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Cory Doctorow replied to Cory Doctorow's status

For the #AI sector, a 148-day news-cycle about how AI threatened writers’ jobs was a gift from the heavens

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#critihype #EvilSorcerers

For the AI sector, a 148 news-cycle about how AI threatened writers’ jobs was a gift from the heavens.

It’s not just that there’s no such thing as bad publicity — it’s that this bad publicity was very good for AI’s narrative of being the most powerful, amazing and transformative technology since fire, or possibly language.

Here’s how that works: “If the writers are convinced that AI can write scripts so well that they will all be out of a job in five years, then you should absolutely invest in AI technology, because it is obviously incredibly powerful.”

And here’s how that works: “If the writers are convinced that AI can write scripts so well that they will all be out of a job in five years, then you should absolutely buy an enterprise site-license so that you, too, can fire all of your workers and replace them with a chatbot.”

The term of art for this kind of bad publicity is criti-hype, wherein a critic is suckered into repeating the booster’s own claims, but as criticism.

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory Doctorow's status

#AIEthics vs #AISafety

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#Tescral #Distraction #PumpAndDump

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory Doctorow's status

The real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an #AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#NoWarButClassWar

The studios fought like hell for the right to fire their writers and replace them with chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that the chatbots could do the writers’ jobs.

Think of the bosses who fired their human switchboard operators and replaced them with automated systems that didn’t solve callers’ problems, but rather, merely satisficed them: rather than satisfying callers, they merely suffice.

Studio bosses didn’t think that AI scriptwriters would produce the next Citizen Kane. Instead, they were betting that once an AI could produce a screenplay that wasn’t completely unwatchable, the financial markets would put pressure on every studio to switch to a slurry of satisficing crap, and that we, the obedient “consumers,” would shrug and accept it.

Despite their mustache-twirling and patrician chiding, the real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders.

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory Doctorow's status

If the studios can’t use #AI to fire writers and replace them with #chatbots, they have no reason to shell out millions for enterprise licenses

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory Doctorow's status

No matter how horny your boss is for replacing you with an #AI, a #union will cool his ardor

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#HotLaborSummer #EternalLaborSeptember #JenniferAbruzzo #Cemex #ThrivePetCare

Now, there are plenty of other workers in the film-production pipeline that bosses are hoping to make unemployed so that their salaries can be rendered unto the shareholders.

Hollywood is one of the most heavily unionized sectors in America, but there still gaps where workers are atomized and bosses can act without fear of a strike.

For example, there’s the visual effects (VFX) workers, famously unorganized, whose wage-bills are a big chunk of any film budget. These workers already have a heavily automated pipeline driven by sophisticated computer technology, so perhaps they can all be fired and replaced with software?

Well, maybe (especially if you don’t care whether the VFX the software produces is good, and only care about satificing).

Which is why Disney/Marvel’s VFX workers just voted to unionize. What’s more, if Disney doesn’t give them a contract ASAP, the hard-charging general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board is going to simply force the company to honor the terms that other unionzed workers get through their contract.

Unions are back, baby, and the NLRB has instituted a new, zero-tolerance policy for union-busting. Everyone is unionizing, from strippers to Starbucks baristas, and the writers just proved that no matter how horny your boss is for replacing you with an AI, a union will cool his ardor.

Cory Doctorow replied to Cory Doctorow's status

#AIHype completely misunderstands the point of #ScienceFiction

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c?sk=28d4f52322040150651fea37a303b342

#Inevitabilism #ThereIsNoAlternative #Luddites