Friday, November 29, 2024
TV Writers Found 139,000 of Their Scripts Trained AI. Hell Broke Loose
theankler.com: Whenever AI came up during last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, it was a contentious issue, but one that seemed to exist as an abstraction, fodder for pithy picket signs.
But last year’s theoretical fear became a real, deeply personal one with last week’s discovery by The Atlantic of more than 139,000 TV and film scripts in a data set being used to train AI.
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3 comments:
That is so uncomfortable and infuriating that their scripts were being used to train AI without their knowledge, consent, or compensation. I wish that people could opt-in their work to train AI for some sort of compensation. But even then, who would actually opt-in to that? This makes me think of my dad, who is a digital concept artist, and AI has trained on all of his artwork without his permission or compensation. You can literally type his name into any AI image generator and it will spit out something that sort of looks like his work (of course, it looks much worse, and takes inspiration from other artists, not just him). It also reminds me of that famous AI art piece that won a competition which was most definitely trained on his work. The first second or two I saw it, it looked like something I would see my dad working on at home on his giant screen. Anyways, it sucks that these people get no compensation for their work, especially if they are just trying to make ends meet or get their career started. It doesn't matter quite as much for my dad who is already very established and towards the end of his career, but it is awful for people whose livelihoods are being taken from them by AI.
I think the reason AI scares me isn’t because of the AI itself, but rather because of the people who train and create the AI. While artificial intelligence has the potential to make decisions for wars, take jobs, and do any number of other things that could be harmful, they do not have the agency to choose to do those harmful things. However, the people who train AI language models and robots can choose that, and in many cases they probably will because it will be profitable for them in the short term. This is one example where that exact scenario happened: the humans trained the machine with stolen materials because it was profitable, not considering who was going to get hurt along the way. This whole situation disgusts me. I really hope that these authors and dramaturgs are going to be able to fight for some kind of compensation or the removal of their intellectual property from the program.
I have been of the opinion that AI is overall a bad thing for creative people and creatively driven industries for a long time. I have an extensive list of issues with AI used for designing sets, costumes, etc. One of the biggest issues is scriptwriting. A good production starts with a good script. I’ve seen too many movies with amazing actors and show stopping set design and costume design, but the story was a let down and ruined the entire movie. Scripts written by AI just are not as good as scripts written by actual humans. There is also the elephant in the room; copyright. The writer’s strike last year brought the questions of copyright to the forefront of many people’s minds. It is a real problem that seems to be getting more and more relevant as AI becomes more advanced and commonplace. The situation described in this article will unfortunately happen again as time goes on.
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