The Film and TV Industries

One thing that came out from the negotiations is that the studios are trying to push the idea of paying writers per day. They're trying to make writing into a gig economy thing where there's no job stability whatsoever.

The other element is that the stuff the writers are demanding will amount to about $429 million a year going to the writers. Hollywood execs are going "that's too expensive! Give me my $700 million bonus in cash please". They're wailing and gnashing their teeth over paying a fraction of a fraction of their yearly profit to ensure their writers can actually not starve to death doing their jobs.

The union demands are on the left. If you look, you'll notice how actually reasonable the demands are and how bad the counter-offers are, if the studios bother offering them at all.

Hell, one thing that sticks out is the obvious loopholes the studios are trying to put in. Like, that increased fee for writing streaming features budgeted at over $40 million. The average cost of a direct to streaming feature is about $30 million.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 9:55:46 AM

What do the executives at a film studio even do? I feel like they basically say "Yes, make this movie, and you can have this much money from the studio to do it" and that's the extent of their involvement in a project. Why does that deserve hundreds of millions in bonus pay?

Generally they're supposed to be steering the whole ship. Like "we want this to be our image right now" and stuff like that. It is actually important and valuable for someone to be doing that, but the compensation level is insane. The video game industry has the same problem.

I mostly highlighted that because when a necessary part of your business is demanding a compensation package that's lower across the entire industry than the average top level executive bonus, it puts it into perspective how greedy and stupid the top level people are being.

A lot of it is just the "WE NEED EXPONENTIAL GROWTH AT ALL TIMES" thing and they don't care how much damage they're doing to themselves in the process by...basically nickel and diming themselves to death. They're cutting a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of their budget and jeopardizing the entire industry in the process.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 10:16:46 AM

Sympathies to the workers, but this is terrible long-term for them what with AI scripts slowly becoming a thing.

Burden of proof that the companies aren't lying about using AI to write the whole thing will be on them.

If they honestly think this is going to work, good god do they have another thing coming.

Actually, due to the way crediting rules work in Hollywood, it means that Hollywood would need to get someone (in the WGA) to sign off on AI scripts and claim to write them themselves. If they do an AI script and lie but don't get a WGA person to sign off, 1) gonna be really suspicious that there's no credited writer and 2) it's a breach of clauses that are in every agreement, including the studio offered version of this one.

The burden of proof will actually be on the studios because it'll be absolutely trivial for the WGA to check if one of their members actually worked on a movie otherwise made under union rules.

The other element is that an AI script cannot be copyrighted. That seems to be the main reason Hollywood hasn't actually tried doing a full AI script yet.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 12:18:44 PM

Okay, so they hire some guy minimum wage to sit in a room without a camera for a few hours and to lie through his teeth that he wrote a script.

There's an undercurrent of naivete here.

Okay, and that guy needs to be a WGA worker with proper crediting and the script goes into his portfolio for other projects and if he ever gets put on a TV production that has other writers working on it, they'll instantly notice. Also movie scripts take weeks to write and have constant drafts and back and forth notes and stuff like that. It's actually easier to just hire a writer and pay them a good rate.

Going full AI scripts and putting the burden of proof on the WGA is actually extremely difficult and the output is going to be pretty noticeably bad in the short term. Like bad to the point that Hollywood would have a period where basically everything is extremely low quality writing for no apparent reason.

I want to stress this thoroughly: the easy option for Hollywood is to just pay the writers. AI work is a lot harder, requires hiring people to fix up the scripts and it requires an entirely different infrastructure pipeline that has a very high chance of fucking up the other unions, which would also go on strike. And if this WGA strike lasts until June, the actors and the behind the scenes people can also go on strike in solidarity and Hollywood just straight up ceases to function. The other two main unions have a "no striking in solidarity" clause, but it expires on June 1st this year.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 12:28:29 PM

There are definitely people out there that will gladly be paid to bum around and then decide that they won't work in team projects.

Even if it's the most obvious shit in the world, no definitive proof won't stand up in a competent jury trial.

Except it's Civil trials. Not criminal trials.

Civil trials don't work on the reasonable doubt rule, they work on the "balance of evidence" rule. That is, "is it more likely than not that this happened?"

If the WGA sues a studio that did an AI script and the studio's evidence that it isn't AI is a really sketchy writer who's really evasive on the stand and a weird copyright filing that doesn't specifically state the script as a copyrighted element and the WGA doesn't have any of the normal correspondence that gets generated from the usual scriptwriting process? The WGA would probably win.

The other element is that the fake writer would have a contract. Like, legally, there'd need to be an actual contract laying out what exactly they're being paid for and your idea of what they'd be doing is different enough from the normal writing process that it would instantly raise red flags.

Sure, theoretically, the studios could do that...but it's enough of a pain and difficult enough that just not using AI is easier and faster and isn't going to run into, you know, killing off the entire industry within 20 years.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 12:42:36 PM

I'm sure companies will try to replace writers with AI but I don't think that's going to work out super well for them. Writing is a very subjective and abstract process and while current AI might be capable of pushing out something that's at least coherent, that's an extremely low bar and not nearly good enough for an actual story. And yes studios don't care whether films are "good", they want to make money, but the thing about creating mass entertainment is that while it doesn't need to be good, there is still an art to appealing to the human condition on a base level that's required for a film to resonate with a large enough audience to make the kind of money studios want. AI will improve in the coming years of course but who knows how long it's going to take for an AI to function as an actual competent writer who can create decent scripts with mass appeal comparable to what an actual human would make.

