Actors join Writers on strike

Rroff said:
Was interesting to see several people suing AI companies including actors, it is a losing battle really as even if AI isn't trained on their material directly if it is trained on enough general information eventually it can be guided to the same results.

Interesting how many people don't understand both how capable but also how limited current and medium term AI is/will be and it isn't something you can really regulate, even if you shackle the big companies or nation states there is nothing to prevent individuals chipping away at it.
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The huge problem with ai is the theft of art to feed it. Let’s be fair, the software writers won’t be feeding it with their material and without high quality art to reference, the ai wouldn’t be anywhere near as good.

If you actually had to pay the artists for the thousands of bit of art used to make the ai decent the cost would outweigh the benefit as you could use artists for the bespoke work and need less of it.

Regulation could exist if it were possible to track the information used to feed the ai for big companies, which can be audited to prove it was fed from internal work.
 
Werewolf said:
Except that you might not be getting those jobs very often and then trying to live off very low wages jobs in some of the most expensive places in the country.
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So if they're effectively doing a part-time job then, logic would suggest, you would also need to work other jobs (either a full-time or multiple part-time) at the same time outside of acting/writing to make ends meet rather than solely depending on a singular part-time "low paying per year but high pay per task" job to sustain you. Yet from what you've written about these folks, it would suggest that these various low paid actors/writers aren't doing that and are instead fully dependent on their part-time roles to sustain them.

I wonder if thats due to the nature of their "gig" work which could require them to drop everything at the last minute for an acting/writing gig at the potential cost of being unable to hold a more full-time job or multiple part-time jobs?

I know the old Hollywood trope is that new actors freshly arrived and looking for fame generally ended up being waitresses etc before hitting the big time but taking those other jobs to survive just seems to make sense rather than telling studios effectively "you need to pay me more for the my part-time work because I can't survive on it" which I can't believe is a message that will go down well amongst none-Hollwood Americans, many of whom who already have to make ends meet by working more than one job.
 
montymint said:
The huge problem with ai is the theft of art to feed it. Let’s be fair, the software writers won’t be feeding it with their material and without high quality art to reference, the ai wouldn’t be anywhere near as good.

If you actually had to pay the artists for the thousands of bit of art used to make the ai decent the cost would outweigh the benefit as you could use artists for the bespoke work and need less of it.

Regulation could exist if it were possible to track the information used to feed the ai for big companies, which can be audited to prove it was fed from internal work.
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Feeding it high quality references makes it easier with current generation AI but enough general information will increasingly enable it to fill in the blanks better. It might take a bit more guiding to get the same end result but often there is only so many possible variations of something.
 
montymint said:
The huge problem with ai is the theft of art to feed it. Let’s be fair, the software writers won’t be feeding it with their material and without high quality art to reference, the ai wouldn’t be anywhere near as good.

If you actually had to pay the artists for the thousands of bit of art used to make the ai decent the cost would outweigh the benefit as you could use artists for the bespoke work and need less of it.

Regulation could exist if it were possible to track the information used to feed the ai for big companies, which can be audited to prove it was fed from internal work.
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I think it’s millions maybe even billions of unlicensed art pieces that have been used. The laion 5b training dataset is 5 odd billion and I don’t think that is sufficient for training the AI
 
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I always see people blame Hollywood and writers for today’s films but they just make what the majority of public want to see, sadly at the moment that seems to be lame superhero nonsense.

Blame the public for liking bad things :p
 
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imtoooldforthis said:
I always see people blame Hollywood and writers for today’s films but they just make what the majority of public want to see, sadly at the moment that seems to be lame superhero nonsense.

Blame the public for liking bad things :p
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I'd generally blame the accountants at least as much if not more...*

The people that run Hollywood and provide the funding follow the money and the trends and are usually very risk averse, so they see a superhero film doing well, they'll jump to make more, they see a couple of real flops (not the imagined ones) and they'll shy away from them.

IIRC it's one of the reasons you go through cycles of what sort of films get the big budgets, so for a few years it's Bible epics, then it's Westerns, then it's Horror, then it's Sci-fi, then it's Buddy comedies, or Action heros, then it's super heroes.

It's also worth remembering that those people providing the funding often have their own likes and dislikes for genres, there are some fun stories behind things like the making of the Puppet Masters where it was greenlit as a sci-fi, then the exec in charge changed and the new one hated sci-fi so they had to shoot it whilst playing down the sci-fi aspect of a well known sci-fi story so the exec didn't interfere more than he already was.
It's one of the reasons it seems WB/discovery has been so terrible since the merger, the new head guy of the company is a "reality" pusher because that was what made money for Discovery (not the historical stuff, or the nature, but scripted reality shows), so he's quite happy to dump anything that he doesn't like if it might give a short term saving.

