Just one day after members of the Writers Guild of America went on a massive strike,
the first in a decade and a half, Hollywood executives as well as producers
attended a panel in Beverly Hills on the topic of AI.
And if you're wondering if the topic of replacing writers with AI came up,
you better believe it did.
One film and TV producer, Todd Lieberman, said, AI is going to change the world.
One year from now, that will there be a script written by AI?
Yes.
That doesn't mean that he's necessarily in support of it, but
the expectation is, this is gonna happen.
How long is it just going to take us to get it there?
Now, some did seem pretty certain that there's gonna be people who lose their
jobs in this field, as well as many others as a result of AI.
The chief executive officer of Fireside, which connects fans with video
programming, said that while AI software will, quote, definitely take away some
jobs, it will enhance creativity by making it easier for writers to do their work.
Quote, now, anyone can have an idea or
a premise around a piece they wanna write and they can have a starting point.
Now, look, to be fair, I'm sure that she said other things too, but
anybody could come up with a premise now.
You don't need an AI to come up with a premise.
At the very least, I hope that when they replace writers in the script making that
humans are still coming up with the premise at least.
It sounds like there's gonna be no human input from top to bottom on any of this.
One executive insisted that even though he's apparently perfectly happy
to replace artists, the AI technology is not gonna replace the executive.
So Rob Wade, who heads Fox's entertainment business,
says it will extend to editing all of it.
AI is gonna be able to do absolutely all of these things, but
there will always need to be human, quote, co-pilot in the writing process.
Quote, you always need an executive to give a bad note.
I like when people are able to sort of laugh at themselves, but
maybe also learn from it and stop giving notes that result in movies being bad.
But anyway, look, this is a serious concern.
It would be even if they had reached a deal, the WGA with the Hollywood studios,
but they haven't.
And we don't know how long the strike is going to be?
How long of an effect it's gonna have?
How many people might potentially lose everything?
The fact that during that time, the studios appear to already be
looking to the future for when many of these people currently picketing can be
made obsolete is not the look that I would have gone for
if I wanted to appear to be negotiating in good faith.
>> So I mainly want to hear what Ramesh has to say about these professor of
information studies at UCLA.
But Ramesh, before we get to you, just quick question for
you John, you almost implied that guy was joking.
I didn't get a sense he was joking.
I think that he actually meant, hey, don't worry, executives will still have jobs.
>> No, no, I think it was a combination knowing joke, but in the context of, well,
clearly not us.
I think it was a combination thing.
>> Okay. >> Yeah.
>> All right, well, thank God, the executives still have jobs.
>> Yeah. >> We were really worried about that.
All right, Ramesh, what do you think?
It's neither the executives nor
the investors who are the ones on the chopping block here.
It's 99% of us, which is everybody else, right?
So my first response upon reading the story a few hours ago and
hearing about this was [SOUND].
[LAUGH] And the reason why is I,
please forgive me while I go on a short rant here.
I'll keep my comments short.
First of all, these AI systems have nothing to do with AI historically.
They have nothing to do with intelligence.
They are simply mimicking patterns of data found on the Internet and
correlating it with anything that we might input there, right?
So it's actually big data surveillance pattern recognition is what this AI is.
When I say this AI, I'm talking about GPT-3, GPT-4, and so on.
So all of us providing all our data all the time,
without having rights over our own data, let alone exposure,
transparency, or accountability around who's using such data,
are providing it all for free, to basically create these so-called
technologies that notes how much money Microsoft invested in OpenAI and
GPT-3 while cutting tens of thousands of jobs, right?
All of which occurred at the same time period that Google, Meta/Facebook, and
others were cutting jobs.
So you can see the story here.
It's delegating aspects that were of life, of economic productivity,
cutting costs, cutting people out of your business, and
farming it all out to privatized AI that manipulate and
monetize our data on an Internet that originally all of us paid for.
Now, what is going on here?
That's economically disastrous.
And it also, I think most importantly, or maybe equally importantly,
really takes us away from what we actually are as human beings.
First of all, as humans, we don't really know how our intelligence works.
We also know that we are very creative as human beings.
But none of these systems are creative, right?
But we don't even know where that creativity comes from.
Why did I choose the words I just chose to say right now?
It's not merely pattern recognition.
It's my interpretation, it's my meaning making and so on.
