Hollywood Strikes: A Glimpse into AI's Future Impact on White-Collar Office Jobs
How current unrest in the entertainment industry foreshadows a monumental shift in white-collar jobs due to Artificial Intelligence.
Hi folks, hope you had a great week.
This week I’m discussing how the crisis in Hollywood may be a portent of what’s to come in other industries, specifically white-collar office work.
Hollywood actors and screenwriters have powerful unions which are prepared to organise and ask their members to strike for better pay and conditions.
AI now has the capability to create remarkably lifelike digital performances using scanned images of actors. In response, and not unreasonably, in my opinion, one of the union's demands is that actors should have a say in how their likenesses are used.
However, professions like lawyers, accountants, and data analysts, to name but a few, are predicted to be profoundly affected by AI in the near future also, and typically lack such protective unions.
As AI moves beyond its current scope of handling specific tasks and becomes more seamlessly integrated into daily workflows, it's likely that many of these roles will be inconspicuously absorbed by AI - the so-called “boiling a frog” metaphor, where the frog doesn’t realise it’s being boiled until it’s too late.
How will this pan out, and what stage of the “hockey stick” curve of AI adoption are we currently at?
Let’s dive in and think this out!
There’s been a lot of media speculation about how AI is going to augment and eventually absorb many traditional white-collar office jobs in law, accounting, financial advisory, marketing, data analysis and so on.
Just recently, however, more of the media talk has been about AI and Hollywood, particularly how AI might affect the future job opportunities and income of screenwriters and actors.
If anything, the impact of AI in the film and creative industries is being felt even more acutely than in the world of business and commerce right now.
Hollywood screen artists are lucky they are unionised.
I’m pretty sure that lawyers, accountants and data analysts don’t have the same union protection from AI taking their jobs (maybe it’s the time to start unionising now!)
I’m no expert on Hollywood work relations, but it appears that union members, like the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), are striking due to a number of pay and conditions issues, but one of their biggest beefs with studios is their concern surrounding AI.
For example,
Amongst the demands by SAG-AFTRA, they describe how Hollywood studios want to perpetually use AI-generated replicas of actors in return for a half day’s labour during which their performance is scanned and turned into a “digital replica”.
Once scanned, the digital replica can easily be turned into an articulated 3D computer model that can be animated to undertake any performance the animator wants it to. It’s like signing your image to be under the control of a real-life puppet master for eternity.
Now to me, that doesn’t sound fair at all.
Imagine if a musician only received payment for the first play of their latest song.
Or a trader only got paid for their first trade.
Or a studio exec only got paid for the first day they turned up at work :)
Having said it’s not fair, I’m not at all optimistic that artists will win out in the long run, whatever concessions the unions manage to make in the short term.
The reason is that actors, voice artists and screenwriters are facing a triple-whammy hit from generative AI, which is making huge advances in the areas of video, voice and text generation - pretty much exactly overlapping what they do.
Companies like Epic Games, the developer of Unreal Engine, which unveiled its MetaHuman Creator project in February 2021, allow developers to create ultra-realistic, real-time human characters for games.
When I say “ultra-realistic looking human characters”, I mean these AI-generated characters can already easily pass as film extras for populating busy city streets or mob scenes, a job previously inhabited by flesh and blood human actors.
And for even more realism, the characters can be exported to applications like Autodesk’s Maya for pixel-perfect frame-by-frame rendering for the latest blockbuster movie.
These metahumans, or digital people, can not only replace extras but also provide digital stunt people and soon, you won’t be able to tell the difference between a CG character in the starring role and a real-life human.
Meta recently announced VoiceBox, a product so good they decided not to release it…
With the fragmentation of media consumption across multiple platforms, the traditional, high-budget studio production model is under increasing financial stress.
The goal is to get the audience's attention without the huge outlay traditionally associated with content creation. Meaning the complete production lifecycle is under threat from cheaper-than-human AI services.
Unless you’re a well-known celebrity with a strong brand and social media following, you can kiss goodbye to a career as a stand-in actor in film and TV shows.
And not only are jobbing actors’ roles being made redundant, but also voice artists that narrate films and books or give animated feature films their distinct characters.
AI can sample and clone a voice with close to perfect accuracy already, and it’s getting better at it every day.
Meta recently announced VoiceBox, a voice cloning product deemed so good they decided not to release it (for now) due to concerns it could be misused for faking politicians, celebrities and indeed anyone else’s voice.
Similar voice cloning software has already been used by criminals to send scam ransom requests, in the voice of the person supposedly taken hostage, to family members demanding payments.
Then there are the Hollywood screenwriters, and we’ve all seen what large language models (LLMs) can do with text.
ChatGPT and its competitors excel at simple things like generating character names, titles and fictional personas.
But more recently, with rapidly expanding model capabilities and increasing context windows, language models can be used to write large chunks of a story plot, rewrite a whole script from a different point of view (POV), or translate it into other languages.
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