Personally the last film I went to the cinema to watch was Dune, and it looks like the sequel might be the first one since then I go to see, I've lost interest in most of the Marvel stuff because it hit a point where it was more like homework than fun to try and keep up with an ever increasing number of films and TV shows that linked together, and the DC stuff never really impressed me much apart from IIRC Suicide Squad and that's mainly because it was a super villain film and more importantly it was fun to watch, shot with actual lighting! and not (as seemed the way with most of the DC stuff) with 15 watt bulbs and everything having to be grim and dark, and gritty (I don't mind grim/dark but it's not really effective when the entire film is like it).


*I'm finding it more than a little hilarious that a film based on a doll questioning her life seems to be one of the biggest hits of the year, if not the last few years, and the reports that there was no option/contract in place to make additional films with the same primary cast and crew if it did well (so if there is going to be a sequel they can basically ask for a lot more dosh based on the performance of the first).
 
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It's amazing how quiet this has gone. Nobody really cares about what Hollywood has to offer anymore. I remember the last time people were craving new series of Heroes and Lost I think it was. None of that this time.
 
Jokester said:
It's amazing how quiet this has gone. Nobody really cares about what Hollywood has to offer anymore. I remember the last time people were craving new series of Heroes and Lost I think it was. None of that this time.
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The Studios learnt from the last strike.

The last strikes helped accelerate the, relatively, cheap reality TV shows that it will help fill the void.

Plus this time we have the streaming services and people will happily just watch old shows and films in the meantime. Last time it was mainly network TV shows that tradionally start in September that were hardest hit.

Also the studios completed a lot of films and shows a bit early so this time round they have a lot of completed content in the bank that they can slowly drop feed us.

Finally, a few people, are watching the Korean stuff on Netflix instead. That's probably a very small minority though, judging by the lack of threads in this sub.

Maybe people will care a bit more in a few months when things they were hoping to see get delayed.


rp2000
 
Shamikebab said:
I don't see why people are saying AI can't be regulated, why not?
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At this point, it's too accessible. Anyone with a half decent machine can learn the ropes and knock something up right now. How do you regulate thousands of randoms in their bedrooms just doing things on a whim, with a continually growing userbase? It's like whackamole needle in a haystack.

Plus, ultimately you need to feed a model material to train it to produce good results, which right now simply means feeding it endless content, which in most cases is without the content creator's consent. When you have billion dollar companies who do completely gross things like "revive" dead actors when they obviously have no say in the matter because they want to earn another couple hundred million at the box office, then there's no chance all these randoms are going to respect copyright or people's privacy to produce their content.
 
Smeghead said:
At this point, it's too accessible. Anyone with a half decent machine can learn the ropes and knock something up right now. How do you regulate thousands of randoms in their bedrooms just doing things on a whim, with a continually growing userbase? It's like whackamole needle in a haystack.

Plus, ultimately you need to feed a model material to train it to produce good results, which right now simply means feeding it endless content, which in most cases is without the content creator's consent. When you have billion dollar companies who do completely gross things like "revive" dead actors when they obviously have no say in the matter because they want to earn another couple hundred million at the box office, then there's no chance all these randoms are going to respect copyright or people's privacy to produce their content.
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Regulating any use of AI is obviously impossible. Regulating film companies using it is easier though. Films that have AI simply don't get approved for release.
 
Bigpig said:
Have they realised yet that there won’t be very much of an industry left when their strike ends^^?
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The way things had been going there wasn't going to be much of an industry left as it was, at least in terms of experienced humans involved in the creative and production side of things.

The contracts the studios were giving out were unsustainable for almost anyone new to the industry, and barely sustainable for those who were established even if they had a "hit", and that's before the likes of the attempts to slip stuff into contracts to allow a studio to basically use an actors likeness or voice in perpetuity without additional recompense or the actor having any say in what it was being used for (especially bad for anyone whose primary work was voice over which has rarely paid well to start with).
It's already been at the point for a few years that the likes of the VFX artists and companies were going bust due to how low their income was, even if they won Oscars they didn't necessarily earn enough out of the contracts to stay afloat (and IIRC Disney's in house VFX people have voted to create a union to deal with their pay and conditions).
I think it was "Suits" which was one of the big streaming hits where the entire writing staff between them got a total of $3k in residuals for millions of watched hours.


