Hiya, writers anâ frenz, some updates re-edited in:
From The19th (named for the amendment to the constitution) economy reporter Chabeli Carranza examines how the writersâ strike could determine the future of women, people of color and LGBTQ+ writers in the industry. (And hereâs the WGA StrikeHub)
From Amazonâs blurb of Naomi Kleinâs new book Doppelganger: â...AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication...â
HERE is a TheAtlantic article on Chatgpt writing highschool papers, HERE is a dk post by Lenny Flank on 3 novels he âco-wroteâ with Chatgpt for the fun of trying it (published at Amazon), and TheConvo writes, The exploitation of Hollywoodâs writers is another symptom of digital feudalism. From their email:
I had always assumed writing for movies or TV was a relatively cushy gig. But the ongoing writers strike has disabused those notions.
Sociologist David Arditi explains how the rise of streaming upended the TV industry â and as the industry changed, so did the working conditions for writers, which started to reflect many characteristics of the gig economy. While Hollywood writers might earn a lot more per hour than a DoorDash driver, they now lack the protections, wages and job security once taken for granted in pre-streaming days.
Thereâs also the looming threat of artificial intelligence â which, as Arditi points out, has âbeen the one point of contention that studios have been unwilling to even discuss.â
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and from the article itself:
I use the phrase digital feudalism because todayâs version of capitalism increasingly mirrors the transition from feudalism to capitalism in 16th-century England. Beginning in the 16th century, the English Parliament passed a number of enclosure acts, which abolished common land and defined it as private property that the government reallocated to the elites. These laws kicked peasants, known as serfs, off the land where they had lived and worked for generations. Many of them ended up heading to cities in order to find work. The ensuing oversupply of workers drove down wages, and many ex-serfs couldnât find jobs or housing, becoming vagabonds [and dying in droves â.ed].
In other words, serfs lost stability in their everyday lives as they were thrust into a new economic system.
Precarity, debt and a lack of stability are again the dominant themes in todayâs digital economy.[and generally.--ed]
The gig economy, in which people juggle two or three part-time roles to make ends meet, is largely to blame. These jobs usually donât offer full-time benefits, livable wages or job security. The roles â whether theyâre working as an Uber driver, delivering food for DoorDash or cleaning homes through Task Rabbit â are often managed through digital platforms owned by powerful corporations that give their workers a pittance in exchange for their laborâŠ.
On May 5, the New Republic offered a very well-written article by a striking screenwriter who was previously a journalist: Yes, You Should Care About This Writersâ Strike, and Hereâs Why,
...Television work, for example, is hard to get. In the past, a television writer might staff on a network sitcom where theyâd be guaranteed high-paying work for the majority of a year, and supplement that income based on residual payments, presumably tiding them over until the next job came. The switch to streaming has replaced that model with shorter rooms (the length of time a writing room meetsâeight weeks versus 22 weeks, for example), lower residuals, and longer gaps between jobs. Our proposal? Make rooms a little longer, residuals a little higher, writers a little better taken care of to help ensure that shows arenât written only by promising young talent with generational wealth.
The Guild estimates that its proposals would cost the studios $429 million per year, a drop in the bucket compared with the $28 billion in operating profits the studios reported in 2021, and the $773 million eight Hollywood CEOs made in 2022. And yet on count after count, the AMPTP not only rejected our proposals, but refused to even make a counterâŠ.
The author âJoanna Rothkopf âEmmy Awardâwinning television writer and a member of the Writers Guild of Americaââ points out that this follows several years of crisis in the journalism realm as well, capped by economic exigencies brought on the global pandemic (including affecting DK, as some of us have discussed). She goes on to say:
In his newsletter Read Max, the writer Max Read also pointed to the similarities between the boom-bust 2010s of digital media and the current strike, noting a trend in corporate innovation that has offered an increase in profits while forsaking the quality of the products. âIt would not be unfair to say âtheyâre doing to screenwriters what they did to journalists,ââ he wrote, âif what you mean is that theyâand it is in some cases quite literally the same Silicon Valley executives and investors!âare using technological shifts in production and distribution as an excuse to roll back labor protections and grind down writersâ share of current or future profits, regardless of how those technological shifts will affect the business overall...â
Why does quality matter in entertainment? Because entertainment is one of the major ways our species enlarges and optimizes our capacity for imagination. Which we need for meeting all kinds of real life challenges and aiming for optimal outcomes.
One way to measure quality in entertainment is in terms of diversity: interestingly, there has almost always been more diversity behind the camera than in front of it, âe.g., cinematographer James Wong Howe 1899â1976â or more recently,
While at USC, [Shonda] Rhimes was hired as an intern by Debra Martin Chase. [one of the mentors to whom Rhimes credits her early success. Chase is the first African-American female producer to have deals at major studios, affiliated first with the Walt Disney Company from 2001 to 2016 and then with Universal Television, a division of NBCUniversal Television Group.
Initially a Houston attorney, Chase moved into the film industry upon joining Columbia Studiosâ legal department. She ran Denzel Washington's Mundy Lane Entertainment from 1992 to 1995 and Whitney Houston's Brown House Productions from 1995 to 2000, then forming her own company, Martin Chase Productions...]
and yet, despite numerous other cases, it has STILL been slow going getting even a kind of broad spectrum represented out front, at least on broadcast channels, which is what most Americans watch, so it does affect their/our outlook on diversity. The current offerings seem to me more diverse than ever ⊠but Alaska Daily just got cancelled after a single season/eleven episodes, so...
