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

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

#61

Post by mixmastamyk »

senordevnyc wrote: post #59
pj_mukh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hasn’t it always been this way though? Hollywood has long been the canonical example of how a tiny fraction get rich and famous, and everyone else is waiting tables while they hope for the big break that never comes. And further, isn’t the evidence that low income workers have seen their real wages rise over the last few years?

Not actors but there was a class of craftspeople that made a good California living doing things from costumes to vfx. Then jobs moved first to Albuquerque then overseas.

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

#62

Post by ForHackernews »

> Then our managers announced that a “golden batch” of tasks would be released to the most talented, the most special, the royalty of annotators—the folks, we were told, who consistently scored a perfect 5 with an average handling time well below the recommended amount.

Shades of Glengarry Glen Ross

"These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads, and to you, they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers."

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

#63

Post by rsynnott »

rsynnott wrote: post #51
delichon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My…

Well, presumably you didn't have a debilitating horse addiction.

(It is fascinating to me, though, how these "I'm broke due to [completely bonkers lifestyle expense]" things span almost all income levels. From "decent salary but has four cars for no obviously explicable reason" to crippling horse addictions, for some people there just seems to be no income level at which they will not screw up their finances.)

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

#64

Post by ForHackernews »

randycupertino wrote: post #55
delichon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My…

Horse expenses are bonkers. I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby. I used to work for a boss who made $5 million a year and he would get into SCREAMING fights with his wife in the office over the phone about how they couldn't afford to fly the horses to Europe for her to compete in horse dressage competitions. I'd be working away three doors down and in the hallway he'd be hollering from his office, "…

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

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

#65

Post by collingreen »

nradov wrote: post #54
ecshafer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NetHack 5.0.0 was just released and it runs pretty well even on older GPUs.

We have video games at home!

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

#66

Post by mmooss »

Aurornis wrote: post #27

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…

> $150 house cleaner

To clarify, in the OP that's $150 flat rate per cleaning, not per hour. If you've tried to hire a housecleaner recently, that seems a bit below average (depending on the apartment). It's not an extravagance - you'd have to spend more time doing it yourself, which takes you away from buidling up your paying work and future.

Prices are going up everywhere, and the contemporary business theory is to maximize extraction from the customer, not to compete (on price, for example). Uber-wealthy capitalists do it; I'm happy for the housecleaners doing it. Not only do I not mind them getting the money, but they have to pay all their rising bills just like everyone else.

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

#67

Post by jermaustin1 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #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 agree with you (mostly), but I suggest you should spend an hour a week watching something new - do it while folding laundry or working out. Something you might never have chosen. There are gems out there waiting for discovery.

Now onto my response:

TV has always been this way, the only difference is there aren't time slots now, so they can develop a bunch of crap shows (that used to just get left for dead after pilot season), let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live).

When it was ad-supported with 4 prime-time hours across 10-ish channels (between OTA, cable, and premium), every show had to count. Streaming removes that constraint, which has actually been beneficial to producers and consumers of content. More shows means more jobs for writers, actors, directors, crew, etc., even if those shows they are working on are completely forgettable.

But with every gold rush, comes over-abundance of people panning for gold. So yes, there is an over-abundance of screenwriters. There is an over-abundance of choice on the platforms. There is an over-abundance of platforms to chose from. There is an over-abundance of over-consumption of content on these platforms.

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

#68

Post by stronglikedan »

randycupertino wrote: post #55
delichon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My…

Horse expenses are bonkers. I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby. I used to work for a boss who made $5 million a year and he would get into SCREAMING fights with his wife in the office over the phone about how they couldn't afford to fly the horses to Europe for her to compete in horse dressage competitions. I'd be working away three doors down and in the hallway he'd be hollering from his office, "…

> I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby

that, or golf

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

#69

Post by pickleglitch »

mmooss wrote: post #66
Aurornis wrote: post #27

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…

> $150 house cleaner To clarify, in the OP that's $150 flat rate per cleaning, not per hour. If you've tried to hire a housecleaner recently, that seems a bit below average (depending on the apartment). It's not an extravagance - you'd have to spend more time doing it yourself, which takes you away from buidling up your paying work and future. Prices are going up everywhere, and the contemporary business theory is to…

$150/cleaning is a perfectly reasonable rate for a housekeeper, but the fact remains, broke people can't afford that. Broke people can't afford servants. Broke people either do it themselves or live in a dirty house.

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

#70

Post by randycupertino »

ForHackernews wrote: post #64
randycupertino wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horse expenses are bonkers. I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby. I used to work for a boss who made $5 million a year and he would get into SCREAMING fights with his wife in the office over the phone about how they couldn't afford to fly the horses to Europe for her to compete in horse dressage competitions. I'd be working away three doors down and in the hallway he'd be hollering from his office, "…

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

I think a lot of it is comparison, too. He was jealous of the guy who made $20 million a year and took netjets everywhere. That guy was jealous of the guy who was a billionaire and had his own private jet. They all wanted to be the next rung up the ladder!
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