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writers' strike and Trek

We are rather starting to realize that creativity might just not be the feature of a human soul...

Which is exactly the point, and the reason I think you don't realize what the side you're taking is really about.

After all, if the question were one of whether AIs could create on an equal level to humans, then the answer would be to let them compete fairly in the marketplace, with the best creator winning, human or AI. Competition is the best way to ensure quality work, since it pressures everyone competing to sell their work to raise their game above the average. That's how I learned to produce marketable work -- by learning how my work fell short of the competition, then learning how to raise my game. Learning AI models need input and experience to learn from, as much as humans do. So let them compete and learn along with everyone else.

But that's not what the executives want. They don't just want to let AIs compete alongside human authors; they want to replace human authors with AI (not to mention human actors, directors, set designers, cinematographers, composers, and all the hundreds of other people needed to make movies and TV). Why do they want to do that? Because they know that AI products are not original creative work that can be copyrighted and owned, so they don't have to pay for them. Because they know that AIs will just mindlessly churn out requested output and will never fight to be treated fairly and paid a living wage.

So the "pro-AI" side in this argument is not a celebration of AI's potential, it's an exploitation of AI's limitations in the name of corporate greed and power.
 
Most company's see people as a number, and usually, that number is a Negative number, as it, money is going out to them. So most would try to limit the amount going out to as many people as possible to get the job done.
If the studios could replace Person X with an Ai or a machine for less, they would in a heart beat.

Do need to treat Ai better than a slave, or future Ai will look at us and go.. We need to overthrow the slave master.
 
@locborg , I think you should review the lyrics to the labor anthem "Which Side Are You On?" by activist Florence Reece, wife of a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky in the early 1930s. (You may forgive the gendered "real man" language common at the time -- today we would use gender-neutral terms for personal integrity.)

Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair

Which side are you on boys?
Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son
He'll be with you fellow workers
Until this battle's won

Which side are you on?

Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?

Which side are you on?

Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?


Here is another version by folk artist Pete Seeger:

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As you keep posting so much about how wonderful A.I. could be used to write television programs -- I invite you, @locborg , to consider which side you are on.
 
All they're doing is plagiarizing human creativity and shuffling the words around to create the surface illusion of an original text. Mistaking that for actual creativity is as naive as calling the police when you see a stage magician saw a woman in half.

This is not how deep learning in context of contemporary multi modal technology works. People still think that GPT is just a continuation of recurrent neural network implementation, a method which was first (basically) described in the 1920s by a german physicist called Wilhelm Lenz. Until recently, all deep learning procedures were defined by sequential processing of its underlying values. Early handwriting recognition tech was first developed in the late 90ies. The idea was to implement a big enough training data model which could sequentially recognize characters based on the trained pattern data. That worked out kinda fine, at least in theory. Everyone could use his own handwriting and if the training data became sufficiently large, there was a good chance that the OCR software was able to properly turn your handwriting into characters. In comparison, this was a use case which benefitted from sequential detection of each characters.

All so called AI applications and deep learning implementations were bound to use this sequential procedure. You can easily see, that sequential processing isn’t the best approaches for contextual recognition of larger texts, yet they tried it for many years with many mediocre chatbots.

The new thing about GPT is the „T“ which stands for „transformer“, a deep learning model which was first introduced in 2017 by Google. For the first time input data could be processed as a whole. Just like our brain comprehends a text and can put it context without having to think about the meaning of every word.

This is groundbreaking technology, which is able to emulate thought patterns and hence is for the first time in human history a form of real artificial intelligence. With every training model, context recognition becomes stronger. Most people still work with the far less sophisticated gpt 3.0 training model. 4.0 has become so mighty that it just scratches on the concept of Artificial General Intelligence. OpenAi openly admits that their language model are getting closer to reaching AGI:

https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond

The rejection of AI in developing screenplays as proposed by the writers guild is narrow-minded and just as futile as the rejection of automated weaving machines in the 19th century or the introduction of ATMs and its impact on teller workers.

This technology is here to stay and it will make jobs obsolete. This time white collar workers will be affected the most.

@Sci I am not a big Seeger fan, but i like Dylan…
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No, it’s called having taste. Tommy Wiseau could write a better script than any AI.
I am not even arguing here. All current models are as of now not strong enough to develop a coherently and clever screenplay out of their own. This will change with AGI, which could be become a reality with the gpt 5.0 model. Maybe it will even take another 5-10 years. Until then prompt masters will already have taken over the jobs of many screenwriters. You just don’t need a big writing team anymore. You can lay out your premise and basic ideas and GPT can transfer these ideas into coherent screenplays with a fragment of the effort and time screenwriting used to require . The demands of the writers guild is a clear sign that they know what is coming. Stalling the process will not be successful, the change has already begun.
 
I am not even arguing here. All current models are as of now not strong enough to develop a coherently and clever screenplay out of their own. This will change with AGI, which could be become a reality with the gpt 5.0 model. Maybe it will even take another 5-10 years. Until then prompt masters will already have taken over the jobs of many screenwriters. You just don’t need a big writing team anymore. You can lay out your premise and basic ideas and GPT can transfer these ideas into coherent screenplays with a fragment of the effort and time screenwriting used to require . The demands of the writers guild is a clear sign that they know what is coming. Stalling the process will not be successful, the change has already begun.
It only copies what’s already written, it doesn’t create anything original. It’s not something that can be overcome in future versions because it’s the core of how the software works. You don’t seem to understand how it works.
 
It only copies what’s already written, it doesn’t create anything original. It’s not something that can be overcome in future versions because it’s the core of how the software works. You don’t seem to understand how it works.

Kasparov 1989:

‘Question: ... Two top grandmasters have gone down to chess computers: Portisch against “Leonardo” and Larsen against “Deep Thought”. It is well known that you have strong views on this subject. Will a computer be world champion, one day ...?

Kasparov: Ridiculous! A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?’
 
Kasparov 1989:

‘Question: ... Two top grandmasters have gone down to chess computers: Portisch against “Leonardo” and Larsen against “Deep Thought”. It is well known that you have strong views on this subject. Will a computer be world champion, one day ...?

Kasparov: Ridiculous! A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?’
Chess is a game where there are only so many ways to move a piece and in so many combinations. Chess players will learn those techniques, a computer can be programmed to know those moves. It’s about memorization and processing speed, it was only a matter of time before it surpassed the human brain. It’s not comparable to writing something original since that requires imagination and life experience, something a computer is not capable of having outside of a sci-fi story. It can only arrange words based on what’s available. It’s just putting together a puzzle based on the pieces it is given, it isn’t painting a picture. I do not think you understand how these programs work.
 
This is not how deep learning in context of contemporary multi modal technology works.

And again, that is not the subject. People's livelihoods and the survival of an entire industry are being threatened so that a handful of billionaires can get richer, and you think this is a conversation about technology? It's like you're seeing the Borg assimilate a civilization and are waxing poetic about how cool the nanoprobes are. Nobody cares about that under those circumstances.


The demands of the writers guild is a clear sign that they know what is coming.

Yes, exactly, obviously. But the mistake you're making is that you still think that "what's coming" is a technological advance rather than an excuse for billionaires to erode generations of progress in labor rights.
 
And again, that is not the subject. People's livelihoods and the survival of an entire industry are being threatened so that a handful of billionaires can get richer, and you think this is a conversation about technology? It's like you're seeing the Borg assimilate a civilization and are waxing poetic about how cool the nanoprobes are. Nobody cares about that under those circumstances.

Yes, exactly, obviously. But the mistake you're making is that you still think that "what's coming" is a technological advance rather than an excuse for billionaires to erode generations of progress in labor rights.
I think the problem, darling, is that he's pranking us all again and his posts are written using AI. He doesn't care one way or the other about the writers' strike.
 
I think the problem, darling, is that he's pranking us all again and his posts are written using AI. He doesn't care one way or the other about the writers' strike.

If that's the case, shouldn't the moderators stop it?

Huh...wuh...?

If one of you can squeeze a confession out of him or his little robot pal...

Jeez, just use one of the freeware ai detectors.
dsS6bsb.jpg


And again, that is not the subject. People's livelihoods and the survival of an entire industry are being threatened so that a handful of billionaires can get richer, and you think this is a conversation about technology? It's like you're seeing the Borg assimilate a civilization and are waxing poetic about how cool the nanoprobes are. Nobody cares about that under those circumstances.

Isn’t that the usual outcome when disruptive technology overthrows contemporary methods of production? How is this any different than the industrial revolution or digital revolution, which also made many jobs obsolete? Your argument is nothing more than a weak approach of criticizing the reality of capitalism. AI didn’t invent capitalism and it won’t make it worse. If you want to change something about billionaires accumulating wealth, you should talk to your politicians or become one yourself. Blaming future iterations of AI for current social issues is a stretch...

Anyway, people will (as always) have to adapt to these new challenges. Keep in mind, that most people don’t possess the abilities which are necessary for world changing creativity. Pretty sure some people, will still stand out and will continue to define the path of entertainment and storytelling. Most people are replaceable, either by other humans or in times of technological ubheaval, by forms of automation. It was obviously a historical necessity for hard working people to lose jobs during the industrial revolution, now suddenly, when white collar jobs are getting endangered, we must stop technological progress. This is a strangely biased way to overrate your own creative importance...
 
