No Chatbots in the Writer's Room

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
No Chatbots in the Writer's Room
Evan Xie

This is the web version of dot.LA’s daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.

On this week’s “Succession,” Roman Roy flew to Burbank and met with the head of Waystar Studios, pressing them to greenlight more IP-driven films from major franchises. In the show’s fictional alternate reality, Roy is reacting specifically to the looming failure of sleepy robot-themed sci-fi tentpole “Kalispitron,” and the desperate short-term need to artificially boost the company’s stock price. Still, the scene itself has strong roots in our current business landscape. With media, telecom, and tech companies having recently spent billions creating and selling consumers on shiny new streaming platforms, they now need to actually deliver the quality content they’ve spent the last few years promising and promoting.


Sadly, negotiations between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTA) – representatives for Hollywood studios and the conglomerates that own them – ended without an agreement on Monday night. This has led to a writers’ strike threatening to shut down large sectors of the entertainment industry, with picket lines currently active across Los Angeles and New York.

Points of Disagreement

Some of the points of contention between the writers and the studios and networks hiring them go back several years now, if not decades, including debates about the minimum staff you can hire for a writers room and residual rates based on viewership.

Beyond these ongoing debates, which have largely been part of talks between writers and the industry since the last WGA strike in 2007, AI chatbots have also become a major point of this round of WGA-AMPTP negotiations. The WGA proposed new regulations around the use of AI, including guarantees from studio owners that it won’t be used to write or rewrite source material or literary material.

This means no asking chatbots for movie pitches which are then handed off to human writers for a polish, and no asking a chatbot to do its own pass on a script. The AMPTP rejected this proposal; their counter-offer was annual meetings between creative executives and writers to discuss the use of the technology. This was received particularly negatively by WGA members; on Twitter, “Into the Spider-Verse” and “21 Jump Street” vet Phil Lord called the AMPTP counterproposal “unserious.”

Speaking to The New York Times last month, screenwriter and Writers Guild negotiating committee member John August summarized the WGA’s concerns as “The Nora Eprhon Problem.” (It’s named for the late, legendary journalist-turned-screenwriter, who wrote “When Harry Met Sally,” “Heartburn,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and many other classics.) If it’s some day possible to feed all of Ephron’s work into a computer and get a new script that sounds like she wrote it… how do we fairly compensate the original writer? And would that meant the end of screenwriting as a profession?

The Writers Most Affected By AI Chatbots

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Hollywood writers are among the first organized labor groups pushing back against AI tools. The entertainment industry is famous for its attempts to sideline writers and squeeze them for every drop of their earnings. In 1996, John Gregory Dunne famously wrote “beating up on screenwriters is a Hollywood blood sport” while legendary producer Irving Thalberg memorably said “the most important person in the motion picture process is the writer… and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it.”

But this isn’t just about the threat of using a computer to write the next “Tár” or hailing ChatGPT as the new Tyler Perry. It’s unlikely the top creators with large fanbases will be replaced by famous computers, at least in the short-term. These changes will likely impact the lower levels of the industry first, with executives seeking out the kinds of content that can be downgraded in quality by 5-10% without audiences noticing or minding too much. Over time, more and more of entertainment becomes dull and homogenized, perhaps wtihout most of the audience even consciously noticing the change.

However the AI debate shakes out for the WGA, this process will very likely have far-reaching effects. Actors union SAG-AFTRA is considering similar rules around the right to use AI tools trained on an actor’s work to generate original performances, especially voice-only performances. As more and more employees in various industries suddenly find themselves competing with chatbots for jobs, the precedent set by the WGA-AMPTP negotiation could reverberate over the next several years or decades.

Max Merger and AI Incompetence Favor Writers

Fortunately for writers, they do seem to have picked a fertile moment for negotiations, now that their employers are facing the Waystar Studios issue. In just a few weeks, HBO Max and Discovery+ will merge into a brand new extremely high-profile streaming platform, dubbed simply “Max.” By the management team’s own admission, Max sits at the very center of WBD’s overall post-cable strategy. Back in March, WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels called the new service “an absolutely critical milestone” and “one of our big, big priorities for this year.”

And while ChatGPT is certainly impressive technology… it’s not quite ready to write the “Succession” finale or a new season of “Hacks” just yet. AI can take tests, and can hold up its end of the conversation, and can even sometimes make you feel like you’re speaking to a real person. But it’s not particularly funny or skilled at storytelling, and simply by virtue of not having any sensory or life experiences, it doesn’t have much of a personality. It can write a sentence but can it write an insightful sentence? Can it have an insight? These are still theoretical questions.

