Writers, room

Signal app president Meredith Whittaker on AI's threat to writers:

Those in the C-suite, if we have a story that is believable enough that AI will replace you, that's a really good way to suppress sort of worker wages, or unionization, or simply degrade working conditions. 

And I would point to the Writer's Guild of America as sort of a frontline of some of this. So you have the threat of introducing AI into the writer's room and Hollywood. You have a strike that kind of codified around that set of issues. And who gets to determine where AI fits in this kind of rigidly structured, longtime unionized industry, and what role do writers have in making that decision? 

And what sort of played out through that was an understanding that it doesn't necessarily matter if AI can replace your work. What it can do is serve as a pretext to degrade your work. So you're no longer a writer with health insurance and a full-time job and sort of a writer's room or whatever it is. In the Hollywood case, you are hypothetically an AI editor and you're hired as a contractor to fix a script at the end. 

And of course ChatGPT can't write a compelling script, but you do something to it. It gets on production line and suddenly you've created another category that is much less expensive. Even though there's a huge amount of labor involved, the labor is just displaced into something that is then justified as less valuable.

The podcast and transcript of Whittaker's interview with WSJ's Sam Schechner at Davos is here.

The fourth Khruangbin LP A La Sala is out in April. The press release says it looks "back to their beginnings" of the first album so I am there for it.