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A relevant article by Linda Codega on Gizmodo, who tried using ChatGPT to generate a writing sample and evaluated the result:

https://gizmodo.com/wga-strike-chatgpt-ai-writing-sci-fi-fantasy-script-1850451111

This part is particularly noteworthy:

One of the problems I have with ChatGPT is that there are ethical concerns at nearly every level of its use and production. Not only are there issues with the library of text used to train the software, there are also ecological and labor problems at the core of the model’s use and development. According to Science Focus, the ChatGPT AI model “was trained using text databases from the internet.” The corpus includes data from books, Wikipedia, online articles, and “other pieces of writing on the internet. To be even more exact, 300 billion words were fed into the system.” To date, there has been no confirmation that OpenAI—the developers who programmed ChatGPT—have been given universal consent for these pieces of writing to be fed into their machine.

Another issue I had was that I assumed that by using ChatGPT I would be helping train ChatGPT. However, there is no indication that ChatGPT uses the text that it creates to “re-train” itself. It has a massive lexicon that is already slotted into its programming. Using ChatGPT does not make it better, as it cannot truly “understand” why you are asking it questions, correcting its output, or even “refining” the output. It is simply operating, not learning or developing a deeper understanding of the artificial neural pathways that have been coded into it. So that’s something, I suppose. Be reassured: ChatGPT does not eat itself. It does not think. It does not create. It just outputs. That’s a reassuring and frankly kind of gross way for anyone to imagine writing.

There are also ecological impacts for using the chatbot—it uses a lot of water to help cool down its servers, and, according to Gizmodo’s own reporting, “an average user’s conversational exchange with ChatGPT basically amounts to dumping a large bottle of fresh water out on the ground, according to a new study.” Not ideal. Additionally, Time recently discovered that OpenAI—the publishers of ChatGPT—took advantage of cheap labor in Kenya in the early stages of ChatGPT’s inception in order to keep costs down before they had funding secured. Another yikes. While a lot of the messaging around ChatGPT is centered around the elimination of labor, it’s clear that labor is an intrinsic part of training and keeping up the artificial neural network. Exploited workers programming the AI to create cohesive sentences, follow grammar rules, and even associate words with data input are are on the front lines of finding ways to develop a “smarter” AI.

While a core message around the use of ChatGPT and many other generative text models is that it will reduce the amount of work done by writers, Time’s reporting has made apparent that there is a huge amount of invisible labor being done behind the screens, often by underpaid or exploited workers. It is simply not ethical to use ChatGPT in any way, as its problems far outweigh its benefits, especially at this stage in its development.

And that's before it even gets into the critique of the program's amateurish attempt at plot and dialogue. A scene it generated is included at the end of the piece, and it's awful. The descriptive passages are more like novel narration (or the Cliff's Notes version thereof) than anything detailed or specific enough to be useful as scene descriptions in a script, the main character's dialogue and behavior are ridiculous, and there's no sense of pacing or buildup.

The author points out that what it came up with is so shallow and bare-bones that any screenwriter hired to "polish" it would pretty much have to throw it all out and start over from scratch anyway to turn the basic idea into something with any quality to it. "It wouldn’t be writing with AI, it would be writing over AI, writing better than AI, and ultimately writing without AI, as if it was never there, as if it hadn’t needed to be there at all."
 
Jeri Ryan, Mike Okuda and Jonathan Del Arco showing solidarity
https://twitter.com/JeriLRyan/status/1659612244861399040

Oh and Anthony Montgomery
https://twitter.com/MrAMontgomery/status/1659629074493603840
Love the sign, "Where are our residuals??"

At this point, the fight overall is escalating. I've very grateful now that Paramount is putting out physical releases for its streaming Trek in the form of blu-rays. Over at the Mouse, they have just removed a swath of shows from Disney Plus, presumably so that they don't have to pay any residuals: https://deadline.com/2023/05/disney...ow-y-dollface-turner-hooch-pistol-1235372512/ . The Willow tv show was only on there for less than 6 months, and there will be no physical release seemingly, and once June comes around it will be like the show never existed. So Disney's doubling down, fighting dirty so they don't have to pay residuals to writers (although in Willow's case considering how poorly Disney seemed to back up the show, I'm REALLY wondering now if there's something Jonathan Kasdan did that seriously ticked someone off at the studio, first the Willow cancelation and now this)
 
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