Despite relying on studios for jobs, this gives writers a certain degree of natural leverage. In April, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos assured investors that the company still had a “robust slate” of content stored up to release in the event of a writers strike. But even a vault full of “Indian Matchmaking” spinoffs isn’t going to last forever. Some form of agreement will need to be reached before subscribers begin bailing on the streamers that run out of content or start churning out lower-quality shows.

Though nothing is for certain, most early indicators make it seem like the strike could last for a while. With the WGA publicly releasing its list of proposals and AMPTP’s responses, it’s become clear that the two groups remain far apart in terms of their expectations.

Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.

Creandum’s Carl Fritjofsson on the Differences Between the Startup Ecosystem in Europe and the U.S.

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

Carl Fritjofsson
Carl Fritjofsson

On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Creandum General Partner Carl Fritjofsson talks about his venture journey, why Generative-AI represents an opportunity to rethink products from the ground up, and why Q4 2023 and Q1 2024 could be "pretty bloody" for startups.

Read moreShow less

AI Is Undergoing Some Growing Pains at a Pivotal Moment in Its Development

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
AI Is Undergoing Some Growing Pains at a Pivotal Moment in Its Development
Evan Xie

One way to measure just how white-hot AI development has become: the world is running out of the advanced graphics chips necessary to power AI programs. While Intel central processing units were once the most sought-after industry leaders, advanced graphics chips like Nvidia’s are designed to run multiple computations simultaneously, a baseline necessity for many AI models.

An early version of ChatGPT required around 10,000 graphics chips to run. By some estimates, newer updates require 3-5 times that amount of processing power. As a result of this skyrocketing demand, shares of Nvidia have jumped 165% so far this year.

Building on this momentum, this week, Nvidia revealed a line-up of new AI-related projects including an Israeli supercomputer project and a platform utilizing AI to help video game developers. For smaller companies and startups, however, getting access to the vital underlying technology that powers AI development is already becoming less about meritocracy and more about “who you know.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk scooped up a valuable share of server space from Oracle this year before anyone else got a crack at it for his new OpenAI rival, X.AI.

The massive demand for Nvidia-style chips has also created a lucrative secondary market, where smaller companies and startups are often outbid by larger and more established rivals. One startup founder compares the fevered crush of the current chip marketplace to toilet paper in the early days of the pandemic. For those companies that don’t get access to the most powerful chips or enough server space in the cloud, often the only remaining option is to simplify their AI models, so they can run more efficiently.

Beyond just the design of new AI products, we’re also at a key moment for users and consumers, who are still figuring out what sorts of applications are ideal for AI and which ones are less effective, or potentially even unethical or dangerous. There’s now mounting evidence that the hype around some of these AI tools is reaching a lot further than the warnings about its drawbacks.

JP Morgan Chase is training a new AI chatbot to help customers choose financial securities and stocks, known as IndexGPT. For now, they insist that it’s purely supplemental, designed to advise and not replace money managers, but it may just be a matter of time before job losses begin to hit financial planners along with everyone else.

A lawyer in New York just this week was busted by a judge for using ChatGPT as part of his background research. When questioned by the judge, lawyer Peter LoDuco revealed that he’d farmed out some research to a colleague, Steven A. Schwartz, who had consulted with ChatGPT on the case. Schwartz was apparently unaware that the AI chatbot was able to lie – transcripts even show him questioning ChatGPT’s responses and the bot assuring him that these were, in fact, real cases and citations.

New research by Marucie Jakesch, a doctoral student from Cornell University, suggests that even users who are more aware than Schwartz about how AI works and its limitations may still be impacted in subtle and subconscious ways by its output.

Not to mention, according to data from Intelligent.com, high school and college students already – on the whole – prefer utilizing ChatGPT for help with schoolwork over a human tutor. The survey also notes that advanced students tend to report getting more out of using ChatGPT-type programs than beginners, likely because they have more baseline knowledge and can construct better and more informative prompts.

But therein lies the big drawback to using ChatGPT and other AI tools for education. At least so far, they’re reliant on the end user writing good prompts and having some sense about how to organize a lesson plan for themselves. Human tutors, on the other hand, have a lot of personal experience in these kinds of areas. Someone who instructs others in foreign languages professionally probably has a good inherent sense of when you need to focus on expanding your vocabulary vs. drilling certain kinds of verb and tense conjugations. They’ve helped many other students prepare for tests, quizzes, and real-world challenges, while computer software can only guess at what kinds of scenarios its proteges will face.

