I’ve been “striking” for a long time now, against junk TV in general. There’s an occasional awesome show that delivers but 95% of it is low-effort junk TV like dating, survival, cooking and other shows like it.
I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.
low-effort junk TV like dating, survival, cooking and other shows like it.
... in other words, exactly the shows that don't use actors or writers
Huh. When you put it that way...
Dont they also have writers on these? With most of it being scripted and dramatized, sbd. gotta make all this stuff up. Also the whole set-up the catch etc. I thought these were done by writers too.
I don't know how other companies work, but I work at a company that produces a lot of reality TV shows. They definitely have writers that will lead the direction that the shows take (for example challenge ideas for a dating show or maybe bow they deliver hints to a blind customer cooking show) and they'll have some leading questions in interviews (or even asking to phrase things for more drama if the contestants want to and they usually say yes) but you'd be surprised at how unscripted the ones we produce are.
I actually think the movies they star in and write are shit too.
Just looking at the list of movies held up by the strike makes me weep with joy.
Glad greedy shitbags who make nothing but garbage are fighting each other.
I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.
Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.
I can't believe the people that allow commercials to blare in their living rooms without diving for the remote control like the house is on fire. Is it just me? and they just continue normal conversation like it's somehow possible to hear them.
diving for the remote control like the house is on fire
lol this is me, it's not just you 😂
Our house is generally on the quieter side. Partly because some of us are on the spectrum, and partly because we like to actually hear each other when we converse. Haven't paid for TV in years, don't miss it.
sometimes its nice to have background noise.
most of the time though im with you though.
My parents still have cable TV (I just got them a Roku not long ago, so fingers crossed...), and at this point I can't stand to watch it for more than about one and a half commercial breaks. It's hard to believe anybody willingly subjects themselves to that trash when ad-free alternatives are available.
I had one of them first TiVos, then upgraded to them expanded versions modes online for 1TB of shows. The 30-second skip button pressed six(6) times would effectively (skip) the ads. Never looked back. When I see or hear a commercial at someone’s house it rocks me like I’m in a different dimension and time.
Personally I rarely watch TV in real time, so the only time of year I ever really see commercials is during the NFL season.
nfl redzone is the only way i can watch most of the sunday games anymore. going back to the regular broadcast just feels so slow and outdated.
You do you, my friend. I love the regular broadcasts.
Bruce was talking about it 30 years ago when we had 57 channels and nothin' on. It's only gotten worse since then.
You forgot animated sitcom that either lasts 6 episodes or 16 seasons
lol only 30%?
jokes but i agree.. i remember going to visit some relatives and sat and watched tv with them.. i too was so shocked at how they'd sit idly thru commercials jarring into their show, slapping them in the face..
i can't stand it. just about anything i watch, when i watch, is commercial free
I think they get that from most half hour shows are 22 minutes and hour shows only 42 minutes.
But if course networks have been known to cut them back even further to squeeze some more ads in
Hey now! Some of us like the cooking shows lol
Yeah. I’ll watch an occasional Gordon Ramsay here and there. I’m more referring to the baking shows, kids cooking shows and similar. But you know what I mean, replace all variants of cooking with the many variants of home improvement, how many do we need?
Yea there are simply too many, they’ve flooded the airways with a lot of garbage instead of a small amount of quality that reruns
Even the most high effort shows have so much useless digression and pointless characters that are developed and killed off in a single episode.
Yeah! I’m sick of it. Not only do they want infinite money but also infinite growth.
Literally like a cancer. Feasting on society until nothing is left.
You wanna get really mad? A new practice they were trying to pull off was bring in some young good looking actors; do 3d body scans, record a bunch of voice data, and then have them allow the studios a perpetual license to use their likeness for a few thousand bucks. How evil is that?
It’s only a matter of time for desperate people to sell their likeness to a company doing that. If there was a company out there saying they’d pay you $3k to do a full body 3d scan, record 1 hour of voice lines, and own the rights to your image…do you know how many people would do that? (Probably a significant amount)
Evil and awful yes, but people are desperate for cash in this economy and most people wouldn’t truly understand what they are giving up to the company
Let's hope some never become desperate, because they see through the lies and wouldn't be doing anything for money. They'd have fun watching things break.
This. I want more strikes. I'm tired of everything going to shit and the masses sit back and do nothing. I've gone to a few protests recently, and honestly it's cheap therapy for me. Feels nice to actually DO something.
I think it's even more goddamn nefarious than just destroying the planet for wealth - if some of the shit I've been reading is right, then AI has changed the game and this strike is our fucking chance to get ahead of the shit that these studios want to pull. In what world is it okay to pay an actor a single day's worth of work and retain their likeness in pepertuiry using AI generation.
I'll admit that I'm not very knowledge on the whole workings of the AI part of it, but I do feel like every actor should have full control over their likeness and how it should be recorded and how it is applied to AI.
From what I heard it's not even new technology but from ~2016, they're just trying to push it through again but now under the guise of AI
The 1% would murder us all and replace us with AI if given the chance, never forget that. They'd be too stupid to realize that the AI bots would take them out next.
I don't care how fast AI can pump out "high quality content" because I refuse to consume any of it. I really hope the strikes are successful.
If it is high quality, why do you care how it was produced?
But it's not the high quality content that's threatened by AI, it's the mediocre gargabe. It's the endless stream of poor quality TV shows and movies which are produced not as art, but as a means of steady predictibile income for the companies involved. That's the industry aspect of the business. This side of the business consumes most of the talent in the industry. They all know it's not good and they all hope they will get the funding to actually work on the things they know will be high quality. I think AI will allow them to do that.
Further more, this strike is not just about AI. I think this aspect is the one media outlets care most about and gets reported on more. The entertainment industry has suffered a major shift with streaming platforms and the movement of money from production studios to streaming platforms has left the employees behind. They're getting less money from streaming platforms but still do the same work. That's what the strike is about. The industry didn't care for them when it changed.
To answer your question about quality: it matters because it's not real. The act of producing something of quality is what makes us better people. It ties into motivation to be better. Computers automating repetition doesn't hinder that (as much, it does affect learning curves). The notion that computers be used for an output that would normally require creativity is just throwing away the essense of creation, the end product is not the only thing that benefits us. There's no objective to why it was created, an AI writing something that evokes emotion is a party trick. All it really does is promote consumption and demoralize innovation, and ironically it hides behind innovation as the end-goal of the project. It's just dead. One of the most beautiful things within creating something of value is the very process of creating it, having the passion and desire to do so, and the will to bring it into existence. AI is a cursed attempt at trying to replicate this process, and by lifting that kind of burden from a human inhuman.
I agree with you when it comes to AI in its current form - I wouldn't even call it a party trick, just dumb luck. Machine learning through repetition will use existing ideas and tropes.
However you can provide the model with unique ideas, new tropes, characters, environments, and settings. The model in its current form could generate something nearly usable (script wise) and still be a valid piece of art with some cleaning up. Just because you save time doesn't make an idea less "good"
In the future we could have near sentient AI that generates actual pieces of art far faster and better than a person can.
There’s no objective to why it was created, an AI writing something that evokes emotion is a party trick.
Then it's not valuable. The question still stands: if something is truly valuable, does it matter how it was created? You are not answering this question, you are simply pointing out why AI in your opinion cannot produce art. My question is a bit "tongue in cheek", of course. It cannot be truly answered without a specific example of creation. I'm asking it to prove a point: we're dismissing something we don't understand.
All it really does is promote consumption and demoralize innovation
I'd argue that this is what Hollywood already does. And as you rightly argued through your comment, it brings little artistic or creative value.
To me, it's the same feeling as the teachers that wouldn't accept papers written on a computer (after an age where we know how to write) because "it's less honest".
