About Those Hollywood Strikes

An Internet acquaintance recently opined that,

You know AI is a good thing if SAG-AFTRA are against it.

SAG-AFTRA, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, is a union that represents actors, singer, models, and other media-facing persons. It recently went on strike, in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which is striking against the media production companies (aka "Hollywood") that employ its members.

One of the big issues for these unions is the rise of Artificial Intelligence as a tool for doing some of what their members do. As in, AI writing scripts, and thereby displacing workers.

History is a long string of technology displacing manpower. Eli Whitney's cotton gin, invented in 1793, produced output equivalent to fifty human workers. Machines have displaced scribes, weavers, farm workers, switchboard operators, typing pools, bank tellers, elevator operators, travel agents, bowling pin resetters, and countless others. That societies aren't crushed by massive unemployment from all these displacements tells us that we should not fear them. Concurrent with, and as a result of, all these displacements is a stunning increase in human productivity, and therefore in human living standards.

Humans, preferring the path of least resistance to the uncertainty of innovation and "creative destruction," are apt to protest the destruction of their jobs or careers by technology even as they reap the fruits of that innovation in countless other areas of their lives. So, where they can, they protest progress when it takes a bite out of their personal paths.

Understandable.

Since organized groups can have a more cohesive message (and power of numbers) than individuals acting alone, people across time have formed unions to amplify their voices and hired union representatives to argue their positions. Unions, as long as they don't pursue coercion (see: government), fit into the libertarian worldview just fine, and I'm not choosing sides in the WGA or SAG-AFTRA disputes.

That said, I do have some choice words for the Luddite attitudes that today's unions embrace and push into their labor negotiations. The Luddites were textile workers who protested (often violently and destructively) the introduction of machines that displaced their jobs back around 1811, and we see echoes of that behavior in both the Hollywood strikes and in other aspects of our economic landscape.

Harken back a couple ago, when the nation was in the throes of a supply chain crisis that ensued from COVID lockdowns. One of the biggest sources of that crisis was the cargo ship bottleneck at California's Long Beach and Los Angeles ports, where 40% of the nation's container cargo enters. At its peak, there were over a hundred ships stuck waiting to be off-loaded. That off-loading was severely hampered by the ports' relative technological antiquity (compared to other major shipping hubs around the world). That antiquity is directly traceable to the unions that represent port workers.

Of course, the rest of us pay for that protectionist recalcitrance. And, with both the legal/regulatory state heavily favoring the unions and with a President who is all too happy to keep the scale tipped in their favor (see my earlier mention of coercion), it is certain that we will continue to be denied the benefits of modernization that such ports as Rotterdam have provided.

Sure, modernization means fewer longshoremen, but that's the nature of progress. As certain career paths diminish, others emerge, and robust economies provide high levels of employment. Yes, it sucks to have your job displaced by automation, but that can only be delayed, not halted, and union deals can help soften the blow and ease transitions.

When it comes to the plaint that AI is going to displace writers and take over their jobs, I have a similar view. As it is, most Hollywood writing is ridiculously formulaic, and you can time almost to the minute the plot points of mainstream TV shows and movies. If an AI can produce the same rote dreck, what value are human writers adding to the equation.

I'm inclined to believe that AI is apt to lead to an increase in human creativity, because the rote pabulum is going to be more cheaply generated by machines. In my occasional musings about what the world might look like a century from now, I'm often inclined to conclude that creativity will be the primary domain of humans as automation frees us of more and more manual/repetitive work. AI remains very far from being able to truly think as humans do.

The writers' and actors' strikes will unfold as they will. I understand parts of the dispute, e.g. the shift in viewing habits toward streaming has had an impact on such things as production schedules, residual rules, and contracts in general, and the "worker bees" want their taste of the new revenue streams. Then there’s the very legit question of who owns an actor’s likeness in a movie - as in, can the studio use AI to make another Jack Sparrow movie based off Johnny Depp’s existing installments?

I'll continue consuming the content that I find interesting and of good quality (per my personal tastes), no matter the resolution. But, obstacles to the adaption of modern technology (were the same squawks made when CGI tech displaced the people who drew animation cels or built special effects models?) are going to draw my cluck of disapproval, because progress is a Good Thing.

AI is a tool, and like any tool it can be used well or misused... but can also be used in positive and creative ways that its inventor never conceived. Those who fear it should instead figure out how to use it to enhance their work product. If they don't, someone else surely will, and their recalcitrance will result in their being left behind by the rest of the world. It raises many new questions, including who owns the image of one's face, and such are the bread and butter of job actions and contract negotiations. In other words, market forces.

It's also here to stay, as I recently blogged.

This latest Pandora's Box is open, the genie is out of the bottle, the cat is out of the bag, the dice have been cast, the toothpaste is out of the tube, the bird has flown the coop, the horse has bolted, the floodgates have opened, the bell cannot be unrung. All those idioms were offered by ChatGPT, saving me the time, effort, Google-fu, and brain-plumbing needed to compile the list on my own. It missed "the ship has sailed," but I'd say it did well enough.

Hollywood's union members would do well to figure out how to use it to improve their product, instead of demanding the producers simply preserve their jobs. As with the Long Beach port, such obstructive efforts may benefit a few, but at greater harm to the whole.