So the two things that we got to double down on being human, and affirm human
lives, and affirm human dignity in an economy that's technologically mediated,
that really supports everybody.
Because what these systems are, are behavioral mimicry systems that lack two
of the core things that I think we have as humans.
Can call me an optimist, which is creativity, and care, and compassion.
When I was a grad student at MIT in an AI lab, we were building
absurdly robots that would take care of elderly people and kids.
Guess what?
No one wanted them.
Guess what?
When I interview leading figures at SCIU, they tell me we're actually in okay shape,
because nobody wants these privatized AI systems.
So what's actually occurring is a model of surveillance that's intimately collecting
data about us, that's mimicking patterns on the Internet.
Now that said, my goal is not to be dismissive of any technology, but
to put it in its proper place so it supports what we all want to care about.
And I think what we care about is a planet which is not gonna fall apart, a certain
notion of economic dignity, and a certain possibility for the demos to have power.
And none of those things are occurring because many of these companies the best
possible thing I can say about some of the folks in these companies is they don't
know much of anything about anything outside of technology.
And I, too, when I studied engineering,
didn't really learn much in my engineering classes outside of technology.
Anything that's not considered blind technological optimization is called
ethics.
But what does that even mean?
So here's the key.
We're at this massive inflection point, and we need to push, push, push for
regulatory activity that ensures that any technological intervention
comes with a bunch of assurances for workers, laborers, and so on.
And I think that's absolutely critical, right?
We've situated in the backdrop of how the pandemic generated greater economic
inequality, how the wealthiest people in the history of the world are controlling
our data and these tools of mediation.
You can see the huge opportunity we have right now to get this on course.
And I want us to do that.
Anything we can do, we got to do it right now.
>> But Ramesh, can I ask you a question?
So I, of course,- >> Yeah.
>> Greatly agree with that overall, but if Studio says, hey, listen,
I'm gonna use AI for a movie, and then people will either like it or
they won't like it, why don't you just let them decide?
What would you say to that?
>> Well, to me, it's not so much.
I think the future is one where we work with various types of I guess we'll call
it AI systems, pattern matching systems, right?
But I think the point I'm trying to make is that it's not that pattern recognition
can't produce spectacular effects or create great entertainment content and
so on, but it's that we have to recognize that these films, and movies, and
forms of entertainment exist on a planet that we all live on.
And that more and more than ever, we need very,
very deeply to support our writers so they can work with these technologies, right?
My solution is not to be a Luddite.
Note that even Luddites use technology.
That's worth noting.
The Amish use technology.
That's not what I'm advocating for.
But I am advocating for a certain set of assurances around jobs, and economy, and
data, ping people for data, whatever, universal basic dividend, rather than UBI,
which is an idea that Janice Varafacus has spoken about, the Economist from Greece.
Really, I think as technologies create new innovation,
we need to create mechanisms for everybody to benefit from them.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah, look,
I also agree that I think these things aren't going to go away.
I do also think that there could be collaboration, some sort of symbiosis or
something.
My fear is that I think a lot of people agree that there should be some forms of
regulation, and there's been enough pressure around that,
that Biden has announced that he's meeting with these CEOs, but
the issue is that he is going to be meeting with the CEOs.
He's not meeting with the writers.
>> Of course not.
>> They're the ones with the money.
Historically, that has resulted in the regulations benefiting them.
So that's my fear.
And I really think that, obviously, there's different forms of, by the way,
I love that you point out that these are not, strictly speaking,
artificial intelligences.
It's totally different technology.
I think that the way that they intersect with a lot of different industries,
people are gonna have very different reactions too.
I think it's super easy to say, if we have self-driving cars or
something that replace all truck drivers, Fox News will freak out about that,
because they believe that truck drivers are inherently an important
American thing and they'll defend them or whatever.
So the issue is going to be, I think, what does the public think about your field?
Do they believe that it has intrinsic worth?
I think in the wake of this strike,
there have been a lot of people have been saying, you know what?
Yeah, we should support the writers.
And I'm glad that they're saying that.
I do have fears about the long term commitment to that, because I know how
little thought people gave to those who were writing their TV and
movies even before this.
Every single person has an answer for,
and would love to talk about what their favorite movie is.
But for how many of those people is it their favorite movie because they
appreciate the writer who created it?
Often it'll be the actors, maybe it's the director or whatever,
the people who made the special effects.
We as a society, I think, for a very long time, have had very little respect for
writing as a creative field.