Does AI offer better hope? Or even equal? Doubtful: from a Convo email:
Bias in artificial intelligence algorithms has been in the news in recent years, particularly algorithms that are biased against women and people of color. Facial recognition algorithms have been especially unfair to Black women. But itâs not a new problem.
Computer scientist John MacCormick recalls creating a head-tracking algorithm 25 years ago when he was a Ph.D. student. When the time came to demo the algorithm, he had the shocking realization that it was racially biased.
As Big Tech rushes headlong into a new era of powerful AI systems, MacCormick sees the same mistakes cropping up again and again. It boils down to who is in the room, what gets prioritized and how hard it is to spot bias lurking in the numbers.
<big>The dangers of bias and errors in AI algorithms are now well known. Why, then, has there been a flurry of blunders by tech companies in recent months, especially in the world of AI chatbots and image generators? Initial versions of ChatGPT produced racist output. The DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion image generators both showed racial bias in the pictures they created.
[As recently as 2021, teaching a computer science class, I had just had the class view] a video poem by Joy Buolamwini, AI researcher and artist and the self-described poet of code. Her 2019 video poem âAI, Ainât I a Woman?â is a devastating three-minute exposĂ© of racial and gender biases in automatic face recognition systems â systems developed by tech companies like Google and Microsoft.
The systems often fail on women of color, incorrectly labeling them as male. Some failures are particularly egregious: The hair of Black civil rights leader Ida B. Wells is labeled as a âcoonskin capâ; another Black woman is labeled as possessing a âwalrus mustache.â
I had a horrible déjà vu moment in that computer science class [remembering] that I, too, had once created a racially biased algorithm...</big>
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We can read at TheAtlantic link and Lenny Flankâs diary to explore a little more about what AI so far evidently can and canât do where writing is concerned, but I would argue in particular that the sheer capacity for diversity and originality is an irreplaceable human quality because AI is programmed from what is and has been â thatâs all that exists to program it with, not things unimagined as yet. And what is and has been arenât the creative level of diversity and originality we still need more of. Likely only the most superficial, low-cost programming adequate to satisfy superficial audiences is as far as AI show-runners will go, since AI costs affect their profit margin the same as other costs do. Likely, therefore, some cheap-thrills factors to look deceptively creative, much as visual special effects do.
Critics of the Harry Potter franchise may recognize how readily a range of kinds of racism and bias slip in unintentionally, simply because cultural history is imbued with all of them. (See image above, from AI experts concerned about exactly these issues in critical non-entertainment contexts.)
All in all, there seems nothing to suggest that AI can provide depth of character and portrayal the way human writers can. Especially human writers committed to being allies for diversity, regardless of their own heritage âI sure hope thatâs us kosaksâ and to not leave minorities saddled with having to push the entire bulk of society and its info-tech forward all on their own.
Since television and film studios seem to anticipate that their AI can replace dozens upon dozens of individual, varied, diverse human writers, dispensing with what human artists uniquely provide, they bid fair to set society backward, on top of the slow civil war already militating in that direction.
Based upon what Iâve read and heard so far about novels written by AI or largely by AI, I anticipate that fiction from that source will exhibit major quality issues, too, if possibly fewer where diversity is concerned, since the individual author-of-record can tailor her/his product to their own specifications. ...assuming s/he/they choose to put that effort/cost in.
Before this era, the most comparable kind of operation I know of is like what Barbara Cartland was rumored to have run: a large stable of ghostwriters whose job was to take the characters, era, background, conflict and title she handed them, and write novels in her style, churning out a few a month amongst them all. Whether true or not, Iâve never been able to discover, but itâs not radically different from the way the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and other publisher-owned book series used to be generated, except that a writer had more than a month to complete the assigned title.
Does AI threaten to put most fiction writers out of work, on screen or on page? I guess it depends on whether readers will be able to tell the difference ⊠and which type of product they prefer. The quality range is huge as it is, and thereâs plenty of material out there by humans thatâs not high quality by various measures, but sells great anyway.
<big><big>Challenge:</big> Donât worry, you donât need ChatGPT for this :D</big> â the work that film and television writers do.
The most basic kind of screenplay is generally laid out as below, leaving interiority and most details to director and actors to interpret from the lines and overall story, or devise for themselves:
MARTHA
(trying for patience)
Weâll be out on the picket lines a few hours.
You sure you want to wear flipflops?
GEORGE
Oh, right, lemme go put on something
better.
He leaves the room. Martha is stashing sunscreen, water bottles, energy bars, sunglasses, cellphone, extra cash, windbreakers, a first-aid kit, and other practicalities, into a tote bag prominently labeled WGA STRIKE SUPPLIES. George comes back in with swim fins on his feet.
MARTHA
George, everyone out there already
knows youâre a comedy writer.
Compose a brief conversation in script format, with two or three characters. It can be longer than the one above but it doesnât hafta. Include only as much stage/scenic direction as is critical for the actorsâ movement or line delivery in the moment.
This is just to experience a little what scriptwriting can be like if you havenât tried it before! Hereâs the centering button, plus you may need to add a few blank spaces at the right ends of lines to get squared blocks of centered text.
If you prefer, stageplays sometimes are formatted with character names left-margin aligned, followed by colon : followed by any line-delivery instructions in parenthesis, and the line itself immediately after. Youâd only need to hit return/enter to put space between each speaker, and between speakers and any intervening crucial stage/scene directions, block paragraphed on their own.
Commenters who know of screenwriting format programs they like, please do mention, even if those programs might not be use-able within comments in our thread.
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