars a week from Paramount:
"The three hundred is peanuts. There will be millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots”.
The rise of the talkies, for which Hecht became a prolific scenarist, soon brought a wave of non-idiot writers to Los Angeles, to supply the snappy movie dialogue of the thirties - a decade that, not incidentally, saw the rise of the Screen Writers Guild. Scores of professional writers flocked to Hollywood and became famous.
Writers have always endured indignities in Hollywood. But, as long as there are millions to be grabbed, the trade-off has been bearable — except when it isn’t. The past month has brought the discontent of television writers to a boiling point. In mid-April, the Writers Guild of America (the modern successor to the Screen Writers Guild) voted to authorize a strike, with a decisive 97.85% in favor.
At issue are minimum fees, royalties, staffing requirements, and even the use of artificial intelligence in script production — but the over-all stakes, from the perspective of TV writers, feel seismic. Laura Jacqmin, a writer whose credits are voluminous, has been very outspoken and recently said in an interview:
"If we do not dig in now, there will be nothing to fight for in three years. The word I would use is 'desperation'. This is an existential fight for the future of the business of writing".
Most of the headlines I’ve seen about the strike that started this week have been about securing a better deal for streaming residuals. Which, make no mistake, is important, and I’ll get to that in a second. And this is a huge topic to cover. But in keeping with my (often futile) attempts to maintain *short* posts ( 🤪 ) I'll zoom in on a just a few points.
The role of AI in the strike. This provides a frightening vision of the near future of, well, everything.
The most recent proposal from the WGA concerning AI is the following:
“Regulate use of artificial intelligence on [Minimum Basic Agreement] covered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.”
And, as it currently stands, the response from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is a big wet fart of an offer for “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”
In a sense all labor negotiations are a waiting game to see which party blinks first. But the AMPTP’s desire to kick the can down the road on AI is especially telling. Their counter, put another way, is actually: “we do not want to commit to anything until we know if this technology will be good enough to replace whole writers rooms.”
Which is how most industries appear to be reacting to the fast ascendence of generative AI. As I wrote earlier this week, IBM's CEO (probably feverishly sweating and licking his lips in delight) announced that the company could replace almost 8,000 jobs with AI over the next five years. AI has also been mentioned prominently as a replacement for human staff in the wave of recent layoff memos from digital media CEOs. And Ashley Cooper, a Toronto-based video game narrative lead, reported that she’s already been asked by a studio use AI to write in-game dialogue.
Two things have quickly become very clear: First, corporations will happily sacrifice quality for infinite amounts of passable AI sludge. And, second, unless you have some mechanism for collective action in your workplace, your boss is going to try and figure out a way to replace you with an AI.
And no industry or profession is immune. My ediscovery industry readers know that attorneys hired on a temporary basis are equally gutted by the law firms and corporations they serve, both also licking their lips in delight. The chimera called the legal “profession” - the institutionalization of an economic model simply focused on quick, self-serving rewards, and so inured to long-term social costs. In America it’s all about the money, only about the money. So no surprise even lawyers have been destroyed by the thugs of commerce and the AI technology that can do their jobs. They hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little, sometimes nothing. And I use the word nothing” when you tote up the net effect of daily cost-of-living expenses, loan repayments, etc
So the fact that AI regulations for writers rooms are tied into broader negotiations around streaming residuals is fitting. The streaming platform, as a piece of technology, started as an imperfect antidote to piracy. The idea was that instead of outright stealing content, users could, instead, pay a small monthly fee and access as much of it as they want. Over time, however, the monthly fee has increased as has the amount of walled-off streaming platforms you’re required to sign up for to watch that content.
Now, streaming platforms are essentially distribution systems for entertainment monopolies and, unless the WGA puts a stop to it, it seems like the plan is to fully automate these distribution systems by jamming them full of as much AI-generated content as technologically possible. Netflix is already experimenting with using AI generations in their animated films which will be at full display at Cannes Lions next month - my last conference event (😢) as this year marks my exit from the conference circuit.
And this is something that Hollywood studios have been preparing for for a long time. Jet Li, famously, didn’t appear in The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions because Warner Bros. wanted to scan his fight choreography and add it to a digital library that they would own the rights to (he was going to play Seraph).
And Disney has been experimenting with deepfake technology for years under the guise of de-aging actors’ faces.
NOTE TO READERS: Remember that Martin Scorsese movie "The Irishman" a few years back where Scorsese was able to reverse-age DeNiro and Pesci and Pacinio to make them look younger? My regular readers will remember my post from a few years back. Those cameras and that technology were actually first developed by Disney about 8-10 years ago, at the Disney Research Center in Zurich, Switzerland where Disney does its really high-tech/funky stuff (they are hooked up with the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology where I did my artificial intelligence program).
But it also means Disney has the option of owning, and archiving, their likenesses, at least for use in the context of that film universe. There is a very good article from in The American University Business Law Review which wrote last year.
“Once an actor signs on to a project within a large and profitable franchise like Star Wars or Marvel, their likeness and voice could become part of the intellectual property due to its affiliation with the character".
This is why legendary actor James Earl Jones (now 92) stepped back from his iconic role as the voice of Darth Vader. After 45 years of playing the part, Jones was able to sign over his rights to the Vader voice for $25 million. Lucas Films has developed a proprietary AI algorithm to create new Vader dialogue. And an FYI: Jones was only paid $7,500 for the first movie.
So it’s not hard to see how, from an executive’s point of view, this is the perfect final phase of “content”. An AI writes the script, digital clones of actors perform it, another AI puts all of the scenes together in a sequence, and yet another adds in all the effects. And then it’s all distributed via proprietary platforms that offer no residuals whatsoever for the scant few humans involved with the process.
NOTE TO READERS: there is already an intra-industry arms race to be the first studio to find - and lock down with a copyright - the best suite of tools to do this. I am writing a brief on all of this for a media client and will share it when time permits.
So I suppose someone should ask the capitalism fandom what happens if every product is being made by an AI and all the humans who used to be paid to make them don’t have jobs anymore and, thus, don’t have enough money to buy them. If Disney produces an infinite content machine but no one can afford to watch it, exactly how long does that last?
Ok, it is a lot more complicated than that but let's leave it there.
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