The WGA Had Three Years to Think About AI. They Didn’t
Plus: Jeff Shell’s second fall, Zendaya and a Netflix price revolt
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly takes on the industry’s passing parade.
Today, Jeff Shell’s second fall from the top, Zendaya’s total dominance, Netflix’s price revolt in Italy — and that baffling Oscars move.
But first.
Way back on Tuesday, I wrote about how Hollywood’s conversations around AI had broken down completely — devolving into a primal scream about the terrors of the age, and a moral panic desperately searching for witches to burn at the stake.
If you doubt the latter, check out the reaction on your favorite social network to Steven Soderbergh’s mention to Filmmaker that he had used some AI tools in his new film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono:
AI has been helpful in creating thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space. And that’s been really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do. But like every other piece of technology, it desperately requires very close human supervision.
If there’s a director on earth who deserves the benefit of the doubt that he is genuinely interested in exploring the artistic possibilities of innovation and not just looking to turn a quick buck, it is Soderbergh.
But now he’ll be lucky if he can show his face at Café Gratitude again.
As I wrote, the shouting into the void is extremely understandable. It’s just not productive at a time when we need to hunker down and find actionable approaches to this fast — like now, before the AI tsunami just washes us all away.
The problem is, when all we’re doing is screaming, we’re neither stopping the bad, nor harnessing the good — and Hollywood badly needs to do both things.
Today’s leading example of how off the rails the dialogue has gone is the new WGA contract, whose details were released yesterday. Of all the guilds, the WGA should be right at the forefront of this discussion — even leading it.
But three years ago, when the last contract was hammered out, coming out of the strike, all they could manage to do was basically kick the AI can down the road.
Well, they’ve had three years to look more closely at what really matters and what we really need to stand up against in these developments. Yet when the WGA announced last weekend that it had reached a new contract, it didn’t provide any details about its provisions on AI.
On Tuesday, I wrote:
We’ll see in the details of the WGA deal whether they made any significant advances on these things rather than… agreeing to form a task force to create a report to submit to a committee to put to a debate.
I tend to think that if they had made any real breakthrough, we would have heard about it by now.
If there isn’t something concrete, chalk it up to moral panic — our inability to focus on problems that can actually be solved, and solved quickly. If we can’t get it together to throw down some basic markers, AI will run us right over just like the last dozen plagues that descended on this industry.
Well, lo and behold. They’ve done it again.