Hollywood’s striking writers were right to be up in arms over AI

Plus: Being 13, a small brag, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and I didn’t get an email out last week. I was traveling for work—visiting the Christianity Today headquarters in Chicago—and could not find the time. I thought about emailing about it, but then I thought, it’s dumb to email to say you’re not emailing, and also, it’s just an email. Anyway, now things are back to normal, and here are this week’s five items for you.

In this post, paid subscribers will receive:

1. the rest of the first item

2. being 13

3. glass San Pellegrino bottles

4. some recent work

5. a small brag

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Hollywood’s striking writers were right to be up in arms over AI

(via)

I haven’t really followed news about the Hollywood writers’ strike, which now seems to be winding down after a tentative deal was announced on Sunday. But I was struck by several parts of this passage about the deal in a Monday New York Times newsletter:

The use of A.I. was the final sticking point. The writers didn’t want studios to use their work to teach chatbots how to write, feeding A.I. old scripts so the chatbots could generate writing in a similar style.

The writers also worried that studios would ask chatbots to rewrite or refine the first drafts of their work — for scenes or whole shows. “That’s the nightmare scenario,” said John August, who is on the Writers Guild negotiating committee.

The studios had initially said that too much was unknown about the technology, and that the guild would need to wait to discuss it in future contract negotiations.

But over the weekend, the studios proposed a few paragraphs to be inserted into the new contract that addressed a writers’ concern about A.I. and old scripts. The two sides spent several hours negotiating the language on the final night of talks.

For a long time, if you’d asked me whose jobs were most at risk of being replaced by AI, I’d probably have listed people who operate large vehicles: truck drivers, cab drivers, train engineers, maybe even some landscapers or construction workers. But fully self-driving vehicles increasingly seem like a mid-century fever dream, something to be filed away as a type of naive futurism, like those old “city of the future” drawings with multi-layer roads and ceilings over skyscrapers.

Instead, it seems the future is coming for knowledge and creative workers first: for people like these writers and for people like me. Now, I have my doubts about how complete AI’s victory will be here, or indeed whether it will win a meaningful victory at all. What we currently call AI is—as is increasingly widely observed—superficially impressive but often much less useful than it’s made out to be.