I'm not good at drawing. I would love to try to make a game. Anti-AI luddites are happy that I will never produce something because I am incabable of doing something that an AI could easily accomplish.
i refuse to believe AI can replace totally of the human part in the industry. Yeah some of the weak actors will be pushed out as they are not doing the job good enough, but it’s inevitable that one day technology is advanced that AI can actually replace human workforce. Like car manufacturing industry that have massive machines to assemble car parts, but also there are things only human can do. We don’t need crappy scriptwriters writing rubbish soap opera that my 10 year old daughter can write because they are no more generic than a AI churn out script. It’s like hiring a typewriter operator in 2023. Or rubbish actors that are like reading their script out with minimal effort and skills. It does not make sense.
typewriter operator in 2023
There's this people called stenographers who are paid quite well, they can write hundreds of words per minute and essentially transcribe a conversation in real time. They are hired by courts to create records of the sessions, by journalists, parliaments and to transcribe subtitles for audiovisual media. They use this cool typewriter like machine called a stenotype that was invented in 1880. The thing is, they tried to replace them with speech recognition computers. They discovered they needed a human to sanitize input for the computer, essentially a person who can speak really fast and really mechanically, repeating what others said in the room, or what was said in the movie or whatever, into an oxygen-mask-like sound proof microphone. So, they still had to pay someone to be there. Many places decided they could just pay the stenographer and receive higher quality products despite the slightly higher costs. Then YouTube tried to use machine learning to auto-create closed captions. Before that they used a community contribution approach that depended on volunteers to take some time to transcribe the subs. That change to automation was such a fiasco that some big YouTube channels now advertise that they pay an actual company with humans to do the closed captions for their videos in the name of proper quality accessibility. Because automated closed caption tends to do interesting stuff and it's even worse when they try to throw auto-translation into the mix.
The point is, people tend to not understand technology and how it relates to humans, specially techbros and techies who have the most skewed biases towards tech and little sociological understanding. Nothing can be accurately predicted in that realm, and most relations that result from the appearance of new technology are usually paradoxical to common sense.
I'm looking for an interaction with the artists. I do not care what an AI produces... and I don't care what a marketing team or boardroom of producers produces. I'm looking for an artist's vision.
If it is high quality, why do you care how it was produced?
To me, this is comparable to fiction vs. non-fiction.
Personally, I do already find fiction less engaging, because there's nothing romantic about these stories. With which I'm not referring to a love story, I mean that there's no sense of wonder of what lead to these events. It happened that way, because a writer wrote it that way.
And yet, the one thing still tying fiction to reality is the writer. You can still wonder what life experiences they've made to tell this story and how they're telling it.
Our current narrow AIs don't make life experiences, so you lose even that strand of meaning.
I saw a great strike sign- "I refuse to memorize lines written by a machine."
But why? I feel like people are twisting their arguments against AI. Or they are being twisted against.
Why does an actor care where there lines come from? We live in a world where The Room was written and released, but AI content is going to be the end of media? People aren't that special. Our thoights aren't that special. We don't have souls. We're just thinking machines, and nothing we create is more unique than something that we created creates.
But why? ...
Because this is about enshitification of life for studio exec profits. It's not really about where a machine can or should be a part of creative works, but HOW they are being used.
Nearly very industry in which LLMs are being used in the latest hype wave, it's not being used to improve anything but concentration of wealth in the hands of a dwindling number of individuals by worsening product quality and real ability of any of humanity, outside of those of hereditary wealth, to be get by.
because I refuse to consume any of it
I guarantee you already have and didn't notice.
There's a philosophical argument to be made for sure, and I'd probably even agree with you. But the reality is that the technology is here, and it'll be used in pursuit of the almighty buck.
That's what makes it especially insidious. We want entertainment made by people, for people, not by AIs for corporations and their pockets.
I do too hope the strikes are successful. That said, you've likely already been consuming generative technology for some time now. Disney alone has nearly a decade of research into it already. Advanced VFX applications use all sorts of generative tech too. When I was working in LA we referenced public data all the time. I know it's gotten a huge spotlight on it given private AI capitalizing/evangelizing it all but the very real threat of digital scabs taking people's jobs needs the biggest spotlight right now. I do think the tables will turn if nothing good can come out of Hollywood and those artists begin weaponizing that same tech against the execs. I see what studios are doing as no different than impersonation & identity theft by using this tech to limit working hours to skirt union protections.
I hope there is some kind of "label" that comes out of this like the Surgeon General's cigarette warning. "This movie is 87% AI generated" so I won't have to bother thinking about whether to skip it. Fuck lazy & greedy movie makers. They'd giveup their immortal soul for $3.50
There are many issues besides AI stuff that are causing this strike.
Yes, with the quick emergence of AI in all industries, we do need strong workers rights agreements and laws to address it, but AI isn't really the primary issue.
People pick positions in these arguments that are too stringent and not realistic. There will be places where AI is useful in this industry. The union just needs to make sure AI isn't abused in order to completely replace certain types of laborers.
This would be good opportunity for people to start new film studios and such, founded on more equal profit sharing. Let greedy pieces of shit shrivel and die without labor to exploit. There is no negotiating with those kinds of people as they will just try to find ways to force and manipulate people to do what they want.
It's ironic that Hollywood was created by filmmakers and actors who got tired of being exploited by investors and cinemas alike.
Charlie Chaplin did a similar thing - United Artists. Then it got sold to MGM. and so on
It's also worth noting that many of the "indie" production companies are backed by billionaire money. For example, Annapurna (movies: Her, Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle, games: Journey, Stray, Kentucky Route Zero, Outer Wilds) was founded by Megan Ellison, the daughter of Larry Ellison of Oracle software, worth about $150 billion.
Indian Paintbrush, the production company that has financed all of Wes Anderson's movies since 2007, is run by Steven Rales, CEO of Danaher, worth $7.3 billion.
It's not just production or indie firms either - CAA (Creative Artists Agency) talent agency that represents people like Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, The Weeknd, Bob Dylan, Aubrey Plaza, Bradley Cooper, Cardi B, Chris (Evans, Hemsworth and Pine), Salma Hayek and thousands of writers, producers and directors, is currently in final talks to be purchased by Francois-Henri Pinaul, who owns Gucci, Balenciaga, Girard-Perregaux and Christie's auction house, is married to Salma Hayek, and is worth about $33 billion.
I honestly don't know how I feel. Most content feels like 'consume our product/content and give us monthly fee' instead of nice shows and movies. Everything seems to have a point where it pulls me out and I find myself questioning if I'm crazy or if everything feels like shit.
There are some amazing gems, but for years it feels like Hollywood has cared less and less about making cool and engaging media and are instead of focusing on manipulating people.
I'm sure the problem is coming from the top, but writers and actors have been pretty shit too
I think that's in part due to nepotism. It seems like everyone who's successfully in entertainment is the child or grandchild of someone else who was successful in entertainment. The same is true for the music industry and its starting to become true in the AAA gaming industry.
When people start to get those jobs because of their family connections rather than their ability everything goes downhill. The most obvious example outside of entertainment is politics.
You're worried about the 1%, this is about the 99% behind the scenes, doing supporting roles, building sets, etc . Don't let movie execs take your eyes off the prize, that's what they want.
I'm interested to see how Hollywood evolves post strike. Hoping that this will allow Writers and Actors more agency when making their products rather than having to conform to whatever shitty money grubbing practices that the Execs usually force on them
Oh boy at this point most of them are just fighting for their jobs, not even worried about actually making the work they want to be.
If thats the kind of change you want to see in Hollywood, its gotta come from the consumer.
Hopefully the number of bombs this year is the message the consumer needed to send.
Gonna offer my two cents as someone who entered the industry during the last writer's strike. You'll see some interesting creative divergence as said creatives crave expression and reach out to new venues like YouTube for the first time. It was one of many changes to the industry at that (and now this) time. I use generative tech because it's part of this exploration of the taboo. Back then, YouTube was the taboo because it was effectively working for free and with no insurance or protection by comparison to a stable studio gig. Take away the studio gig, anything and everything could be opportunity for change and especially so the longer this goes on tbf.