A recent Forbes editorial by academic Thomas Davenport suggests that, while AI is getting all the hype right now, other forms of computing or machine learning are still going to be more effective for a lot of basic tasks. From a marketing perspective in 2023, it’s helpful for a tech company to throw the “AI” brand around, but it’s not magically going to be the answer for every problem.

Davenport points to a similar (if smaller) whirlwind of excitement around IBM’s “Watson” in the early 2010s, when it was famously able to take out human “Jeopardy!’ champions. It turns out, Watson was a general knowledge engine, really best suited for jobs like playing “Jeopardy.” But after the software gained celebrity status, people tried to use it for all sorts of advanced applications, like designing cancer drugs or providing investment advice. Today, few people turn to Watson for these kinds of solutions. It’s just the wrong tool for the job. In that same way, Davenport suggests that generative AI is in danger of being misapplied.

While the industry and end users both race to solve the AI puzzle in real time, governments are also feeling pressure to step in and potentially regulate the AI industry. This is much easier said than done, though, as politicians face the same kinds of questions and uncertainty as everyone else.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been calling for governments to begin regulating AI, but just this week, he suggested that the company might pull out of the European Union entirely if the regulations were too onerous. Specifically, Altman worries that attempts to narrow what kinds of data can be used to train AI systems – specifically blocking copyrighted material – might well prove impossible. “If we can comply, we will, and if we can’t, we’ll cease operating,” Altman told Time. “We will try, but there are technical limits to what’s possible.” (Altman has already started walking this threat back, suggesting he has no immediate plans to exit the EU.)

In the US, The White House has been working on a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” but it’s non-binding, just a collection of largely vague suggestions. It’s one thing to agree “consumers shouldn’t face discrimination from an algorithm” and “everyone should be protected from abusive data practices and have agency over how their data is used.” But enforcement is an entirely different animal. A lot of these issues already exist in tech, and are much larger than AI, and the US government already doesn’t do much about them.

Additionally, it’s possible AI regulations won’t work well at all if they aren’t global. Even if you set some policies and get an entire nation’s government to agree, how to set similar worldwide protocols? What if US and Europe agree but India doesn’t? Everyone around the world accesses roughly the same internet, so without any kind of international standard, it’s going to be much harder for individual nations to enforce specific rules. As with so many other AI developments, there’s inherent danger in patchwork regulations; it could allow some companies, or regions, or players to move forward while others are unfairly or ineffectively stymied or held back.

The same kinds of socio-economic concerns around AI that we have nationally – some sectors of the work force left behind, the wealthiest and most established players coming in to the new market with massive advantages, the rapid spread of misinformation – are all, in actuality, global concerns. Just as the hegemony of Microsoft and Google threaten the ability of new players to enter the AI space, the West’s early dominance of AI tech threatens to push out companies and innovations from emerging markets like Southeast Asia, Subsaharan Africa, and Central America. Left unfettered, AI could potentially deepen social, economic, and digital divisions both within and between all of these societies.

Undaunted, some governments aren’t waiting around for these tools to develop any further before they start attempting to regulate them. New York City has already set up some rules about how AI can be used during the hiring process while will take effect in July. The law requires any company using AI software in hiring to notify candidates that it’s being used, and to have independent auditors check the system annually for bias.

This sort of piecemeal figure-it-out-as-we-go approach is probably what’s going to be necessary, at least short-term, as AI development shows zero signs of slowing down or stopping any time soon. Though there’s some disagreement among experts, most analysts agree with Wharton professor and economist Jeremy Siegel, who told CNBC this week that AI is not yet a bubble. He pointed to the Nvidia earnings as a sign the market remains healthy and not overly frothy. So, at least for now, the feverish excitement around AI is not going to burst like a late ‘90s startup stock. The world needs to prepare as if this technology is going to be with us for a while.

Rivian CEO Teases R2, New Features in Instagram AMA

David Shultz

David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.

Rivian CEO Teases R2, New Features in Instagram AMA
Rivian

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe took to Instagram last weekend to answer questions from the public about his company and its future. Topics covered included new colors, sustainability, production ramp, new products and features. Speaking of which, viewers also got a first look at the company’s much-anticipated R2 platform, albeit made of clay and covered by a sheet, but hey, that’s…something. If you don’t want to watch the whole 33 minute video, which is now also on Youtube, we’ve got the highlights for you.

Read moreShow less
RELATEDEDITOR'S PICKS
LA TECH JOBS
interchangeLA
Trending