While personally I don't care too much about the whole thing, it's not hard to see this is going to affect such streaming services that depend mostly from original content, such as Netflix.

And considering them, they could simply sidestep this by licensing more content from abroad, like foreign series, anime and the like.

Eh, sort of. They've kinda dialed back down on that because they don't get any control over the property in the long-term.

If a K-drama's a huge hit on Netflix, Netflix can't go and ask for a season 2 because Korean production companies are a lot less interested in multi-season shows and by the time Netflix asks, the entire production has probably been broken up and everyone's on different projects.

Keep in mind Netflix doesn't license content just from South Korea, but also from other countries as well.

It's the same deal there. Minimal control over the end product and no perpetual ownership of it.

I would love for the studios to try and hire some minimum wage scab to get the credits for an AI-written show. Y'all think what happened with Heroes was a travesty? I'm willing to bet my life savings that's nothing compared to what sort of dumpster fire an AI would shit out as a show.

Current AI can't manage to write a coherent script for a two minute ad, there's zero way they'll get a coherent hour out of it, let alone a whole movie or show.

Hell, a show would be even harder because that's multiple totally separate scripts and you'd have to explain to the AI somehow that this new script is a continuation of the last one. And the current ones aren't really able to understand that.

The thing with the WGA is that these agreements last three years. Even if Hollywood is hellbent on destroying the writers, it's still in their best interests to just agree and wait to see what happens with AI in three years.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 1:22:10 PM

Personally, thinking that the studios can just swivel on over to ChatGPT and expect it to be able to spit out a coherent script, let alone a good one, for an episodic series is far more naive than thinking that the WGA are shooting themselves in the foot by striking. Sure, AI might be able to eventually write decent scripts, but expecting that to happen any time within the next few weeks or months of the strike is pure wishful thinking.

The absolute best scenario for using an AI to write a TV show is a really surreal anthology show with no thematic consistently.

Getting an AI to write something long enough is already really hard, but getting it to understand that two prompts are connected to each other? Holy shit would that be difficult. Like, difficult to the point that the "proofreader" would just be entirely rewriting the scripts.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 1:31:38 PM

Adding that. It's really hard to know what will end up a hit. As audiences can be unpredictable (even some authors note that they aren't sure why specific stuff catches on in that time) and hence trying to predict that is nonsensical.

My favourite example of that is actually Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

Everyone thought that would be a sure fire bomb. Weird slanted sequel to a movie that people generally liked but didn’t really adore (before Robin Williams died, the reputation it had was mostly “it’s fun but not really that amazing”, it just aired a ton on TV and got its fan base that way) that couldn’t bring back the only character that anyone really cared about and that made the whole thing a video game pastiche that had Jack Black playing a teenage girl and that had a Jonas brother in it. It sounds fucking terrible when you just say it like that, but it became a huge hit with ridiculous legs because it was a super fun adventure movie that knew exactly what it wanted to be and how to be it and it was released at a time that meant it had like two solid months with barely any competition.

An AI can sometimes spit out really crazy pitches, but most of them are crazy bad pitches. And I don’t mean like the Jumanji one, I mean Iike “a sequel to the Rocketeer where all of the characters are murderous cannibals.” I actually got that on one attempt to get pitches. Like, that’s a concept that is ludicrous and terrible on the surface. But most of the other pitches were things like “romantic comedy in New York.” “Romantic comedy in Los Angeles.” “Action movie about spies in Belgrade.” A lot of stuff that exists and concepts that aren’t interesting or things that the AI doesn’t need to be there for. You don’t need an AI to realize that you can make a good romantic comedy set in New York.

Edited by Zendervai on May 2nd 2023 at 3:13:50 PM

The problem with AI as a whole is that it's basically just a part of technology that needs to be controlled (as in Artificial Intelligence). If you let the AI do its own thing with a movie script, then the script is just going to be either cluttered or just basic because it got no emotions to the script that would make your average viewer care about the movie itself. Like AI don't really have any emotional insights that a human being would have and therefore, the movies would be kind of soulless because of the lack of emotional impact within the scripts.

Well, it's not even that. It's just really bad at being at all consistent over long enough amounts of text. It's not really an intelligence, it's just a more powerful predictive algorithm, like the one in your phone that suggests the next word to you.

But the thing is, machine translation has already been used in a professional context and it almost always requires paying someone to go after it afterwards to make sure it's not just gibberish and AI scripting is like that. If you tell Chat GPT to give you a two hour long movie script, it's going to give you like maybe a couple pages worth of material and then it'll kinda sputter out.

I can see why the WGA don't want the use of AI, because that could limit what they are doing and make it even more impossible for them to get rightfully paid for their works.

Machine translators have existed for over a decade and I would not trust them to correctly translate a full page of text (though, unfortunately people who don't know much about language regularly do trust and do task them to do so), I am highly doubtful a LLM can generate a cohorent 90 page script. The whole "we're so done, AI will do this soon" is an endless Zeno's paradox, you approach the perfect result but can never reach it.

CBS cancels Fall Unveiling Event