This is one of the reasons why I strongly believe that if you want to do any kind of art and are passionate for it, you should never make your income depend on it. It's why even though I've studied Masters in game development and was always passionate about games, I work as a Red Teamer in cybersecurity instead, and then work on my games as a hobby.
And especially if we're talking about games, where you can just get a regular IT job as a programmer that pays more than you will ever make (assuming you don't get to work on a AAA project, but the you basically have zero agency about the game and are still just a code monkey), the best course of action (which I regret not doing, but my classmate did and is a lot better for it) is to just take advantage of the fact that IT pays comfortably, but instead of just making more money just work parttime for a "regular" pay, and use the free time for your projects.
But every time an art becomes business, it will inevitably suffer for it. There are rare cases of small indie studios getting lucky to be able to uphold their vision and still earn enough to afford paying their employees comfortably, but sooner or later you get into a point where you just have to start considering stuff around marketing that's totally unrelated to the art in itself, but usually forces you to compromise your vision
I'm actually pretty glad that generative AIs will probably really soon replace most of the artists required for mass production of such big budget commercial titles - because then the only option of someone who wants to do that kind of art will be a smaller indie studio or a hobby project, which may not be as successful and will probably end up as a niche, but it will also mean that a lot less artists end up with their passion sucked out and destroyed by execs forcing them to do shitty generic money grubbing stuff - because that will be done by AIs, and keep on being as generic as it is now.
Having 20 writers so you don't have to pay them as much really dilutes any narrative structure.
Actors and writers use what they're fed, this is 99% on movie execs.
I've barely even noticed this writers strike because I haven't watched any Hollywood movies or watched any new TV shows and it literally years. Everything I've watched recently has been complete garbage. So I find myself watching older shows again and again, more YouTube content, educational and history stuff like that...heck, I've been following some modern film critics like Red Letter Media and just watch their commentary vs the real thing, and it's usually much more entertaining.
I think Hollywood is going to use this opportunity to replace the writers with AI. If it works great, if it doesn't work, nobody will notice or care.
Other than the nightly shows, you won't be seeing the impacts of these strikes for months. Films and shows take a lot of time to go from inception to finished product. For movies I wouldn't be surprised if the impact doesn't happen until next year.
To wit -- we're just now, seeing the tail-end of a lot of the COVID-19 shutdowns percolate up through the delayed releases and shortened seasons for a bunch of shows, and most of those shutdowns were gosh, almost 2 years ago now.
I subscribed to Britbox and find the writing and acting of much higher quality. Plus, the stories are generally more interesting with more feeling. I mainly watch that, watchTCM, and certain YouTube channels.
If you want a gem, I recommend checking out Undone. It's by the same guy who made Bojack Horseman.
What's it going to take to actually do something about these ultra-rich leeches literally destroying our planet and everything good on it to inflate a number in a bank somewhere? How do we actually build up the initiative to stop it?
All our other problems seem largely centered around our inability to appropriately respond to extreme greed. Not only in actually actively stopping it, but in even identifying it or being able to properly censure it in the first place. The moment you start talking about the rich being the cause of our problems, there's a section of society that starts tuning you out. I definitely feel like as things get worse people are starting to catch on, but even once we're there, where do we go?
If we actually get to the point of agreeing that excessive wealth is inherently misanthropic and should be a crime in and of itself, how do we make it a crime while so much power sits in the hands of those who'd be on the losing end of that decision?
I hope the WGA and SAG can spark a change in people's consciousness around labor. I'd honestly love to see a lot more interviews and independent podcasts coming from the picket lines. If there's anyone who can convince Americans to fight for the value of their labor, it's the people write and play the parts in the stories they love.
The fact that most people will reflexively reject and wilt at the idea of a wealth cap, or at least enforceablely taxing every dollar made above a certain amount at 99%, is a testament to the many decades of often-subtle propaganda that makes people think that modern western capitalism is the only way. As well as the continuing de-funding of public education and making colleges less accessible.
And another part of the problem (and IMO one of the biggest ones) is that the propaganda is only their first line of defense. If the rich and ultra powerful feel actually threatened, they don't have to rely on soft power. See Epstein's fate as well as the Panama papers reporter.
I want to add on some quick math. Some people will look at this and scoff, saying that actors are millionaires and are more similar to these billionaire leeches than to us. A billion isn't a number you can easily wrap your head around -- I have trouble putting it into the correct perspective and scale, and I'm an engineer. It's really difficult. So to try and show exactly how much money we're talking here, I'm going to use time:
35k seconds, 9.7 hours
70k seconds, 19.4 hours
100k seconds, 1.16 days
250k seconds, 2.9 days
1m seconds, 11.6 days
10m seconds, 115.7 days
100m seconds, 3.2 years
1b seconds, 31.7 years
I haven't even lived for 1 billion seconds yet, and I'm 28! Even an actor who's racked up $100m over a successful career is closer to $0 than they are to $1b. Now arguably I'd say $100m is at the point where it needs to be treated similarly to $1b, but even so. The average working adult is closer to an actor in terms of wealth than these disgusting hoarders.
In reality, every dollar isn't equal, and what this analysis doesn't take into account is the amount leftover after all necessities are paid for, which is the reason why someone making $35k is not living like a millionaire. The point here is, a billion is incredibly big. It's unfathomable. Unless the person protesting is a billionaire, they're on your side against the leeches and absurdly wealthy.
(I suspect this is why actors tend liberal and billionaires tend conservative.)
What's it going to take to do something about these ultra rich assholes
Let's be honest the only answer is [redacted], they effectively own the government in the US and it's not much better in Europe
Not all revolutions require blood, but I feel like capitalism is going to fight real hard to stay around. Even though that's exactly what needs to go
But what are we going to DO about the 5–12 feet tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis?
We need enough people to agree on both a vehicle and a direction.
There are a lot of people dissatisfied with the current government(s) but don't agree how to create change; be it through the current system, major modifications to the current system, or even more severe changes.
There are a lot of people who don't want wide spread poverty/suffering, but don't agree on how that problem should be dealt with; be it through universal income, massive public projects, or wealth taxation and better competition regulations.
IMO we need a new digital/decentralized/open-source/transparent 'social media platform' that can replace the current easily manipulated electoral systems.
We need ideas & policies to be independently actionable from the partisan politics that afaic specifically exist to mitigate change and maintain the influence of money in policy.
Not sure if this is directly applicable but there's the concept of dual power, where you can organize a bottom up power structure that takes some power from the regular government without needing to either submit to it or outright overthrow it. With that said it has only ever been successful in cases where the government is incredibly unstable to begin with.
I agree that that we do need something like a collective action platform so people can coordinate much better than they currently do. Also something that you didn't directly mention but I think you imply is that there doesn't need to be complete agreement before action is taken because there are alot of valid disagreements on how to move forward but there are also alot of agreements as well that are ignored in public conversation because we take those points as a default.
I've been working on something similar to this on my own time (which you can see in my post history) but honestly we won't move forward if we don't actively start working together properly.
Robin Hood Rebellion. Start taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
That's a really good question. Part of the problem, of course, is that the game is rigged: consider how difficult it is to buy food that doesn't feed the Nestle war chest.
As a society, I think there are moves in the right direction - I just stumbled across something called Community Wealth Building, which is very cool, for example.
But as a private individual? That's harder. I'd love it if there were an Amazon equivalent out there that sourced exclusively from worker owned co-ops, or at least unionized businesses, but as it is, I'm coming up dry...
I'm glad more and more workers are realizing the power they have over the industries they're working in.
Without the workers, the businesses have nothing. We really need to have a serious revolution before they replace all jobs with AI robots.