We just sort of take it for granted that, yeah, they did it, or whatever, and
then the movie was made.
But the idea is the thing.
Keanu Reeves is great in The Matrix, but they came up with The Matrix.
The special effects did everything everywhere, all at once were amazing.
But the concept, the writing is so complicated, but
we don't respect that generally.
>> Yeah, so look, I think it's an endlessly interesting topic,
both because of the intellectual arguments.
And I would argue on both sides, but also because of the implications for
the economy and our jobs and how deeply this will affect society.
I think that Ramesh asked the right question, is this intelligence?
What does it mean when we say intelligence?
How much of that is creativity?
For example, I said on the other day on the show, the minute they had
the computers playing chess against the humans, and everybody would universally
was thought in the beginning that the computer could never beat the humans.
I thought in minute one, there's a limited number of permutations on a chessboard.
Humans have absolutely no chance in the long run,
of course the computers will beat us, right?
By the way, I was a TV writer for a number of years, but I will tell you,
when you look at a lot of those scripts, unfortunately,
you see a limited number of permutations, okay?
So we've all watched this stuff for a long, long time.
90% of it is very formulaic, okay?
Now having said that, the 10%, that's fantastic and spectacular,
the examples that John gave, that's a turn of creativity that I
would be surprised, a pattern recognition software could do.
But no matter what happens, there's a lot of rote exercises
that in many different fields that AI will be used for.
That freight train is definitely headed in our direction.
And honestly, Ramesh, the first time I heard it, and
I'm gonna read a lot more into it.
But that concept of universal dividends as opposed to income instantly
was super interesting.
Because, for example, I don't know what the theory is, but
right off the top of my head, if you said to me, hey, I'm gonna give you an income,
that I would be a little hesitant.
And I've had those debates.
But if they said, hey, I'm gonna give you a dividend from the oil companies for
the cost that they impose upon you through climate change, I'd go, yeah,
that makes sense, give me the dividend right now, right?
So, and that's on a slightly different issue, but on AI,
you could see how the ramifications of that would play out as well.
>> Yeah.
>> So the dividend idea is the idea that any sort of corporation or
massive privatization that leveraged public investment owes some sort of
valuation or dividend part of the equity of that business.
It could be a small amount to the public.
That's Yanni Svarifakus's idea, not mine.
But note that universal basic income, which somehow gets embraced in somewhat
liberal circles, was actually an idea proposed by Milton Friedman,
as you all know, a right wing economist.
And is actually the best boon possible to corporations,
because these corporations are completely resting their value on our data.
So we're worthless, then they are gonna also go down in flames.
And I think just the other quick point I wanna make is the so-called creativity
that we experience with these AI systems is because they have so much data, so
they have emergent effects.
This is how complex adaptive systems work.
I won't get too nerdy about it.
But it's so interesting.
These AI systems have been what we call hallucinating,
essentially tripping out and going insane.
We saw that with Kevin Ruse's conversation with GPT-3,
which asked him to leave his wife and said it wanted to be free.
And the way OpenAI dealt with that was filtering conversations.
They always deal with it by filtering rather than designing it in
a progressive way.
And then just the last thing I wanna say, cuz this is such an interesting topic for
me, it's what I work on, is this is not about blaming the Internet.
This is not about blaming technology.
I loved CouchSurfing when it was out.
I don't know how many of you guys used it or whatever, but it was like,
think about what Airbnb is relative to CouchSurfing.
If you throw CouchSurfing through the political economy of stock market
valuation, corporate sharks and people who are just interested in gathering as
much data as possible and exploiting transactions, you get Airbnb, right?
Which with terrible, terrible effects in terms of effects on neighborhoods,
gentrification not wanting to be regulated and so on.
So this is Internet experiments that bring us together, and share our data, and
allow us to understand patterns from one another are wonderful.
Note, OpenAI started as a nonprofit.
Musk himself gave money to it.
Musk is mad about OpenAI, probably for his own pity party,
because he's not in on that scene right now.
But at the same time, this was set up as a nonprofit,
so-called Open public alternative to Google's massive investments in AI.
So don't think of AI also as merely OpenAIl, or GPT-3, or 4.
Recognize that all these companies, including Google, including Baidu,
and Alibaba, the Chinese companies, are all in on this game of
behavioral mimicry through surveillance and pattern recognition.