Hollywood on strike: Justine Bateman on AI and the future of entertainment
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.1 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
AI technology has emerged as a sticking point for workers in the entertainment industry. Without any guardrails, writers and actors both say their work can essentially be used to train AI that can then put them out of a job. As an industry bellwether for AI's potential to displace huge numbers of workers, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild (WGA) are both under contract renegotiations that are being closely watched by many outside of Hollywood. What's really at stake here? Actor, writer, director, producer and computer scientist Justine Bateman joins us to share her take.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Five Things. I'm Dana Taylor, today is Sunday, July 9, 2023. |
| 0:10.5 | With the screen actors and writers' guild contracts, both under renegotiation, AI technology |
| 0:16.4 | has emerged as a primary issue of concern for workers in the entertainment industry. Our |
| 0:22.2 | guests has a unique perspective on the matter. We first came to know Justine Bateman as |
| 0:26.6 | an actor now as a filmmaker. Justine is a member of the writers guild, the directors guild, |
| 0:32.9 | and a former screen actors guild board member and negotiating team member. She also holds a |
| 0:38.9 | bachelor's degree in computer science and digital media management from UCLA. Justine has been |
| 0:44.3 | a vocal advocate for workers' rights in the face of AI technology. She's with us today to discuss |
| 0:51.3 | the issues. Thank you so much for joining us, Justine. Hi. So the past year we've seen an |
| 0:57.1 | explosion of easily available AI tools for manipulating words, audio, and visuals. The dystopian |
| 1:05.5 | tech is eerily captured in a recent episode of the hit series Black Mirror where actress |
| 1:10.4 | Selma Hayek is cloned by AI. Her likeness is then used in list dramatizations without |
| 1:17.2 | Selma's overt approval. Justine, what did stay care? Well, first of all, I want to say that |
| 1:23.4 | episode didn't capture the absolute crushing emotional, spiritual, and economic crushing of that |
| 1:32.9 | sort of thing going on, of confusing people about what's real and what's not. Because what's |
| 1:37.8 | happened is studios, streamers, tech companies, corporations have valued greed over people to |
| 1:46.4 | such an extent that we're going to see like a cratering of our, the way our society is set up. |
| 1:53.8 | And in the entertainment business, this is a kind of a microcosm of that. So what's at stake is |
| 2:00.1 | everybody's jobs. The way AI works for someone that doesn't know or a generative AI, |
| 2:05.9 | it's like a, I'm simplified, it's like a box. Let's say you want it to write books, you feed it |
| 2:10.4 | a bunch of books, and then you give it a task, write me a book about pandas in outer space, and |
| 2:15.0 | it'll spit out that book. So you can imagine for screenwriters, this, and they're called |
... |
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