Hollywood is dead anyway. They just make superhero movies for china now
They've been making alternate versions of every movie for china since 2008. Especially disney. Disney is such a cuck to china that they declared all the winnie the pooh characters as public domain to appease Ping.
I wonder what the Chinese version of Cocaine Bear is like
Is $25,000 per annum a living wage LA? To think that these are getting so little is nuts.
I imagine that's poverty in any state
"Low income", as defined by the state, is anything below $70,650 in Los Angeles county.
Not even close
Good question! I looked up the poverty line in LA specifically. And here are the results:
Persons in Family Household - Poverty Guideline (annually): 1 person - $14,580 / 2 persons - $19,720 / 3 persons - $24,860
This is a very quick look for an answer. I don't fully understand the results.
The long and short of it is $25,000/year is over the poverty line for a single person household but barely over the poverty line for a 2 person household. It is the poverty line for a household of 3 or more people.
It is unclear how this factors in housing, and if it includes owning property and renting. A 3 person household is generally considered to be two adults and a child or dependant. Livable, depends on what you considered livable. If owning a house and starting a family is part of having a libable life, I would say they are probably not earning a livable wage.
Fake news, these are all crisis actors. They didn't even try I've seen many of these people in movies!
According to his lawyers, Alex Jones is a crisis actor
These crisis actors can literally be anyone, it could be you, it could even be gasp me!
Good to see actors, many whom get just the base for their work, stand up for what they deserve.
Having 20 writers so you don't have to pay them as much really dilutes any narrative structure.
They're fighting a losing battle, but I hope a side effect of it is that new people come in and change both the economics and artistry of Hollywood. Most Hollywood content sits in a very rigid box. It's repetitive, unoriginal, and unappealing. People are encouraged to eat ramen for every meal in order to "make it", simply because far too many of them try (which is partially the result of the "follow your dreams" narrative in America as well). The further down you are, the worse your compensation. Good ideas get missed or thrown out and relegated to dollar theatres all the time.
If this strike goes on long enough that it starts to flush people out, I'm ok with that. Sucks for the people who are going to lose their livelihoods, but for some of them that was an eventuality. Hopefully in the end creators will have more creative freedom and receive more proportional compensation.
But I wanna see Indiana Jones 6: The search for more money!
The movie industry needs a bigger market for independent movies. Look at the videogames, the indies are holding the creativity among a similar crisis for the aaa titles as for the movies. We need an "EA Orginals" for the majors...
Indy game industry has exploded thanks to benevolent monopoly of Steam. There was a chance for indy cinema when Netflix started, but that's long gone with every studio having their own streaming service.
They’re fighting a losing battle, but I hope a side effect of it is that new people come in and change both the economics and artistry of Hollywood. Most Hollywood content sits in a very rigid box. It’s repetitive, unoriginal, and unappealing.
My two cents is there's a structural issue that's converged to strictly Campbellian story-telling as the end-all-be-all structure. Sure, you'll have something come out of HBO or AppleTV that breaks it, but AAA movies rarely break it.
I have mixed feelings about this. I hope they all are compensated fairly, but technology keeps getting better and capitalism latches on to the absolute cheapest solution. If that includes firing most employees and using AI to save billions a year then they will do it. I think this will just excacerbate AI proliferation in the end. Alas, no one gets paid to strike in America.
Just like the last writers strike produced an endless unmitigated firehose of reality TV and bastardized all the good TV channels, this move is going to double down on that model
AI isn't going to be able to do what actors can do. Not for some time yet. The content will probably start off okay, but we've already seen issues with AI used for "creative" purposes. It sucks. The quality of content on streaming platforms is already hurting. This is going to make it even shittier.
Something will get figured out, because now there are gonna be a lot of people sitting around at home with no bread and no games.
The actors' anti-AI protests are much, much stronger than the writers' (and I say this as someone who is nevertheless 100% supportive of the writers' demands vis-a-vis AI). Because the actors are literally talking about studios demanding to have the right to use their likeness. That's not a technological hurdle that has to be overcome, it's literally just profiting off of someone else's image without having to pay them. A mere $200 to hire an actor for one day, and they own their likeness in perpetuity; that's what studios are supposedly asking for.
The writers' case is still very strong, in my opinion. Because their fear (and I think it's very founded) is not that their jobs will be replaced by AI. Not in a real sense. But that they'll be forced to do like 90% of the work for like 50% of the pay because of studios' use of AI. The way studio credits/payment works for writers, "revising" an existing script pays less than writing a script fresh. So if the studios can create a really shitty script with AI and hand it to a writer who has to do a significant amount of work editing it to be in an actually-usable state. But because they're being paid to revise it, not write it, they don't get paid commensurate to the amount of work actually being done.
In theory, the writers' case could eventually be harmed by actual use of AI in a way that the actors' simply cannot (an AI could theoretically eventually replace an actor entirely, but that's not the debate on the table right now). I think that "eventually" is much further away than most techbros seem to suggest, because frankly LLMs are just not as close to AGI as it seems they usually get thought of as. But that eventually could happen, and then the nature of a writers' job will have to change more substantially in a way that does hurt them quite a bit more. Though it's worth noting that AI is even further away from doing the less-obviously-"writery" work writers do, which often sets them on the path to becoming directors and producers, and without that pipeline for creating the higher-level roles, film studios are going to struggle to keep making films.
This is why governments need to get involved legislationing profits from AI work. Shareholders can't be the beneficiary of lower costs from AI when it means workers lose their jobs. There needs to be an AI specific tax, to support people losing their livelihoods.
I think they are doing the right thing before AI gets firmly set in as the "norm" and that laws are put in place that movies have to use human actors, or they get labeled properly as AI movies so we can skip them if we don't approve of AI taking over the industry.
so we can skip them if we don’t approve of AI taking over the industry.
Spoiler alert: Nobody will give a fuck, people will watch AI movies, and human actors will lose their jobs.
The only question is, shall we tax AI usage and implement UBI? Or watch as entire industries full of people will be laid off? And HOW to tax AI usage? Just implement huge taxes on dividends, stock buybacks and annual salaries and bonuses > 10 mill?
Whole lot of the bigger establishments have been going through the ringer lately
“Women and men, let no one miss today! Death to the machines!”
Metropolis
Good to see some solidarity. I wish it happened more. I'd have thought that the spread internet, allowing easy and covert communication, would have caused a proliferation in the number and efficacy of labor unions, but alas.
The Internet has done a ton of that, around the world. But the news focuses on negative stories because, psychologically, humans are much more compelled by negative stories
Probably the best thing that can happen to the world right now...
/Bye Felicia
Don't really follow this much, what's the TL:DR with all this? Something something more pay? Good on em , i think?
I'm not following it much either so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt but I believe it's a combination of the actors deciding to support the ongoing writer's strike, in addition to having some of the same concerns as the writers with regard to their rights in a changing digital landscape (see the somewhat overblown AI craze currently in progress).
Just like when reruns first became a thing, the actors are striking to be paid for the use of their likeness and their performances. With TV reruns becoming less popular, yet people are rewatching old favorites on streaming, the actors rightly want to be paid for streaming rewatches. That is one of the biggest things. Streaming platforms are making big money from hosting old shows, and the actors want their cut.
I’ve been “striking” for a long time now, against junk TV in general. There’s an occasional awesome show that delivers but 95% of it is low-effort junk TV like dating, survival, cooking and other shows like it.
I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.
... in other words, exactly the shows that don't use actors or writers
Huh. When you put it that way...
Dont they also have writers on these? With most of it being scripted and dramatized, sbd. gotta make all this stuff up. Also the whole set-up the catch etc. I thought these were done by writers too.
I don't know how other companies work, but I work at a company that produces a lot of reality TV shows. They definitely have writers that will lead the direction that the shows take (for example challenge ideas for a dating show or maybe bow they deliver hints to a blind customer cooking show) and they'll have some leading questions in interviews (or even asking to phrase things for more drama if the contestants want to and they usually say yes) but you'd be surprised at how unscripted the ones we produce are.
