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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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No this is about money.
In 15 years there won't be any live action "big budget" movies anymore, they will be generated using ai models and licensing the likeness of actors.
The fact that they are eating 500M right now means that they are confident in their models, hence my 15 year prediction.
We've been here before and it's a bluff. The capabilities of AI and future AI are specious at best and untested at worst.
The root of this issue is the fact that we have publicly traded companies at all. WB can weather actions from other persons all it wants, but it can't capitulate to workers because of their obligation to the shareholders. All this would be over in a heartbeat if shareholders got together and demanded WB seek a resolution.
That i find a weird way of the Americans. The company is supposed to deny workers proper compensation and liveable working conditions, so the shareholders make more money shortly, or not even that because of the loss incurred by strikes?
Now they are basically advertising to everyone: "please work somewhere else. dont work here. we are a shit employer and you will get fucked"
With that they'll jeopardize their company over the next decade. We all saw with Twitter how fast a company can be run into the ground, when the workers are getting fucked over too much.
American corporate executive culture is really toxic, but even worse is the fact that in the US, publicly-traded companies (and the boards thereof) have a legal fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of their shareholders and no one else. Not the workers, not the greater good, not even the company itself.
Nah, the history of labor relations is the owner's willingness to implode things. Like when the deli at walmart formed a union and walmarts response was to stop having delis. They lost a lot of money, but they would rather lose than share.
They likely did the math and the potential loss of money if unionization took hold and shutting it down is the better financial option in the long run.
'They did the math' implies a level of competence and foresight that I think it's foolish to ascribe to the rich. They are humans, just like anyone. They are not perfect and they make mistakes. They certainly don't all exhaustively analyze every decision to maximize profits. Many of them are just arrogant and go with how they feel. Even those that might do a bit of research are hampered by the yes-men they surround themselves with.
Lots and lots of companies make decisions solely because some execs ego was involved.
No one can do that math; that's nonsense. They knew they might have to share and did what any money-addicted psychopath does and hurt everyone to win.
I think they wanted to stop the spread of unions to other parts of Walmart, which could cost them some unknown amount of money.
It's both
I do not buy the "everything will be AI" bit, but this is 100% about the money (which, to be clear, is also power). Employees are forced to think short term just to survive, but (smart) companies think much, much longer. They look at "+$xx million/year" and they see that times an indeterminate amount of years into the future. On those time scales, losing $500m once to stop it is a bargain to them.
The thing is, they lost a tonne of money during the COVID lockdowns, then after one decent recovery year in 2022 they lost even more from the 2023 flops, and now they're losing money from the strike. After a while it starts to add up.
I think I’d predict A.I. will replace the business side of the film industry long before it can handle writing a decent script, much less generate a whole coherent movie. But if the models are that amazing in 15 years, I can imagine a scenario where it lowers production costs to the point directors don’t need a studio anymore.
Like imagine A.I. models can’t make a whole film but a director and writer can use A.I. tools to provide prompts and the script text to generate the scenes and easily add CGI effects. If “Adobe Film Director” or whatever can handle that and only costs $1000/year, who needs producers and distribution and all that?
The problem with AI is, that it tends to go for the "average" or "middle ground" solution. Also if we start seeing more and more AI movies, the models would learn off other AI generated content and that will degenerate them. It is AI inbreeding.
These things are kind of fundamental to the way machine learning works, because at heart it is statistics.
So either they will generate new movies, that are just reskins of other movies with ever more boring plots. Or they will still need actual writers and actors. Now i know hollywood is doing a lot of the first already. But without actual creativity, bringing along new ideas and starting new franchises, eventually it will get boring even for the most diehard marvel fan.
One of the things the studios are wanting to do is not even need to licence the actors (especially background actors) to use them for their AI.