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I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

wired.com

41–50 of 92 posts

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#42
post #20

> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.

That's exactly how I feel when gamers complain that a GPU that used to cost $1000 now costs $2000.

I mean doubling in price is pretty significant though? I used to happily (well, grudgingly) spend $500 on a GPU. $1k is crazy though.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#43

I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs. The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience. I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claimin…

I mean this is the K-shaped economy. A swath of workers + capital owners with infinite leverage, and another swath of workers still simply exchanging 1 hour of labor, for an hour of results with very little rent to be extracted. The lucky ones have union protection (with its own problems), but the rest are just this lady writ large.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#44
I understand that it is not easy to relate to the author who pays (or was paying) $150 for a house cleaner, I understand that this is a 1-person history and may be highly biased, I understand the author is motivated to create a story from it.

However, if you think that any of the conditions described in the article are acceptable or that this is a fair price to pay for having AI, I think you are a horrible human being and I hope you'll be expelled from civilized society.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly skip triple A hollywood movies, but the bulk of movies being made nowadays don't make use of any of that, mostly because it makes no sense in their genres. Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc. Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China start…

American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.

Much like everything else in the US, products suffer and sink in quality for being sidelined by individual interests.

Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified...

All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#46

IMO AI already doing better creative writing than most hollywood shows, I see myself enjoying premium mediocre slop.

IMO, AI is still not there, but getting better quickly, and I'm excited about how it is going to unlock so much creative talent held back by an expensive system that requires a lot of labor to create content. I know someone who has been trying to raise money for a while to create a movie he wrote a script for. He's registered it with SAG-AFTRA. He's put on dinners. He's worked tirelessly to pull it together. He is an unknown quantity with a couple of roles in movies but no track record of making movies. I keep watching the progress, counting down the days until I can feed his script into a tool and show him a version of his vision come to life. I don't doubt he'd still rather do it with human talent the old school way, but, like tens of millions of other people on earth who have a creative vision and aren't named Bezos, Musk, or Gates, he may never succeed in raising, and I think some version of those visions becoming a reality is better than none. It's also like watching people who understand the problems in an industry work on tech tools by vibe coding solutions.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#47
> You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t.

I see two problems here:

1: The streaming platforms are filling themselves with slop shows. Maybe not "AI slop," but slop in general. When I browse, I keep seeing lots of shows that I have no desire to watch, and wonder who actually watches them. Every time I open a streaming platform, they keep wanting me to watch a new series that I have no time to watch.

2: It seems there is an over-abundance of screenwriters.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#48
post #40

I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs. The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience. I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claimin…

Today's Wired is a shadow of its former self. I don't know what happened. But it's sad.

This article honestly read like some random blog post from the author.

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#49
post #4
post #3

I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.

> half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin wo…

The Americans, a great television series about Russian spies, really leaned into the wigs:

'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wi...

>Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties.

>Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna.

>Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favou...

Re: I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

#50
post #20

> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.

That's exactly how I feel when gamers complain that a GPU that used to cost $1000 now costs $2000.

Someone whose hobby is Gaming, saves up diligently to pay $1k for a GPU, now has the rug pulled from under them and its $2k. Amortizing a $1k GPU over 4 years isn't too bad, $250 a year, $20 and change a month vs $500 a year / $40 a month is pretty big.
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