I actually think the movies they star in and write are shit too.
Just looking at the list of movies held up by the strike makes me weep with joy.
Glad greedy shitbags who make nothing but garbage are fighting each other.
Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.
I can't believe the people that allow commercials to blare in their living rooms without diving for the remote control like the house is on fire. Is it just me? and they just continue normal conversation like it's somehow possible to hear them.
lol this is me, it's not just you 😂
Our house is generally on the quieter side. Partly because some of us are on the spectrum, and partly because we like to actually hear each other when we converse. Haven't paid for TV in years, don't miss it.
sometimes its nice to have background noise.
most of the time though im with you though.
My parents still have cable TV (I just got them a Roku not long ago, so fingers crossed...), and at this point I can't stand to watch it for more than about one and a half commercial breaks. It's hard to believe anybody willingly subjects themselves to that trash when ad-free alternatives are available.
I had one of them first TiVos, then upgraded to them expanded versions modes online for 1TB of shows. The 30-second skip button pressed six(6) times would effectively (skip) the ads. Never looked back. When I see or hear a commercial at someone’s house it rocks me like I’m in a different dimension and time.
Personally I rarely watch TV in real time, so the only time of year I ever really see commercials is during the NFL season.
nfl redzone is the only way i can watch most of the sunday games anymore. going back to the regular broadcast just feels so slow and outdated.
You do you, my friend. I love the regular broadcasts.
Bruce was talking about it 30 years ago when we had 57 channels and nothin' on. It's only gotten worse since then.
Bruce?
Bruce Wayne
You forgot animated sitcom that either lasts 6 episodes or 16 seasons
lol only 30%?
jokes but i agree.. i remember going to visit some relatives and sat and watched tv with them.. i too was so shocked at how they'd sit idly thru commercials jarring into their show, slapping them in the face..
i can't stand it. just about anything i watch, when i watch, is commercial free
I think they get that from most half hour shows are 22 minutes and hour shows only 42 minutes.
But if course networks have been known to cut them back even further to squeeze some more ads in
Hey now! Some of us like the cooking shows lol
Yeah. I’ll watch an occasional Gordon Ramsay here and there. I’m more referring to the baking shows, kids cooking shows and similar. But you know what I mean, replace all variants of cooking with the many variants of home improvement, how many do we need?
Yea there are simply too many, they’ve flooded the airways with a lot of garbage instead of a small amount of quality that reruns
Even the most high effort shows have so much useless digression and pointless characters that are developed and killed off in a single episode.
Lol get fucked Hollywood
UNION STRONG ✊
Good. More please. Hold these cucks accountable.
Destroying the planet for infinite wealth.
Yeah! I’m sick of it. Not only do they want infinite money but also infinite growth.
Literally like a cancer. Feasting on society until nothing is left.
You wanna get really mad? A new practice they were trying to pull off was bring in some young good looking actors; do 3d body scans, record a bunch of voice data, and then have them allow the studios a perpetual license to use their likeness for a few thousand bucks. How evil is that?
It’s only a matter of time for desperate people to sell their likeness to a company doing that. If there was a company out there saying they’d pay you $3k to do a full body 3d scan, record 1 hour of voice lines, and own the rights to your image…do you know how many people would do that? (Probably a significant amount)
Evil and awful yes, but people are desperate for cash in this economy and most people wouldn’t truly understand what they are giving up to the company
Let's hope some never become desperate, because they see through the lies and wouldn't be doing anything for money. They'd have fun watching things break.
This. I want more strikes. I'm tired of everything going to shit and the masses sit back and do nothing. I've gone to a few protests recently, and honestly it's cheap therapy for me. Feels nice to actually DO something.
I think it's even more goddamn nefarious than just destroying the planet for wealth - if some of the shit I've been reading is right, then AI has changed the game and this strike is our fucking chance to get ahead of the shit that these studios want to pull. In what world is it okay to pay an actor a single day's worth of work and retain their likeness in pepertuiry using AI generation.
I'll admit that I'm not very knowledge on the whole workings of the AI part of it, but I do feel like every actor should have full control over their likeness and how it should be recorded and how it is applied to AI.
From what I heard it's not even new technology but from ~2016, they're just trying to push it through again but now under the guise of AI
The 1% would murder us all and replace us with AI if given the chance, never forget that. They'd be too stupid to realize that the AI bots would take them out next.
I don't care how fast AI can pump out "high quality content" because I refuse to consume any of it. I really hope the strikes are successful.
If it is high quality, why do you care how it was produced?
But it's not the high quality content that's threatened by AI, it's the mediocre gargabe. It's the endless stream of poor quality TV shows and movies which are produced not as art, but as a means of steady predictibile income for the companies involved. That's the industry aspect of the business. This side of the business consumes most of the talent in the industry. They all know it's not good and they all hope they will get the funding to actually work on the things they know will be high quality. I think AI will allow them to do that.
Further more, this strike is not just about AI. I think this aspect is the one media outlets care most about and gets reported on more. The entertainment industry has suffered a major shift with streaming platforms and the movement of money from production studios to streaming platforms has left the employees behind. They're getting less money from streaming platforms but still do the same work. That's what the strike is about. The industry didn't care for them when it changed.
To answer your question about quality: it matters because it's not real. The act of producing something of quality is what makes us better people. It ties into motivation to be better. Computers automating repetition doesn't hinder that (as much, it does affect learning curves). The notion that computers be used for an output that would normally require creativity is just throwing away the essense of creation, the end product is not the only thing that benefits us. There's no objective to why it was created, an AI writing something that evokes emotion is a party trick. All it really does is promote consumption and demoralize innovation, and ironically it hides behind innovation as the end-goal of the project. It's just dead. One of the most beautiful things within creating something of value is the very process of creating it, having the passion and desire to do so, and the will to bring it into existence. AI is a cursed attempt at trying to replicate this process, and by lifting that kind of burden from a human inhuman.
I agree with you when it comes to AI in its current form - I wouldn't even call it a party trick, just dumb luck. Machine learning through repetition will use existing ideas and tropes.
However you can provide the model with unique ideas, new tropes, characters, environments, and settings. The model in its current form could generate something nearly usable (script wise) and still be a valid piece of art with some cleaning up. Just because you save time doesn't make an idea less "good"
In the future we could have near sentient AI that generates actual pieces of art far faster and better than a person can.
Then it's not valuable. The question still stands: if something is truly valuable, does it matter how it was created? You are not answering this question, you are simply pointing out why AI in your opinion cannot produce art. My question is a bit "tongue in cheek", of course. It cannot be truly answered without a specific example of creation. I'm asking it to prove a point: we're dismissing something we don't understand.
I'd argue that this is what Hollywood already does. And as you rightly argued through your comment, it brings little artistic or creative value.
To me, it's the same feeling as the teachers that wouldn't accept papers written on a computer (after an age where we know how to write) because "it's less honest".
I'm not good at drawing. I would love to try to make a game. Anti-AI luddites are happy that I will never produce something because I am incabable of doing something that an AI could easily accomplish.
i refuse to believe AI can replace totally of the human part in the industry. Yeah some of the weak actors will be pushed out as they are not doing the job good enough, but it’s inevitable that one day technology is advanced that AI can actually replace human workforce. Like car manufacturing industry that have massive machines to assemble car parts, but also there are things only human can do. We don’t need crappy scriptwriters writing rubbish soap opera that my 10 year old daughter can write because they are no more generic than a AI churn out script. It’s like hiring a typewriter operator in 2023. Or rubbish actors that are like reading their script out with minimal effort and skills. It does not make sense.
