Sean Penn decries AI (and the studios touting it) as “human obscenity”
At the Cannes premiere of his new film Black Flies, Sean Penn said striking WGA members have his "full support"
Aux News Sean Penn
Just as the SAG-AFTRA (The Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) members prepare to vote on a potential strike, Sean Penn has stalwartly aligned himself with striking writers. At a Friday press conference in support of his new movie Black Flies, which debuted in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this week, Penn said his “full support” is with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) as they continue to strike, and specifically condemned studios’ caginess about enforcing regulations on AI.
“The industry has been upending the writers, actors, and directors for a very, very long time,” Penn says (per Variety.) “My full support is with the writers guild. There are a lot of new concepts that are being tossed about including the use of AI. And it just strikes me as human obscenity that there’s been a pushback [from the studios] on that.”
Penn went on to directly slam the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), opining that “the first thing we should do in these [strike] conversations is change the [name of the AMPTP] and title them how they behave, which is the bankers guild. It’s difficult for so many writers and people in the industry who cannot work.” (Although Penn was initially quoted as addressing the Producer’s Guild of America [PGA], he later released a statement to Variety clarifying that he “misspoke” and “meant to say AMPTP.”)
As the WGA continues to hold the picket line, SAG-AFTRA is not the only guild toying with the idea of a strike as contact renegotiations swiftly approach. The Director’s Guild of America (DGA) also currently negotiating a new contract with producers. Both the DGA and SAG-AFTRA’s current contracts with the AMPTP expire on June 30; the WGA began striking promptly on May 2, after their contract expired on May 1.
17 Comments
and you couldn’t have picked a better picture.
Hitting women though? Totally chill for Sean
Sean Penn is always annoying as hell, even when he says stuff I agree with
Well, he’s not wrong…
I am not sure how I feel about AI. On the one hand it sucks to lose your job. But at the same trying to stop technology never works. If it did we would still be renting movies from stores rather than on demand from our house. Plus if he is mad about AI putting writers out of work, is he also mad about how CG has also put a lot of stunt performers out of work. Or programs like Excel put a lot of accounting clerks out of work?Plus my understanding is that AI can only create things based on what is fed into it, so super unoriginal stuff. Maybe having to compete with that will make writers better, since obvious, by the numbers movie/tv scripts won’t cut it.
if he is mad about AI putting writers out of work, is he also mad about how CG has also put a lot of stunt performers out of work.This isn’t really true. Loads of, if not the vast majority of stunts are still performed by human beings, and most CG stunts are things that are either 1) impossible for human beings to physically do or 2) incredibly unsafe for human beings to physically do. You could argue that VFX put practical effects workers out of work, but even in that case, human labor was still required and the birth of the VFX industry created a lot of (unfortunately un-unionized) jobs.The difference with AI is that it’s very easy to see how it will eliminate jobs and much more difficult to see how it will create any new ones, and there is every indication that goal of movie studios (and more importantly the corporations that own them) is specifically to not create new jobs. Maybe having to compete with that will make writers better, since obvious, by the numbers movie/tv scripts won’t cut it.I think you are going to be sorely disappointed. Corporations are turning to AI to drastically reduce, if not outright eliminate the cost of labor. There is not going to be any “competing” with AI; the AI will always be cheaper.There’s really no small fix for this. People like to complain that movies and TV shows nowadays are already unoriginal, uninspired, and by-the-numbers, and fail to see how that’s by design. Garbage produced for the lowest-common denominator has always been financially lucrative, and corporations have always failed to see how better writing could generate any more profit. Eliminating writers eliminates a cost, and if people don’t notice they’re being inundated with machine-written dreck, all the better.It won’t stop with writers. Once corporations figure out how to make AI good enough to write passable scripts, they’ll move on to replacing the actors and eventually, the production process altogether, which will put tons of people out of work, and for what?
If and when AI gets to the point where it is putting the best human writers out of their jobs, then I think we have way, way bigger problems to contend with. We are entering a turning point in human history unlike anything that has come before, and it’s coming far sooner than most of us would have predicted even 5 years ago. What’s on the other side of this turning point? A golden age beyond anything we can imagine, or a nightmare beyond anything we can imagine? I honestly have no idea, but I am truly frightened.
Yeah, the way you avoid the way, way bigger problems is by addressing them when they’re not big yet, which means not waiting around until the “best” human writers are out of a job.Support the strike.
The driving sentiment of Silicon Valley is that only techbros deserve to be compensated for work; everyone else’s jobs should just be automated. You know what I think’ll kill AI? When they realise the normies are using it to write code. Then they’ll beg to have it shut down once they lose the only reason society tolerates them.
The one way I can see this progress actually getting crippled is if some non-sleepwalking portion of Congress pays the slightest attention to how the creators of the training data for these neural nets receive absolutely zero compensation.
CG didn’t put a lot of stunt workers out of work. On the contrary, it reduced the amount of dangerous stunts stunt workers had to do. There’s a misconception that CG fully replaces actors and stunt people on screen. In reality there’s pretty much always a reference shot that’s then spruced up. So, for instance, if some superhero punches another superhero and sends them flying 50 feet into a wall, that’s usually all filmed in mocap and done mostly with wire work. The VFX team then stitches that all together to make it appear like the person flew farther. It’s much easier to use actual mocap than try to create the realistic movements and reactions of a person completely in CG. As to AI: Maybe having to compete with that will make writers better, since obvious, by the numbers movie/tv scripts won’t cut it.Have you not been following media for the last couple decades? It’s pretty endemic of what Zaslav is doing to WBD. Cheap “by the numbers” schlock does “cut it” when it comes to the bottom line. The studios don’t generally care about creativity when they already have a baseline that shows that people will watch the same old regurgitated crap.
AI is an inevitable progression of science and technology. But while we will do both great and horrible things with it, our capitalist overlords WILL monetize both those great and horrible things.
We’ll never see what could be the real benefits in our working lives anyhow. AI gets to make videos and paint and shit while we drone on at office jobs.
AI is coming for those office jobs too.
yep
Monetization of AI should probably be the least of our worries related to it…
There will come a point in the near future where AI will be suggest to companies how to best monetize everything. Feed years and years of a companies financials and marketing into the dataset along with the same of their competitors and the algorithm will produce the most ruthlessly “efficient” courses of action.