All my musings aside, I'm well aware of the problems and moral / ethical quandaries with this sort of thing. We've seen that it can be abused and as a writer myself I'm kind of egging on my own demise in a sense, but the stuff coming out of Hollywood lately has been so utterly awful, surely with the help of this developing technology they can't do worse than THAT? Surely.
If you think everything you don't like is churned out for mindless consoomers, why would you think programs whose sole purpose is to churn out mindless content be any better?
For goodness sake, this could really be a thing, couldn't it? Writers could actually be replaced by ChatGPT and the like. This is utter insanity.
This thread escaped my thoughts for a while, then I remembered "stuff". As a self taught artist, I never understood the need for "art schools", then I learned about "art schools", art degrees, software blah blah. I didn't like how artificial the "art" was becoming. People said isn't art subjective? I don't really agree. All these students who became "artists" from all these schools churning out commercial "art" but yet couldn't figure out anatomy or even much simpler concepts like structure. If you can't draw it by hand you're not an artist (just my opinion I guess)...but that Photoshop could be used to whip up "art". The screenshots/thumbnails I do for my Youtube vids aren't art to me, just pics and texts, etc. I do admire some commercially taught "art" and "artists". But watching them create their product with formulas and measurements is strange and foreign to my brain. To me, this AI generated art is just an extension of what they taught in "art schools". Perhaps this AI will make the art some of us are into less pretentious. Very rare do you find true art and artists these day...again just my OLD MAN opinion.
I think they can’t legally copyright anything written by AI, so if caught it would immediately go public domain, however it’s Hollywood so I expect them to do it under the table and make up fake writers name that wrote them till they get caught and sued by the writers guild.
Yeah I was wondering about that... I also wonder how much of this present situation lies on the shoulder of the writers turning in total shit scripts, because think about it from the perspective of these pencil pushers: Why would I pay some arrogant turd to write garbage when I can use this handy dandy app for free that puts out stuff that's just as good as anything they'd write? I'm sure the problem is probably both the writers and executive side of things being ass at their job. I don't think using stuff like ChatGPT is the best solution but I can definitely see the logic. But hey not like anime or toku shit will be effected so they can keep striking for all I care.
What an awful thing to think, regardless of the quality of the writing, actual living peoples jobs are at stake, and you want to be on the side of the souless key jingling app? Also "just as good as anything they can write" when all AI does is just steal other peoples work, it's just a copy of a copy, what's the point?
You want “good scripts,” but you are dismissive of people striking for a better work environment that would produce “better scripts” in the first place. Then, you say as long as anime and toku isn’t affected, which are produced in industries notorious for poor working conditions, you couldn’t care less. Peak consoomer there.
And it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin' and it don't stop comin'...
If this becomes a common practice in the future, I could see that being challenged. It would not at all surprise me if - worst case scenario - the studios simply lobby for new laws that allow them to copyright scripts produced by AIs and simply attribute them to the studio. There will need to be a re-evaluation of copyright law due to AI sooner or later anyway. What's more likely, though, is that even if they get ChatGPT or whatever to churn out a script, they'll still need to bring in people to look over, revise, and edit it. They wouldn't even have to make up names, just bring in someone to proofread the script and boom, they get a writer's credit. In the long run, I'm not entirely sure how much money this practice would save the studios. Of course, the AI thing isn't even the real reason behind the strike, it's more of a side issue that the WGA is trying to get ahead of before it becomes a problem. The main reason for the strike is that writers have been getting less and less pay due to the prevalence of streaming services, as they no longer get residuals from syndication because of how the streaming model works. I'm always in support of labor and the effectiveness of striking, but I have to admit I'm not sure how successful this strike is going to be. Obviously the writers should be paid more, but since syndication isn't as much of a thing anymore, how do you quantify how much a writer earns in residuals when their show is on Netflix? As far as I know, Netflix doesn't release viewing statistics for individual shows, and they do not have an incentive to - and the studios, at least right now, do not have an incentive to demand those numbers. I'm rooting for them and hoping for the best nonetheless. I'm only slightly more optimistic about the AI issue - I think studios will find that it's not really worth the effort - but as the technology improves, I can certainly see it becoming a bigger problem in the future.
It doesn't help that a lot of people hopelessly misunderstand the technology being discussed, on both sides of the debate, nor do they have a solid grasp on creative commons or even copyright law itself. I think attempting to create laws to try and 'control' it is misguided and ultimately won't be effective.
What I'd love to see is for the AI text programs to get good enough you could potentially feed it say the first five books to ASOIF and get a decent attempt at the last two books that the lazy slob is never going to write.