There's this people called stenographers who are paid quite well, they can write hundreds of words per minute and essentially transcribe a conversation in real time. They are hired by courts to create records of the sessions, by journalists, parliaments and to transcribe subtitles for audiovisual media. They use this cool typewriter like machine called a stenotype that was invented in 1880. The thing is, they tried to replace them with speech recognition computers. They discovered they needed a human to sanitize input for the computer, essentially a person who can speak really fast and really mechanically, repeating what others said in the room, or what was said in the movie or whatever, into an oxygen-mask-like sound proof microphone. So, they still had to pay someone to be there. Many places decided they could just pay the stenographer and receive higher quality products despite the slightly higher costs. Then YouTube tried to use machine learning to auto-create closed captions. Before that they used a community contribution approach that depended on volunteers to take some time to transcribe the subs. That change to automation was such a fiasco that some big YouTube channels now advertise that they pay an actual company with humans to do the closed captions for their videos in the name of proper quality accessibility. Because automated closed caption tends to do interesting stuff and it's even worse when they try to throw auto-translation into the mix.
The point is, people tend to not understand technology and how it relates to humans, specially techbros and techies who have the most skewed biases towards tech and little sociological understanding. Nothing can be accurately predicted in that realm, and most relations that result from the appearance of new technology are usually paradoxical to common sense.
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I'm looking for an interaction with the artists. I do not care what an AI produces... and I don't care what a marketing team or boardroom of producers produces. I'm looking for an artist's vision.
To me, this is comparable to fiction vs. non-fiction.
Personally, I do already find fiction less engaging, because there's nothing romantic about these stories. With which I'm not referring to a love story, I mean that there's no sense of wonder of what lead to these events. It happened that way, because a writer wrote it that way.
And yet, the one thing still tying fiction to reality is the writer. You can still wonder what life experiences they've made to tell this story and how they're telling it.
Our current narrow AIs don't make life experiences, so you lose even that strand of meaning.
honestly we need legislation that protects artists who use their art as a means to live
I saw a great strike sign- "I refuse to memorize lines written by a machine."
But why? I feel like people are twisting their arguments against AI. Or they are being twisted against.
Why does an actor care where there lines come from? We live in a world where The Room was written and released, but AI content is going to be the end of media? People aren't that special. Our thoights aren't that special. We don't have souls. We're just thinking machines, and nothing we create is more unique than something that we created creates.
Because this is about enshitification of life for studio exec profits. It's not really about where a machine can or should be a part of creative works, but HOW they are being used.
Nearly very industry in which LLMs are being used in the latest hype wave, it's not being used to improve anything but concentration of wealth in the hands of a dwindling number of individuals by worsening product quality and real ability of any of humanity, outside of those of hereditary wealth, to be get by.
I guarantee you already have and didn't notice.
There's a philosophical argument to be made for sure, and I'd probably even agree with you. But the reality is that the technology is here, and it'll be used in pursuit of the almighty buck.
That's what makes it especially insidious. We want entertainment made by people, for people, not by AIs for corporations and their pockets.
I do too hope the strikes are successful. That said, you've likely already been consuming generative technology for some time now. Disney alone has nearly a decade of research into it already. Advanced VFX applications use all sorts of generative tech too. When I was working in LA we referenced public data all the time. I know it's gotten a huge spotlight on it given private AI capitalizing/evangelizing it all but the very real threat of digital scabs taking people's jobs needs the biggest spotlight right now. I do think the tables will turn if nothing good can come out of Hollywood and those artists begin weaponizing that same tech against the execs. I see what studios are doing as no different than impersonation & identity theft by using this tech to limit working hours to skirt union protections.
I hope there is some kind of "label" that comes out of this like the Surgeon General's cigarette warning. "This movie is 87% AI generated" so I won't have to bother thinking about whether to skip it. Fuck lazy & greedy movie makers. They'd giveup their immortal soul for $3.50
There are many issues besides AI stuff that are causing this strike.
Yes, with the quick emergence of AI in all industries, we do need strong workers rights agreements and laws to address it, but AI isn't really the primary issue.
People pick positions in these arguments that are too stringent and not realistic. There will be places where AI is useful in this industry. The union just needs to make sure AI isn't abused in order to completely replace certain types of laborers.
This is the best possible outcome. No one wants that AI generated shit while actors and behind the scenes people make starvation wages.
Fuck hollywood.
This would be good opportunity for people to start new film studios and such, founded on more equal profit sharing. Let greedy pieces of shit shrivel and die without labor to exploit. There is no negotiating with those kinds of people as they will just try to find ways to force and manipulate people to do what they want.
It's ironic that Hollywood was created by filmmakers and actors who got tired of being exploited by investors and cinemas alike.
It's the circle of
liiiiiifecapitalism."Money makes the world go around..."
"Greed is good"
Making money is fine, but at what cost?
Actually, they moved to Hollywood so they wouldn't be under Edison's camera patents.
They should call it "United Artists"!
And.... Jeff Bezos already owns it.
Ribbit
Charlie Chaplin did a similar thing - United Artists. Then it got sold to MGM. and so on
It's also worth noting that many of the "indie" production companies are backed by billionaire money. For example, Annapurna (movies: Her, Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle, games: Journey, Stray, Kentucky Route Zero, Outer Wilds) was founded by Megan Ellison, the daughter of Larry Ellison of Oracle software, worth about $150 billion.
Indian Paintbrush, the production company that has financed all of Wes Anderson's movies since 2007, is run by Steven Rales, CEO of Danaher, worth $7.3 billion.
It's not just production or indie firms either - CAA (Creative Artists Agency) talent agency that represents people like Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, The Weeknd, Bob Dylan, Aubrey Plaza, Bradley Cooper, Cardi B, Chris (Evans, Hemsworth and Pine), Salma Hayek and thousands of writers, producers and directors, is currently in final talks to be purchased by Francois-Henri Pinaul, who owns Gucci, Balenciaga, Girard-Perregaux and Christie's auction house, is married to Salma Hayek, and is worth about $33 billion.
I honestly don't know how I feel. Most content feels like 'consume our product/content and give us monthly fee' instead of nice shows and movies. Everything seems to have a point where it pulls me out and I find myself questioning if I'm crazy or if everything feels like shit.
There are some amazing gems, but for years it feels like Hollywood has cared less and less about making cool and engaging media and are instead of focusing on manipulating people.
I'm sure the problem is coming from the top, but writers and actors have been pretty shit too
I think that's in part due to nepotism. It seems like everyone who's successfully in entertainment is the child or grandchild of someone else who was successful in entertainment. The same is true for the music industry and its starting to become true in the AAA gaming industry.
When people start to get those jobs because of their family connections rather than their ability everything goes downhill. The most obvious example outside of entertainment is politics.
You're worried about the 1%, this is about the 99% behind the scenes, doing supporting roles, building sets, etc . Don't let movie execs take your eyes off the prize, that's what they want.
I'm interested to see how Hollywood evolves post strike. Hoping that this will allow Writers and Actors more agency when making their products rather than having to conform to whatever shitty money grubbing practices that the Execs usually force on them
Oh boy at this point most of them are just fighting for their jobs, not even worried about actually making the work they want to be. If thats the kind of change you want to see in Hollywood, its gotta come from the consumer.
Hopefully the number of bombs this year is the message the consumer needed to send.
Gonna offer my two cents as someone who entered the industry during the last writer's strike. You'll see some interesting creative divergence as said creatives crave expression and reach out to new venues like YouTube for the first time. It was one of many changes to the industry at that (and now this) time. I use generative tech because it's part of this exploration of the taboo. Back then, YouTube was the taboo because it was effectively working for free and with no insurance or protection by comparison to a stable studio gig. Take away the studio gig, anything and everything could be opportunity for change and especially so the longer this goes on tbf.
This is one of the reasons why I strongly believe that if you want to do any kind of art and are passionate for it, you should never make your income depend on it. It's why even though I've studied Masters in game development and was always passionate about games, I work as a Red Teamer in cybersecurity instead, and then work on my games as a hobby.