The insane thing is that what the writers and directors are asking for is not unreasonable, it's basically putting them roughly back in the same sort of situation they were in back before streaming*, and the cost to the studios would be quite small. I can't remember the figures but it was worked out it for at least one studio it would be less than something like the CEO's bonus.


In an earlier post it's mentioned that the day rate for someone as an extra in one of the netflix shows was $300, apparently having looked around that was way higher than the normal day rate for a non speaking extra, which is or was a few years ago $90 (or to put it another way McDonalds wages).

*The contracts at the moment are based on the idea that Streaming isn't a primary form of viewing, and is mainly a promotional thing for the traditional methods of viewing.
 
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Werewolf said:
I think it was "Suits" which was one of the big streaming hits where the entire writing staff between them got a total of $3k in residuals for millions of watched hours.
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But their actual wage for writing each episode was, according to the WGA, around $15k-40k per episode as a MINIMUM with pay even higher than that - PER EPISODE - so I don't care if their residuals were worth nothing when their actual wages are bloody huge!

WAG wages here (PDF) page 8 tells you their "minimum" pay for either writing a 60min story - or just the screenplay - or both - https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf
 
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Werewolf said:
(especially bad for anyone whose primary work was voice over which has rarely paid well to start with).
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Though AI text to speech has a long way to go, AI assisted voice imitation are at a scary level now - the "David Attenborough" Warhammer narrations for example.
 
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Bigpig said:
Seen some of these new shows have up to 8 main writers?
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On of the requests/demands of the WAG was a "minimum size" writers room i.e. at least "6-12" writers whilst the people who run TV series (the showrunners) are already saying "No, there's too many already".

variety.com

TV Staff Minimum Remains Key Sticking Point, but Some in WGA Privately Grumble: ‘Nobody Asked for This’

Some writers and showrunners are expressing private opposition to the WGA's proposal for a TV staff minimum.
variety.com variety.com
 
ianh said:
On of the requests/demands of the WAG was a "minimum size" writers room i.e. at least "6-12" writers whilst the people who run TV series (the showrunners) are already saying "No, there's too many already".

variety.com

TV Staff Minimum Remains Key Sticking Point, but Some in WGA Privately Grumble: ‘Nobody Asked for This’

Some writers and showrunners are expressing private opposition to the WGA's proposal for a TV staff minimum.
variety.com variety.com
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IIRC that's partly because when you're writing a "season" (say 24 episodes) you need to be turning out at least one script a week.
That's exceptionally hard for say a comedy* or a 45 minute drama when you're also having to rewrite on the go, so the way most shows have done it is to have multiple script writers who may be working in sub teams so that you have some of them doing the next script some that have worked on the current one (or the A story and the B story), and are now doing rewrites on set, and still have the chance to have time off or get home after less than a 12 hour day.
Sure the "writers room" may seem overstaffed to some, but at the same time those writers are often working very long days trying to be creative and deal with changes at short notice as required by the showrunners, directors and actors, which leads to burn out.

To give an idea of how the US has varied compared to the UK for comedies, in the UK we tended to do 6-8 episodes of a comedy a year with maybe two or three writers who could have spent most of a year writing the scripts at a healthy pace before filming started that allowed for time off, a lot of the US shows run the writers much harder and without many/any breaks for weeks or months at a time.

IIRC it's not helped that they've been trying to shorten the production schedules so a lot of things have had to be pushed hard, including longer hours for the writers as they have to get their job done before pretty much anyone else can start doing stuff.

[edit]
IIRC traditionally a lot of US shows did have writers rooms of the size that the WGA are reportedly asking for, it wasn't seen as uncommon or "a big deal", and a lot of shows that didn't have big "writers rooms" relied more heavily on script writers who might have done one or two episodes a season and had a bunch of them . IIRC Star Trek:TOS and TNG had both the "staff" writers, and "guest" writers so they'd have scripts or at least outlines that were largely done by non staff reducing the load on the writing room, and they did the production cycle slower than is the norm now, with the old "mid season" breaks.


*A 22 minute episode of comedy might need something like 30-40 minutes of script to start with, then changes to give the producers enough to edit down. IIRC the "How I met your mother" DVD set has a few episodes where they've got the longer cuts, and several commentaries/extras explaining how and why they always made sure to have extra material that could be filmed and often didn't get the "final" version until it was in the edit room and they saw how various bits hung together once they'd started trimming for broadcast (a scene might be great but take too long once acted, or two other scenes worked better).
 
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