Hollywood Strike
Here in Summer of 2023, there are massive strikes across the country as the artists of television and movies demand bare-minimum levels of respect and compensation. Meanwhile, these crushingly massive studios are playing around with their new massive databases of stolen artistic labor, hoping they'll no longer need creative types at all. It's hard to capture the cruelty of it — how little the artists are asking, and how much scorn they are shown.
We must emphasize this point —
While tech executives are off in Congress telling tales about the future existential danger of AI, studio executives are actively causing bodily harm to their creative workers. This is literal, actual, current existential harm caused by AI.
The studios have seen enough of the power and potential of AI systems that they feel comfortable waiting for their workers to scorch and starve. NBC Universal lopped off all the branches of trees that had been shading protesters in the climate-disaster heat. A studio executive told Deadline, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
Many background actors worry their jobs are already gone, as their faces, bodies, and voices have already been scanned and added into massive, black-boxed databases.
Sources
2023-07-12: Sarah Silverman and novelists sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for ingesting their books; https://apnews.com/article/sarah-silverman-suing-chatgpt-openai-ai-8927025139a8151e26053249d1aeec20
2023-07-22: Hollywood’s Fight Against AI Puts Background Actors in the Spotlight; https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hollywood-actors-strike-ai-background-visual-effects-sag-aftra-1234792405/