And especially if we're talking about games, where you can just get a regular IT job as a programmer that pays more than you will ever make (assuming you don't get to work on a AAA project, but the you basically have zero agency about the game and are still just a code monkey), the best course of action (which I regret not doing, but my classmate did and is a lot better for it) is to just take advantage of the fact that IT pays comfortably, but instead of just making more money just work parttime for a "regular" pay, and use the free time for your projects.
But every time an art becomes business, it will inevitably suffer for it. There are rare cases of small indie studios getting lucky to be able to uphold their vision and still earn enough to afford paying their employees comfortably, but sooner or later you get into a point where you just have to start considering stuff around marketing that's totally unrelated to the art in itself, but usually forces you to compromise your vision
I'm actually pretty glad that generative AIs will probably really soon replace most of the artists required for mass production of such big budget commercial titles - because then the only option of someone who wants to do that kind of art will be a smaller indie studio or a hobby project, which may not be as successful and will probably end up as a niche, but it will also mean that a lot less artists end up with their passion sucked out and destroyed by execs forcing them to do shitty generic money grubbing stuff - because that will be done by AIs, and keep on being as generic as it is now.
Having 20 writers so you don't have to pay them as much really dilutes any narrative structure.
Actors and writers use what they're fed, this is 99% on movie execs.
I've barely even noticed this writers strike because I haven't watched any Hollywood movies or watched any new TV shows and it literally years. Everything I've watched recently has been complete garbage. So I find myself watching older shows again and again, more YouTube content, educational and history stuff like that...heck, I've been following some modern film critics like Red Letter Media and just watch their commentary vs the real thing, and it's usually much more entertaining.
I think Hollywood is going to use this opportunity to replace the writers with AI. If it works great, if it doesn't work, nobody will notice or care.
Other than the nightly shows, you won't be seeing the impacts of these strikes for months. Films and shows take a lot of time to go from inception to finished product. For movies I wouldn't be surprised if the impact doesn't happen until next year.
To wit -- we're just now, seeing the tail-end of a lot of the COVID-19 shutdowns percolate up through the delayed releases and shortened seasons for a bunch of shows, and most of those shutdowns were gosh, almost 2 years ago now.
I subscribed to Britbox and find the writing and acting of much higher quality. Plus, the stories are generally more interesting with more feeling. I mainly watch that, watchTCM, and certain YouTube channels.
If you want a gem, I recommend checking out Undone. It's by the same guy who made Bojack Horseman.
You can stream it for free here: https://fmovies.to/tv/undone-70zyj/1-1
Just make sure you have a good adblocker, like uBlock Origin.
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Good bot
What's it going to take to actually do something about these ultra-rich leeches literally destroying our planet and everything good on it to inflate a number in a bank somewhere? How do we actually build up the initiative to stop it?
All our other problems seem largely centered around our inability to appropriately respond to extreme greed. Not only in actually actively stopping it, but in even identifying it or being able to properly censure it in the first place. The moment you start talking about the rich being the cause of our problems, there's a section of society that starts tuning you out. I definitely feel like as things get worse people are starting to catch on, but even once we're there, where do we go?
If we actually get to the point of agreeing that excessive wealth is inherently misanthropic and should be a crime in and of itself, how do we make it a crime while so much power sits in the hands of those who'd be on the losing end of that decision?
I hope the WGA and SAG can spark a change in people's consciousness around labor. I'd honestly love to see a lot more interviews and independent podcasts coming from the picket lines. If there's anyone who can convince Americans to fight for the value of their labor, it's the people write and play the parts in the stories they love.
The fact that most people will reflexively reject and wilt at the idea of a wealth cap, or at least enforceablely taxing every dollar made above a certain amount at 99%, is a testament to the many decades of often-subtle propaganda that makes people think that modern western capitalism is the only way. As well as the continuing de-funding of public education and making colleges less accessible.
And another part of the problem (and IMO one of the biggest ones) is that the propaganda is only their first line of defense. If the rich and ultra powerful feel actually threatened, they don't have to rely on soft power. See Epstein's fate as well as the Panama papers reporter.
I want to add on some quick math. Some people will look at this and scoff, saying that actors are millionaires and are more similar to these billionaire leeches than to us. A billion isn't a number you can easily wrap your head around -- I have trouble putting it into the correct perspective and scale, and I'm an engineer. It's really difficult. So to try and show exactly how much money we're talking here, I'm going to use time:
I haven't even lived for 1 billion seconds yet, and I'm 28! Even an actor who's racked up $100m over a successful career is closer to $0 than they are to $1b. Now arguably I'd say $100m is at the point where it needs to be treated similarly to $1b, but even so. The average working adult is closer to an actor in terms of wealth than these disgusting hoarders.
In reality, every dollar isn't equal, and what this analysis doesn't take into account is the amount leftover after all necessities are paid for, which is the reason why someone making $35k is not living like a millionaire. The point here is, a billion is incredibly big. It's unfathomable. Unless the person protesting is a billionaire, they're on your side against the leeches and absurdly wealthy.
(I suspect this is why actors tend liberal and billionaires tend conservative.)
Let's be honest the only answer is [redacted], they effectively own the government in the US and it's not much better in Europe
Not all revolutions require blood, but I feel like capitalism is going to fight real hard to stay around. Even though that's exactly what needs to go
But what are we going to DO about the 5–12 feet tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis?
We need enough people to agree on both a vehicle and a direction.
There are a lot of people dissatisfied with the current government(s) but don't agree how to create change; be it through the current system, major modifications to the current system, or even more severe changes.
There are a lot of people who don't want wide spread poverty/suffering, but don't agree on how that problem should be dealt with; be it through universal income, massive public projects, or wealth taxation and better competition regulations.
IMO we need a new digital/decentralized/open-source/transparent 'social media platform' that can replace the current easily manipulated electoral systems.
We need ideas & policies to be independently actionable from the partisan politics that afaic specifically exist to mitigate change and maintain the influence of money in policy.
Not sure if this is directly applicable but there's the concept of dual power, where you can organize a bottom up power structure that takes some power from the regular government without needing to either submit to it or outright overthrow it. With that said it has only ever been successful in cases where the government is incredibly unstable to begin with.
I agree that that we do need something like a collective action platform so people can coordinate much better than they currently do. Also something that you didn't directly mention but I think you imply is that there doesn't need to be complete agreement before action is taken because there are alot of valid disagreements on how to move forward but there are also alot of agreements as well that are ignored in public conversation because we take those points as a default.
I've been working on something similar to this on my own time (which you can see in my post history) but honestly we won't move forward if we don't actively start working together properly.
Robin Hood Rebellion. Start taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
That's a really good question. Part of the problem, of course, is that the game is rigged: consider how difficult it is to buy food that doesn't feed the Nestle war chest.
As a society, I think there are moves in the right direction - I just stumbled across something called Community Wealth Building, which is very cool, for example.
But as a private individual? That's harder. I'd love it if there were an Amazon equivalent out there that sourced exclusively from worker owned co-ops, or at least unionized businesses, but as it is, I'm coming up dry...
Wow it's almost like people's tolerance for ruthless exploitation isn't infinite. Hollywood's disgusting parasitic grifters can get fucked.
If you still have the bird app or some other method, send your support of solidarity to your favorite actors. They will definitely appreciate it.
Oh hi barbie
Hi there! Sorry, no movie promotions, I'm on strike.
Funny meme, nice AI generated profile picture.
If they ever find out about this account I can just deny everything, it's great, right?
What about my favorite studios ?
I'm... not sure?
Fuck the studios. Go union!
I'm glad more and more workers are realizing the power they have over the industries they're working in.
Without the workers, the businesses have nothing. We really need to have a serious revolution before they replace all jobs with AI robots.
