Can the next ‘Succession’ be written by ChatGPT? – 04/30/2023 – Tech

When the union representing Hollywood screenwriters laid out its list of goals for negotiating contracts with studios this spring, it included familiar terms on pay, which screenwriters say has stagnated or dropped amid the explosion of new movies and series.

But at the bottom the document added a clear twist in 2023. In a section titled “Professional Standards and Protection in the Employment of Writers,” the union wrote that it intended to “regulate the use of material produced with artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”

To the mix of computer programmers, marketing copywriters, travel consultants, lawyers and comic book illustrators suddenly alarmed by the growing power of generative AI, we can now add screenwriters.

“It’s not out of the question that before 2026, which is the next time we’re doing business with these companies, they might just say, ‘You know what, we’re fine like this,'” said Mike Schur, creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator from “Parks and Recreation”.

“We don’t need you,” he imagines he hears on the other end. “We have a bunch of AIs creating entertainment that people are appreciating.”

In their attempts to resist, the writers have what many other white-collar workers don’t: a union.

Schur serves on the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America and is seeking to avoid a strike before her contract expires on Monday. He says the union hopes to “draw a line in the sand now and say, ‘Writers are human beings.’

But unions, say historians, generally fail to control the new technologies that allow automation or the replacement of skilled labor by less skilled. “I’m at a loss to think of a union that was able to be brave and do this,” said Jason Resnikoff, an assistant professor of history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who studies work and automation.

The fate of the writers, actors and directors negotiating new contracts this year could say a lot about whether the pattern will continue in the age of artificial intelligence.

In December, Apple launched a service that lets book publishers use human-sounding AI narrators. The innovation could replace hundreds of voice actors who make their living performing audiobooks. The company’s website says the service will benefit indie authors and small publishers.

“I know someone always has to get there first, some company,” said Chris Ciulla, who estimates he has earned $100,000 to $130,000 a year over the past five years narrating books under union contracts. “But that people don’t understand how this can affect the narrator battling around is disappointing.”

Other actors worry that studios will use AI to replicate their voices, cutting them out of the process. “We’ve seen it happen before – sites have come up with databases of video game and animation character voices,” said actress Linsay Rousseau, who makes a living in voice work.

Actors point out that studios are already using motion capture or performance capture to replicate performers’ movements or facial expressions. The 2018 hit “Black Panther” relied on this technology for scenes depicting hundreds of people on cliffs, mimicking the movements of dancers hired to act in the film.

Some actors worry that newer versions of technology allow studios to effectively steal their moves, “creating a new performance in the style of a wushu or karate master and using that person’s style without consent,” said Zeke Alton, voice actor and actor. director who sits on the board of his local union, SAG-AFTRA, in Los Angeles.

And Hollywood writers are getting more and more anxious as ChatGPT has become adept at mimicking the style of prolific authors.

“Early in the talks with the union, we discussed what I call the Nora Ephron problem,” said John August, a board member of the Writers’ Union. “Which is basically: what happens if you feed all of Nora Ephron’s scripts into a system and generate an AI that can create a script that looks like Nora Ephron?”

August, screenwriter of films such as “Charlie’s Angels” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” said that while artificial intelligence has taken a backseat to pay in union negotiations, the union has made two important demands on the subject of automation. .

He wants to ensure that no literary material – scripts, treatments, sketches or even set scenes – can be written or rewritten by chatbots. “A terrible case of, ‘Oh, I read your scripts, I didn’t like the scene, so I had ChatGPT rewrite it’ – that’s the nightmare scenario,” August said.

The union also wants to ensure that studios cannot use chatbots to generate original material adapted for the screen by humans, as they might adapt a novel or magazine story.

Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA says more of its members are signing contracts for individual work, where studios appear to claim the right to use their voices to generate new performances.

A recent Netflix agreement sought to grant the company free use of an actor’s voice simulation “through all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and in perpetuity.”

Netflix said the text has been in place for several years and allows the company to make an actor’s voice more like another’s voice in case of a cast change between seasons of an animated work.

The union said its members are not bound by contractual clauses that would allow a producer to simulate new performances without paying the actors, although it has sometimes intervened to get them out of contracts.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, executive director of SAG-AFTRA, said such contracts pose a much greater risk to non-union actors, who can become unwitting accomplices in their own obsolescence. “It only takes one or a few instances of giving up your lifetime rights to really have a negative impact on your career prospects,” he said.

The Film and Television Producers Alliance, which negotiates with the various unions representing writers, actors and directors on behalf of major Hollywood studios, declined to comment.

When professionals avoid obsolescence at the hands of technology, the result often reflects the status and prestige of their occupation.

That seems to have been the case to some extent with airline pilots, whose crews dropped to two on most domestic commercial flights in the late 1990s, but have remained roughly level ever since, even as automated technology has become much more sophisticated and the industry evaluated further reductions.

“The safety net you have when you’re high above the ground – the one that keeps you from hitting the ground – is two highly trained, experienced and well-rested pilots,” said Captain Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, representing American Airlines pilots. To this day, flights longer than nine hours require at least three pilots.

The replacement of certain doctors by artificial intelligence, which some experts predicted to be imminent in areas such as radiology, also failed to materialize. This is in part due to the limits of the technology and the stature of physicians, who have inserted themselves into high-stakes conversations about the safety and deployment of AI. The American College of Radiology created a Data Science Institute partially for this purpose several years ago.

Whether screenwriters will have similar success will depend, at least in part, on whether there are inherent limits to the machines that purport to do their work. Some writers and actors speak of a so-called “uncanny valley” that algorithms may never completely escape.

“Artists look at everything that’s ever been created and find a glimmer of newness,” said Javier Grillo-Marxuach, writer and producer of “Lost” and “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.” “What the machine is doing is recombining.”

As sophisticated as the algorithms are, the fate of writers and actors will also depend on how well they protect their position.

Unions are pressing their case. August says it’s up to the Writers Union, not the studio, to determine who gets author credit on a project, and that the union will jealously guard that rite. “We want to make sure that an AI is never one of the authors in the credits of a project,” he said.

Unions also have legal cards to play, SAG-AFTRA’s Crabtree-Ireland said, such as the US Copyright Office’s March pronouncement that content created entirely by algorithm is not eligible for copyright protection. It is more difficult to monetize a production if there is no legal impediment to copying it.

Perhaps more important, he said, is what you might call the US Weekly factor — the tendency for audiences to be as interested in the person behind the role as they are in the performance. Fans want to appreciate the actors’ fashion choices and know who they’re dating.

“If you look at the culture in general, the public is generally interested in the real lives of our members,” said Crabtree-Ireland. “AI is not in a position to replace key elements of that.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves