The Great Writers Strike of 2023 is On!

Then human imagination should have nothing to fear from AI.

Cut the shit. This is no different from manufacturing laborers resisting automation. You don't get to hold back progress because you are entitled to a paycheck. You either improve yourself to offer more value than the robots, or you fuck off and die in obsolescence.

Demonstrate.

The moment I am obsolete, you have my solemn oath that I shall.

Of course, this is in "functionality in the real world" terms, not "idle critic who rationalizes by insisting he is above everything fantasy world and is therefore absolved of ever making the attempt" terms.

Well, we know what those are worth.

But, they did. You may not remember, but I do, back in the 70s and 80s. This is why there still is so much anti union propaganda. It started long before workers even heard about the automation. This is why there is so much propaganda now against it. If we are forced to live in a capitalistic world, then yes, corporations can damn well hold off automation and keep people employed.

Easy in theory, not so easy in practice.

Let's stick with something that you know a little bit about: Welding. There's all kinds of welding robots out there, and still plenty of welding jobs. I don't know about you, but I've worked places where all the welding's done by hand, and I've worked places where it's a mix of human and robotic welders (like where I'm at now). In every place that I've worked where there's robotic welders, the bulk of the human welders all have the same job: Fix the welds that robots fucked up for whatever reason. This could simply just be taking a grinder to some rough spots, or putting a bead on it. Depends upon a number of factors. Those guys who do that don't make as much money as they might if they were working in a place that didn't have robotic welders, even though they have to the same skillset. This is also one of those situations where if you reject the lower pay, that just means that a robot is more likely to get the job. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you can bet that companies would rather buy robots than hire people, so they're going to resist raising wages and push for automation companies to develop something to replace the uppity humans don't want to do for peanuts.

Okay, now imagine that you're someone whose pay depends upon your reputation. And I don't mean if someone gives you a good reference you can make more money. But the fact that your name is attached to something that is at least nationally, if not internationally known. If that thing happens to be a huge fucking hit, a whole lot of new doors open to you. You have the earning potential of making a lot more money. Even if it bombs, you have a chance of making connections that will get you to a better pay grade. That's one of the reasons why people will take a pay cut to have their names in the credits. Because then you can point to them and say, "See, that's what I've done."

New writers rarely get their own show. Generally, they're someone minor in the writers' room, who occasionally gets to throw out ideas, they help rework scripts, and things like that. It enables them to build skills in the real world that one can't get from a textbook, or really a college class. AI does away with all of that.

Now, if you have a long-running series, like The Simpsons, you can train an AI on the vast library of scripts, it spits something out, and you have a human look over, and fix the script. How much do you pay that person? They didn't write the script, but they had to have the same skillset as those who wrote the originals did. Additionally, if the AI spits out a script that's absolute garbage, the suits are probably going to tell you to completely rewrite the thing, for the same amount of money that they're currently paying you. Does that seem fair? And how much credit for this will you be getting?

Even if we live in a world where an AI can produce a script that's as 90% as good as what a human can produce, there's going to be people who can tweak those scripts better than others. How are those people going to be able to ensure that they can land a job that pays them a decent wage if they don't get some kind of credit in the show/movie that they can point to? It doesn't have to credit them as being the author of the script, but it needs to be able to indicate that they were the individual who fixed the script. And it should say, in some manner, that this is what the person did, and not list them as having written the whole thing (unless they did, of course). This not only ensures that they can land another job like the one they presently have but enables people who actually do write entire scripts to differentiate themselves from the other people.

Ever worked in a union shop? I have. A couple of them, and they can be wildly different than non-union shops. In one, the employees carried copies of the contracts around in their pockets and were constantly referring to sections of them about what they could and couldn't do on their jobs. In the other, you hardly even knew the place was unionized. Both of them had one thing in common: Large changes couldn't happen without a lot of screaming and fighting, even over the simplest of things. Why? Because if the union didn't fuss, then the company would see it as an opportunity to higher low-wage workers, even if they were doing a complicated job that they weren't qualified for. (One place I worked at went union after the company tried to have the machine operators perform electrical work on their machines. The kinds of jobs that you need to be a licensed electrician because you're dealing with high voltage.)

We can sit here and have a rational discussion on the subject and work out a compromise that even if we don't really like, we can live with. That's not how it works in a lot of places, unionized and non-unionized. Yes, I've absolutely worked non-union jobs where I could make a simple suggestion, and the next thing I know, I'm being handed an award for saving the company money. I've also had non-union jobs where after I suggested something like moving the trash can over 2" so it's out of everybody's way, and the immediate response was for my boss to try and fire me, because he thought I made him "look bad" by offering up a suggestion. In unionized places, it's been a bit of a grab bag, but I never had to worry about someone trying to fire me over suggesting that we move a trash can.

So, yes, it would be fair to say that the unions and the companies are going to fight with one another like entitled babies, but unfortunately, that's the only way it can get done. I'm not entirely certain that's 100% the fault of human nature, but I'm leaning in that direction.

And creative types aren't like welders in the sense that a welder can pick up some money on the side for a few minutes of work if they want. Creatives, rarely, if ever, have a friend stop by and say, "Hey, can you fix this letter I wrote?" or "Hey, let me see you do Hamlet." Even rarer do they have those friends offer to pay them. If they have name recognition, they can sell some solo shit somehow. Etsy, eBay, Patreon, ad-supported podcasts, TikTok, etc. But if you don't have a well-known name, it's going to be hard to get traction. Not to mention, there's all kinds of AI one can use for free on the web to do a lot of that stuff, so you're going to be up against the same thing outside of the studios.

A buddy of mine is a digital artist. He's done a lot of shit, nothing that most people would have ever heard of, but he's done some posters and ads for some big companies out there, so you might have seen some of his work. We both agree that he should be paid commiserate with his skills. We might disagree with the amount of money that this is, but that's just haggling. Say I want a custom avatar for a website. I could call my friend, he'd quote me a price, and it would be reasonable for the kind of effort that he has to put in to do it. But for just a stupid avatar? Come on, man, unless he's going to charge me a couple of bucks for it, it's not really worth it to me. Sure, for a few hundred dollars and a couple of hours of work, he can give me an image that's better than what I wanted.

But it doesn't have the kind of value to me, to justify that kind of expense. Especially not when I can go to a site like MidJourney or Craiyon and get something that's either about 80% of what I want, and thus close enough for free, or it's just so fucking weird looking that even if it is utterly nothing like what I wanted, I'm going to use it just to fuck with people.

Doesn't do my friend any good, but it doesn't really hurt him. After all, I wouldn't pay him for an avatar for a website. Would I pay him to do something like an album cover, book cover, or whatever? I might. I might also go to Fiverr, where you can hire folks who live in places with a very low cost of living to do things for you at a low price. He tried to sell his services on Fiverr but gave up because he was being underbid by folks who lived in Thailand, who could afford to spend days working on an illustration and only being paid $30 for it. He shifted into other areas, but he's taken some serious hits to his income.

For him, it's getting harder to make a living as an independent artist, not connected to a big entertainment company. Used to be, if you had one of those jobs, you had a real shot at security while you had the job. It might evaporate the moment the show gets unexpectedly canceled, but if it's picked up for a season, then you, at least, know you'll have a check coming in for that long. Now, though? Those opportunities, even without AI, are going away. What then?

Seriously, dude, if all welding was done by robots tomorrow, you found yourself unemployed, and someone told you to flip burgers because that's all you were good for, you'd probably punch them, and I wouldn't blame you. You've got skills, you know how to use them, and the companies you've worked for made a lot of money of your work, and wouldn't be in the situation that they are today, if it hadn't been for you, and people like you. You're out of a job, you're pushing middle age, and the skills that you've worked your life honing are now as useless as a screendoor on a submarine. What then?

Start your own business as welder? Nobody wants your services. Find a new career path? Okay, what? What's it going to pay? How are you going to be able to find a job willing to hire you when they know they can get some kid or a machine to do it for a fraction of the costs? Equally important, are you going to at least kinda like what you're doing? Sure, we've all done really shitty jobs, and hated every moment of it, but we did it because we needed the money. What if that was the only kind of job you could get? One that you knew, for whatever reason, was just going to be an absolute nightmare the entire time you did it. Even worse, you know that it doesn't matter if you leave this job or not, the next one's going to be just as miserable.