Hollywood is dead anyway. They just make superhero movies for china now
They've been making alternate versions of every movie for china since 2008. Especially disney. Disney is such a cuck to china that they declared all the winnie the pooh characters as public domain to appease Ping.
I wonder what the Chinese version of Cocaine Bear is like
Is $25,000 per annum a living wage LA? To think that these are getting so little is nuts.
I imagine that's poverty in any state
"Low income", as defined by the state, is anything below $70,650 in Los Angeles county.
Not even close
Good question! I looked up the poverty line in LA specifically. And here are the results:
Persons in Family Household - Poverty Guideline (annually): 1 person - $14,580 / 2 persons - $19,720 / 3 persons - $24,860
This is a very quick look for an answer. I don't fully understand the results.
The long and short of it is $25,000/year is over the poverty line for a single person household but barely over the poverty line for a 2 person household. It is the poverty line for a household of 3 or more people.
It is unclear how this factors in housing, and if it includes owning property and renting. A 3 person household is generally considered to be two adults and a child or dependant. Livable, depends on what you considered livable. If owning a house and starting a family is part of having a libable life, I would say they are probably not earning a livable wage.
Source: Californial Department of Public Health https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DOA/Pages/OA_ADAP_Federal_Poverty_Guideline_Chart.aspx
Edit formatting
That chart looks like it uses the federal poverty line. A sweeping guideline to cover all of the US.
incredibly based. fuck the execs. fucking parasites
Good, I hope more join in and walk until Hollywood caves...They won't like this negative attention. 😁
It's too bad the directors guild already made that deal.
What do you mean?
The DGA ratified an agreement last month. If they hadn't, we would have three major video unions on strike instead of two.
Gotcha. Thanks!
What do you mean?
Solidarity ✊
Fake news, these are all crisis actors. They didn't even try I've seen many of these people in movies!
According to his lawyers, Alex Jones is a crisis actor
These crisis actors can literally be anyone, it could be you, it could even be gasp me!
Good to see actors, many whom get just the base for their work, stand up for what they deserve.
Having 20 writers so you don't have to pay them as much really dilutes any narrative structure.
They're fighting a losing battle, but I hope a side effect of it is that new people come in and change both the economics and artistry of Hollywood. Most Hollywood content sits in a very rigid box. It's repetitive, unoriginal, and unappealing. People are encouraged to eat ramen for every meal in order to "make it", simply because far too many of them try (which is partially the result of the "follow your dreams" narrative in America as well). The further down you are, the worse your compensation. Good ideas get missed or thrown out and relegated to dollar theatres all the time.
If this strike goes on long enough that it starts to flush people out, I'm ok with that. Sucks for the people who are going to lose their livelihoods, but for some of them that was an eventuality. Hopefully in the end creators will have more creative freedom and receive more proportional compensation.
But I wanna see Indiana Jones 6: The search for more money!
The movie industry needs a bigger market for independent movies. Look at the videogames, the indies are holding the creativity among a similar crisis for the aaa titles as for the movies. We need an "EA Orginals" for the majors...
Indy game industry has exploded thanks to benevolent monopoly of Steam. There was a chance for indy cinema when Netflix started, but that's long gone with every studio having their own streaming service.
My two cents is there's a structural issue that's converged to strictly Campbellian story-telling as the end-all-be-all structure. Sure, you'll have something come out of HBO or AppleTV that breaks it, but AAA movies rarely break it.
I have mixed feelings about this. I hope they all are compensated fairly, but technology keeps getting better and capitalism latches on to the absolute cheapest solution. If that includes firing most employees and using AI to save billions a year then they will do it. I think this will just excacerbate AI proliferation in the end. Alas, no one gets paid to strike in America.
Just like the last writers strike produced an endless unmitigated firehose of reality TV and bastardized all the good TV channels, this move is going to double down on that model
AI isn't going to be able to do what actors can do. Not for some time yet. The content will probably start off okay, but we've already seen issues with AI used for "creative" purposes. It sucks. The quality of content on streaming platforms is already hurting. This is going to make it even shittier.
Something will get figured out, because now there are gonna be a lot of people sitting around at home with no bread and no games.
The actors' anti-AI protests are much, much stronger than the writers' (and I say this as someone who is nevertheless 100% supportive of the writers' demands vis-a-vis AI). Because the actors are literally talking about studios demanding to have the right to use their likeness. That's not a technological hurdle that has to be overcome, it's literally just profiting off of someone else's image without having to pay them. A mere $200 to hire an actor for one day, and they own their likeness in perpetuity; that's what studios are supposedly asking for.
The writers' case is still very strong, in my opinion. Because their fear (and I think it's very founded) is not that their jobs will be replaced by AI. Not in a real sense. But that they'll be forced to do like 90% of the work for like 50% of the pay because of studios' use of AI. The way studio credits/payment works for writers, "revising" an existing script pays less than writing a script fresh. So if the studios can create a really shitty script with AI and hand it to a writer who has to do a significant amount of work editing it to be in an actually-usable state. But because they're being paid to revise it, not write it, they don't get paid commensurate to the amount of work actually being done.
In theory, the writers' case could eventually be harmed by actual use of AI in a way that the actors' simply cannot (an AI could theoretically eventually replace an actor entirely, but that's not the debate on the table right now). I think that "eventually" is much further away than most techbros seem to suggest, because frankly LLMs are just not as close to AGI as it seems they usually get thought of as. But that eventually could happen, and then the nature of a writers' job will have to change more substantially in a way that does hurt them quite a bit more. Though it's worth noting that AI is even further away from doing the less-obviously-"writery" work writers do, which often sets them on the path to becoming directors and producers, and without that pipeline for creating the higher-level roles, film studios are going to struggle to keep making films.
This is why governments need to get involved legislationing profits from AI work. Shareholders can't be the beneficiary of lower costs from AI when it means workers lose their jobs. There needs to be an AI specific tax, to support people losing their livelihoods.
I think they are doing the right thing before AI gets firmly set in as the "norm" and that laws are put in place that movies have to use human actors, or they get labeled properly as AI movies so we can skip them if we don't approve of AI taking over the industry.
Spoiler alert: Nobody will give a fuck, people will watch AI movies, and human actors will lose their jobs.
The only question is, shall we tax AI usage and implement UBI? Or watch as entire industries full of people will be laid off? And HOW to tax AI usage? Just implement huge taxes on dividends, stock buybacks and annual salaries and bonuses > 10 mill?
Well, yeah. That's part of why they're on strike lol. They are very aware of that threat. Everyone is
Now I can finally catch up with my backlog!
I don't know why you got downvoted. Because you watch TV? So what? Either way, I liked your comment!
I hope all the industry did that kind of hiatus then (?
Whole lot of the bigger establishments have been going through the ringer lately
“Women and men, let no one miss today! Death to the machines!”
Good to see some solidarity. I wish it happened more. I'd have thought that the spread internet, allowing easy and covert communication, would have caused a proliferation in the number and efficacy of labor unions, but alas.
The Internet has done a ton of that, around the world. But the news focuses on negative stories because, psychologically, humans are much more compelled by negative stories
Probably the best thing that can happen to the world right now...
/Bye Felicia
Don't really follow this much, what's the TL:DR with all this? Something something more pay? Good on em , i think?
I'm not following it much either so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt but I believe it's a combination of the actors deciding to support the ongoing writer's strike, in addition to having some of the same concerns as the writers with regard to their rights in a changing digital landscape (see the somewhat overblown AI craze currently in progress).
Just like when reruns first became a thing, the actors are striking to be paid for the use of their likeness and their performances. With TV reruns becoming less popular, yet people are rewatching old favorites on streaming, the actors rightly want to be paid for streaming rewatches. That is one of the biggest things. Streaming platforms are making big money from hosting old shows, and the actors want their cut.
I for one, look forward to interacting with our sentient overlord artists. All hail AI.