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AI Is Coming for Hollywood's Jobs

22 9
25.05.2024

Movies

Peter Suderman | From the June 2024 issue

Tom Cruise might just be Hollywood's most analog movie star. He reportedly once grew irate when a crew member suggested that a dangerous stunt be performed by a digital double, yelling: "There is no digital Tom! Just Tom!"

For last summer's Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise, who was 61 when the movie hit theaters, actually jumped a motorcycle off a ramp on top of a mountain, let the bike fall down into the canyon, and then parachuted down into the valley below. The complex sequence took a year to plan and shoot. It probably cost a lot of money. There were some computer effects involved, including digitally converting a bike ramp into a stretch of rocky mountain. But there was no digital Tom.

Like many of Hollywood's top-tier talents, Cruise has spent much of his career fighting against digital encroachments into Hollywood's processes, especially those that might replace real people. So it was no surprise that Dead Reckoning pitted Cruise's longtime franchise superspy Ethan Hunt against an omnipresent artificial intelligence known only as "the Entity," an enemy that was described in the film as "everywhere" and "nowhere," capable of accessing any digital system and, in the process, "compromising the very truth as we know it." It was a fitting metaphor for Hollywood's own fearful struggles against AI.

As the movie rolled out in theaters, Hollywood's actors and writers unions were going on strike. The unions were concerned about the usual issues—pay rates, benefits, contract transparency, and work expectations. But as much as anything else, they feared for their jobs, worrying they would be made obsolete by generative AI.

"We want to be able to scan a background performer's image, pay them for a half a day's labor, and then use an individual's likeness for any purpose forever without their consent," is how the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the actor's guild, characterized the Producers Guild of America's position. "We also want to be able to make changes to principal performers' dialogue, and even create new scenes, without informed consent. And we want to be able to use someone's images, likenesses, and performances to train new generative AI systems without consent or compensation." The Writers Guild of America, meanwhile, worried that screenwriters might be forced to write drafts based on AI outlines, respond to AI notes, or find their own original work rewritten and restructured by AI software.

No one, in other words, wanted to work for a robot. No one wanted to be replaced by one. The industry was united in defiance of digital Toms.

But work with a robot? That was a slightly different story. As it turns out, AI tools, even in their infancy, are already quite useful assistants, especially for big-picture organizational tasks like outlining. Crafting the arc of a story in a Hollywood script can be as big a part of the task of producing a screenplay as writing the specific lines of dialogue that make up the scenes; screenplay structure is a complex art unto itself.

So when the Writers Guild cut a deal to end the strike, its contract included provisions allowing writers to use AI to assist with their own work, though no AI could be credited. Before the robots revolted, they would be partners, making work easier and more efficient for creatives.

You can tell a lot about an industry from what it's afraid of. For decades, Tinseltown entertainers have conjured up lurid tales about the dangers of artificial intelligence. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Westworld to The Terminator to The Matrix, intelligent machines have been typecast as villains—inhuman and uncaring, relentless and powerful, bringers of death and destruction. Hollywood's AI antagonists are murderous deities and gods of technological apocalypse. They are not helpers or tools, but powerful alien minds indifferent to ordinary human suffering—not, one suspects, unlike some movie studio executives.

Now those fears have migrated into the real world. Both strikes occurred in the aftermath of high-profile advances in generative AI, with programs such as Midjourney showing their power to produce impressively vivid and sometimes lifelike images based on simple text prompts, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT demonstrating that AI could produce high-quality written products such as essays.

Writers and actors both feared they would be forced to work for the AI tools—or worse, that they would be replaced entirely. A movie star such as Cruise could insist there would be no digital Tom, but rank-and-file Tinseltown talent were worried that a real-life Entity might come for their jobs and no Hollywood hero would save them.

In many ways, they were—and are—right to be worried: AI threatens to upend just about every aspect of cinematic production, not just writing and acting. Animation, special effects work, makeup, costuming, lighting, photography, and set and production design are all likely headed for some form of disruption as generative AI tools make it possible for ordinary people without specific training to conjure up and manipulate high-quality audio and........

© Reason.com


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