WGA-ing War or: How I Learned to Stop Writing And Love The AI

Archived from May 18, 2023:

“So potentially, what you could do with it is obviously use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling. So you have a constantly evolving story, either in a game or in a movie, or a TV show. You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. “Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day,” and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long. So you can curate your story specifically to you.”

I ask a lot of questions, and I encourage you to do the same. My most asked question, by far is: “What the fuck?”

This quote is pulled from an interview with Donald Mustard of Fortnite and Joe Russo of Stranger Things talking about the “future” of entertainment. I almost don’t know where to start but, you know, we’ll get there. This interview came out just a week before the start of the Writer’s Guild of America’s strike on May 1st and while there is a lot to unpack in just that excerpt alone, I want to talk about the sentiments of the interview in a larger context. If you would like to read the whole interview, I recommend sitting far away from a wall to help quell the desire to bang your head into it.

Let’s come back to Mr. Mustard later. On May 1st, the WGA officially went on strike, not only demanding better pay, but also that executives make commitments to prioritizing actual writers over using Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in writer’s rooms and the overall production process. Now, the distinction between AI and LLMs and other models is very important and almost never used properly, but I’ll have to leave that to the side today, lest I ramble even longer than usual. If you’re interested in understanding of the misuse of “AI” as a catchall term for modern algorithms, I’d recommend Artificial Unintelligence by Meredith Broussard. Anyway, in response to the demand of regulating how much generative writing is allowed in Hollywood, executives said they would “hold annual meetings about developments in technology”. Just technology in general, apparently. I guess look forward to hearing about what Raytheon’s been up to. Needless to say, this is an absurd “compromise” between wildly wealthy executives and writers trying to make ends meet. This is far from the first time the WGA and studio executives have been at odds with one another. In 2007-2008, the WGA was on strike for 100 days as they foresaw the rise of internet streaming services, pushing forward the negotiations on residuals from internet based services. While, in hindsight, I’m sure they would have pushed for more, hopefully that lesson serves them in this strike. The rise of a technology that will line a handful of pockets while producing worse and worse content, all while insisting it’s the best that can be done is something straight out of a Gary Shteyngart book. It is exhausting and betrays the fundamental misunderstanding so many people have around what makes art valuable. It’s not the dollar sign attached to a project, but the meaning, emotion and connection created by art. Ever my favourite source of comedy, noted failed screenwriter turned far right pundit Ben Shapiro tried to really show off by posting an absolutely juvenile script generated by ChatGPT as some sort of gotcha. I don’t know about you, but I look forward to the riveting stories of Jim and Mr. Smith. I find this impulse hilarious for a number of reasons. One, Benny here works for a studio that actively makes long form content, and didn’t think to use their own work as what non-union writers could do, nor commit to using ChatGPT, since it’s so great. Second, why choose such an on the nose scenario for the bot to write? Why not try to use an actually interesting prompt that may have resulted in something at least half way to engaging? And then I remember, right, it’s Ben Shapiro and the bar is in hell. The point he inadvertently made is that he, specifically, has no artistic sensibility or taste, and no one was surprised. Even in his disdain, Ben is not original:

“Beating up on screenwriters is a Hollywood blood sport; everyone in the business thinks he or she can write, if only time could be found.”

John Gregory Dunne wrote this in 1996. What is going on with the WGA and ChatGPT is just a single instance of the very precarious balance between labour and automation. It is baffling to live in a world where the humans are being asked to do the mindless and menial while the technology makes the art and writes the poems. Maybe it’s not baffling, but rather is to my sensibilities. Yet, in late stage capitalism, this choice does make an awful lot of sense. We have developed systems to strip all humanity from the arts while forcing humans to do redundant, useless work, lest the working class realise it’s all a racket. The notion of the mindless type of work being asked of most people is outlined in great detail in Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber:

“[Bullshit jobs are] a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Many moons ago, it was assumed that gains in automated technology would result in a 15 hour work week for the average person, and yet this is not even nearly the case. Rather, the tasks that truly do require human intervention, creativity and energy are being pared down to simplistic, repetitive products created by systems that necessarily rely on work humans made to train them. It’s worth noting that every LLM, and by extension all models, develop their output based on the data they are trained on. For example, if you’re creating facial recognition technology and feed the tech mostly white faces, you’ll quickly wind up with a very racist product. A belief that products made by algorithms are somehow superior, perfect, is a lazy, techevangelist world view that completely fails to consider the ways in which the technology works, at its core. Do you seriously think Mr. Mustard has considered the energy requirements and financial demands of the average person having a system that can immediately render fully customized movies, video games and apparently everything else? And yet, the choice to give art to AI and meaningless work to humans is unfortunately simple: the point is not quality, not rest, not abundance of resources and joy. The point is to keep you exhausted, to keep you busy, to shrink the middle class and extract as much money from consumption as possible while giving nothing back. Reducing free time to a minimum is very important to those who want to exploit you. There are far more workers than there are investors, and their investments mean nothing when the workers have the time to organize themselves. The incentive is not better entertainment, it’s knowing you’ll be too tired to complain. And so I ask: if you fire everyone, who the fuck will have money to go see your terrible movie? A fun little thought experiment that throws many an economist into a tailspin.

Forgive me, I riled myself up. Let’s go back to Mr. Mustard. First of all, in this exchange he fully puts himself into the category of an executive who doesn’t appreciate nuance and the resonance human creation brings to art in all it’s forms. This is a cowardly, greedy way of interacting with the world. This becomes even more clear when he thinks the answer to loneliness is isolating yourself in a room with a fake version of yourself on a screen, carrying out a life you cannot have. Not only is the suggestion condescending and ridiculous, but it also begs the question: does anyone seriously believe a man worth millions of dollars would alleviate his bad day with this? Of course not, but he does think so little of everyone else that this absurd product is what they deserve to alleviate deep loneliness and heartache. Also, this just irks me: a “constantly evolving story”. Sir, do you think that is revolutionary? What do you think a story does exactly? Describe a single, unchanging thing? Anyway, to complete his inadvertent poetry, as I’m not sure he could write any on purpose, this comment came on the tails of the US Surgeon General’s annual report, which is titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation”. This 82 page report outlines the many ways in which loneliness has permeated the lives of almost half of surveyed Americans. While Canadian, I do see and hear a lot of similar sentiments here (do you remember the death of the third place) and our small population across large swaths of land probably lends itself to exacerbating these problems, to a degree. The report painstakingly goes over how healthcare systems, particularly privatized ones, fail to address the very real physical symptoms of loneliness, postulating that loneliness is connected to premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It goes over social short comings, systemic issues and even how infrastructure in some communities can exacerbate the problem. One thing the report notably lacks is a through line of loneliness to extremism, something that has been well documented. To understand this association is to know that isolation does not only harm people on an individual level, but also by nature, manufactures threats to communities, meaning overall, loneliness is far more deadly than the report even suggests. As humans, we’re hardwired to need one another. We have spent our entire evolutionary history relying on the labour of a group for safety and survival. Living in a world that offers us an excess of products, an excess of services that remove even momentary interaction like contactless delivery and self checkout slowly chips away at us. The world wears us down through meaningless work and then scolds us for not being able to do everything alone, for not wanting to; selling us convenience at a price instead of acknowledging the root cause of the exhaustion that makes us crave convenience in the first place. What is happening with the WGA is not isolated, it is just the way these problems are manifesting in Hollywood, specifically. It can be easy to forget about writers. In fact, I would argue, studio execs bank on the fact that you do. Your favourite actor doesn’t just mosey onto set and channel a character. They become the face of something they did not create. This is not to say that actors are not important, and creating art in their own right, but rather that their performance frequently obfuscates the reality that all these stories are built on the work of wildly, and increasingly, underpaid writers. These writers are important, because as all art, each story is a personal weaving of experiences, references, feelings and values. If 10 people were asked to create a piece of art, they would draw on their own lives, balanced in a way that suits what they’re trying to convey. It is, of course, an art, not a science. When we are isolated from each other, even so much so that we are isolated from the people who carry out the labour we rely on, we are lured into the idea that labour is not valuable, that it is not skilled, that everyone should just work harder. Art is one of the many ways we interact with the world, learning about people different than us, finding new ways of thinking, feeling and loving. Watching a generated avatar of yourself have sex with Marylin Monroe is, shockingly, not going to make you happy, make you see the world anew. This ridiculous idea of how entertainment “will” be will solve nothing. It seems to me that the only people who want entertainment to look like this are those who stand to profit the most.

I don’t know about you, but I want to labour. I want to garden, write, care for my friends, take care of my home, do the groceries, make dinner slowly and with care. This weekly ramble is evidence of that, my murals are evidence of that. We are hardwired for love, community and purpose. Humans will labour and create without being forced into work through threat of starvation and homelessness. In fact, I would argue we are more creative, building stronger relationships and communities when we have the resources, time and energy to do so. But that simply isn’t profitable for the right people. The WGA is proving that it is worth standing up, demanding better. When all of us do better, the world does better. It can feel grim, but doom is what they want you to feel, and hope is always radical.

Bonus title fun fact:

The Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is based on Red Alert by Peter George. After the release of the movie, George made a novelization of the movie, to account of the changes Kubrick et al made. Aren’t humans just so fascinating and strange?

As ever, thank you for joining me, friends. This past month really wore me down. I barely had a day off and felt like I really couldn’t keep up, never mind write, but I’m glad I have kept at it. It’s hard to think of something to write every week, but I always seem to come out the other end with something that isn’t a complete disaster. If there’s every anything you’re curious about or think I would enjoy digging into, feel free to leave a comment, and of course, feel free to share if you think you have a friend who might also enjoy the noise.