That's what the writers are facing. And I'm going to let you in a little secret, that's kinda what killed garamet. She couldn't get her novels published for whatever reason, couldn't get a job with the studios working with scripts, etc. So, she was doing crazy freelance work, and her last assignment was this grueling medical transcription thing that was taking her hundreds of hours to complete, had to be 100% accurate, and the pressure got to her. She was 71, and having to do tedious shit that would drive someone a fraction of her age insane with boredom and stress.

I don't know about you, but there aren't too many people on this planet that I dislike so much that I want to see them humping harder in their 70s to earn a living than they had to do in their 20s. We can argue that one should be better prepared for retirement or whatever, but what if you're trying to do that? What if you're trying to ensure that you can make enough money so that you can comfortably retire? And then, what if someone was trying equally hard to take it away from you? Would you fight them? Or would you shrug your shoulders, and put on your hairnet and flip burgers for a living?

And man, if you're one of those people who thinks that civilization is all an illusion, and we're all locked into some kind of massive Darwining survival of the fittest struggle, where the veneer of civilization is merely a cloak you use to hide your actions, then folks striking for better wages is entirely within that paradigm. Because it's in both parties' best interest to get the maximum amount of value out of the system, with the least amount of work on their part. This clash, instead of being condemned by you as a bunch of greedy fucks trying to screw people out of money that they've earned or deserve, is a perfect example of that in action. So, instead of condemning the strikers, you should be heralding them as your champions, as much as you praise the execs. Because they are engaging in actions that provide evidence to support that idea.

We're not rational creatures who can sit down and have a discussion with one another and come up with a solution. We're vicious apes tearing one another asunder in a battle to survive. Sometimes we use violence, some times we use other methods. But we're engaged in the exact kind of life-and-death struggle people claim humans need to be in, in order for the species to thrive.

You totally forgot to log into my account before you wrote that.

BTW I need to see your wall of text and tldr union card or else there is going to be some trouble.

Disney Delays All Its Upcoming Star Wars and Avatar Movies

and nothing of value was lost. Seriously, what was left aside from Jar Jar and the mando take baby yoda to smurf planet, or mandolorian go. Please stay on strike because I do not need another live action lion king CGI movie.

what if the next one was Robin Hood, with furries for actors

The question is not what if, but where is the butthole cut. Yes, the cartoon version of Robin Hood was the first toon I remember thinking fox girls are cute and I wish I was one. Of course, I do not consider pre- Little Mermaid Disney the same as post Little Mermaid Disney.

They’ve got pole dancers on the picket line!

https://twitter.com/lovefromronni/status/1669614833518673922?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

If there are enough good writers willing to work in those conditions then the strike will ultimately fail as the WGA dies.

Until then, they are allowed to negotiate working conditions.

Long Twitter thread breaking down the tentative agreement between the DGA and the studios.

https://twitter.com/stevendeknight/status/1668486349740208128?s=20

There's links to the actual document itself, in case you want to read it for yourself. In short, the deal's bad because, as the Twitter thread points out, the studios managed to slip in a loophole large enough to fly a star destroyer through.

Learn some fucking brevity.

Your lack of speed reading and eidetic memory is noted, inferior creature.

And the flip side is factories refused to upgrade their WWII era equipment and Japan competed the shit out of us with their shiny new post WWII machinery. They could produce products cheaper than we could because of investment in their factories and workers. Here we just offshored to the cheapest bidder.

Apply this to your biological processes.

The ones you don't already, I mean. There's creams to help with that.

I have no patience (clip it there ) for people who use 100 words to convey a 10 word thought.

Sounds suspiciously like, "Tell me what to think, not how to think."

Functial reading comprehension would yield something more like "Get to the fucking point before I fall asleep."

Like you can even handle the latter.

This episode was brought to you by the number i, and the letters F and U

You can’t have Falstaff and make him thin.

https://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1670057569367334914?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

We've had our first fatality of the writer's strike.

Apple TV+'s Metropolis TV Series Is Dead

Ouch, looks like Marvel may have shot themselves in the foot - they used AI-generated CGI for the opening credits of Secret Invasion and folk are pissed:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/en...mid-writers-strike_n_64932c8fe4b0c0ed59afa64a

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/secret-invasions-ai-credits-scene-angers-viewers/

Directors Guild Makes New Deal with Studios, Despite Low Voter Turnout