Elizabeth Banks finds the prospect of bias in AI scripts “terrifying”
Ahead of Cannes, the actor and filmmaker said she was "heartbroken" that studios and writers can't "agree that AI should not be used for creative purposes.”
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On the continuum of filmmakers who’ve expressed their opinions on A.I., Elizabeth Banks is about as far from the Russo brothers as one can get; that is to say, she’s not interested in putting an A.I. script to screen anytime, anywhere.
Speaking with Deadline ahead of the opening of her new thriller Dreamquil at the Cannes Market, Banks says she was “heartbroken” on behalf of striking writers, who have not been able to move the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to “agree that AI should not be used for creative purposes.”
“As an artist in Hollywood, we export and create culture. And I think we’ve made incredible strides in breaking down the gatekeeping of our industry and presenting underrepresented voices and new ideas. We’ve made so much progress,” Banks shares. “The idea that we would essentially use AI to create that culture based on all the biases of the cultures that have come before — because that’s what the AI will learn from — I find that terrifying.”
Dreamquil—which Banks stars in alongside John C. Reilly—grapples directly with the idea of an AI-driven world. Set in a dystopic near-future, the film follows dissatisfied housewife Carol (Banks) who attends an AI-based mental health retreat, only to return home and find her husband Gary has been keeping up at home with the help of Carol-Too, a robot who becomes fixated on fully replacing Carol. Although full-scale robot replacements may still seem like just another sci-fi trope, Banks makes it clear that creators standing strong against rampant AI will be a key tool in stopping (or at least, putting off) that reality.
“We have to hold the line as a community. I include the producers and the studios in that community,” Banks concludes. “AI is going to be a tool. There’s no doubt about it. It’s coming fast and furious. But I would like it to be a tool used by the writers and not the studios to replace the writers. And once that horse is out the barn, I don’t know why anybody believes their job isn’t next.”
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‘AI’ could never write a movie with as much complexity and emotional depth as *checks notes* Cocaine Bear.
Wow, you really smashed that straw man! You must feel really powerful.
But that’s the thing: it couldn’t. Though it would get conservatives angrily tweeting about the trans agenda after it accidentally switches everyone’s genders halfway through its script. It’s like all those shitty websites run by people who hire non-native English speakers on Upwork/Fiverr to churn out listicles for $0.005 per word and insist that no one can tell the difference, but you get one paragraph in before you spot something like “prepone” as a dead giveaway.
I kind of want to watch that movie now just to see whether it’s ‘good train wreck’ or ‘bad train wreck’ quality.
Neither. It’s more “boring waste of time.” Imagine a train derailing at 3 mph, such that only one car is slightly askew and no one is even injured.
I don’t know I paid real money to watch some amazingly shitty movies in the ‘90s…
Lol. Reminds me of a trending hashtag a while back, #lesserscifi. My contributions were The Day the Earth Paused Imperceptibly and Border Skirmish of the Worlds
Star DisagreementsThe VectorGrainThe PauserSlightly Unfamiliar
“It’s like all those shitty websites run by people who hire non-native English speakers on Upwork/Fiverr to churn out listicles for $0.005 per word and insist that no one can tell the difference, but you get one paragraph in before you spot something like ‘prepone’ as a dead giveaway.” – The A. V. Club
Don’t scare Elizabeth Banks! She seems so nice.
It’s smart for the Writers Guild to jump on this. The machine models out there right now can’t even write a Wikipedia article that makes sense for more than a second, let alone a dramatic script that makes sense, but the tech is going to get better, and the developers of these tools are just going to chuck every screenplay they can into it, whether or not they have the rights to do so, in order to make it better. We’ve already seen how these models clearly replicate existing biases—giving another outlet for it where it’s even more opaque how it ended up where it did is not acceptable.
The way I understand it, these “AI” programs work is to basically put every previous thing into a blender and spits out something that looks new (-ish), but is really just a patchwork of everything that has come before. So if “everything that has come before” is heavily biased towards a casually racist, sexist, pro-gentile, white male, sort of 1950’s America that never really existed, it is likely that bias will be reproduced.
So if “everything that has come before” is heavily biased towards a casually racist, sexist, pro-gentile, white male, sort of 1950’s America that never really existed, it is likely that bias will be reproduced.That’s basically the sorts of white neckbeards who infest the tech sector and write these things, alas. And if there’s anything we’ve learned about techbros, it’s that none of them think or act like normal people, and should in no way in hell be given the amount of influence and power over society as they have.
The big AIs now all go through human-directed reinforcement learning which has been described as reflecting the sensibilities of an affluent Bay Area progressive*. 1950s content wouldn’t even be as available online as post-internet writing.*Although Elon Musk claims he’s going to create a competitor to OpenAI which won’t be so “woke”.
Breaking: “Weavers’ guild member ‘heartbroken’ that industrialsts can’t agree to not use machinery to produce textiles”
Justine Bateman, who I did not know was a coder, offered her own terrifying take in a Twitter thread last week on how AI could replace not only writers, but 90% of all actors as well.
Do we get to pick which actors get replaced, I ask, looking at Johnny Depp and Ezra Miller?
The AMPTP genuinely believes that they should not have to pay writers. There is no going around a group who has a tenet of their business belief being “creative jobs are worthless” because the people who are at the top are not, and never have been, creatives. They are just finance execs who come from a culture that thinks anything that isn’t about making money hand-over-fist solely is just simply “not a job”.
in other words, the AMPTP is run exclusively by people not too dissimilar to an immigrant mom and dad.