Effects of writers strike on Sci Fi & Fantasy genre

[Dausuul]

If they produce any shows with AI during the strike, they won't need a boycott to make them crash and burn. Whatever you may think about the prospects of LLMs in the future, they are certainly nowhere near replacing human screenwriters today. Nor is that going to change in the next few months while the strike goes on.

I actually hope the studios try it. That might push them into accepting the writers' demands (figuring "It doesn't work anyway, let 'em have what they want on this one and we'll fight on the other stuff"). Then the writers will be in a better bargaining position when the breakthrough comes that makes replacing humans a real possibility.

 

[bloodtide]

I actually hope the studios try it.

Me too. I don't think AI written things will be that "good", but what they WILL be is "average". And that is all you really need from a TV show.

After all, to tell an AI to "write an entertaining TV show plot about a rookie cop" and they will write out a typical "TV cop plot story like any cop show from 1970 to 2000 or so. Something done many times before, but still entertaining.

And that show would be 100% better then most 'cop shows' being written today.

After all, an AI will just write and "entertaining show" with out all the other stuff that modern writers put in a show. The rookie cop has a 'fish out of water' time adjusting to their new job....and, dun dun dun...have to arrest their best bud from high school for a crime. Bam, right there is episode one.

People that like cop shows, will like it "just enough". It won't be great, but it can be "just enough".

 

[overgeeked]

Me too. I don't think AI written things will be that "good", but what they WILL be is "average". And that is all you really need from a TV show.

After all, to tell an AI to "write an entertaining TV show plot about a rookie cop" and they will write out a typical "TV cop plot story like any cop show from 1970 to 2000 or so. Something done many times before, but still entertaining.

And that show would be 100% better then most 'cop shows' being written today.

After all, an AI will just write and "entertaining show" with out all the other stuff that modern writers put in a show. The rookie cop has a 'fish out of water' time adjusting to their new job....and, dun dun dun...have to arrest their best bud from high school for a crime. Bam, right there is episode one.

People that like cop shows, will like it "just enough". It won't be great, but it can be "just enough".

The gap between the basic premise of an episode and the actual writing of an episode is a monumental gap. Try your hand at turning that premise into a script for a 45-minute episode of a cop show. Then try having an AI spit one out. Then check that script for plagiarism. All AI does is spit back words in the most likely order. So large chunks of the text they generate are 100% verbatim from the sources, i.e. plagiarism. It would only be average in the sense that the words regurgitated would be the ones that, on average, come after the previous word. It’s writing in the sense of predictive text. No telling if the sentences are grammatical or make any sense at all. You’re more likely to get surrealist or dada or Cut Up text than anything resembling an intelligible story. Much less an average one, to say nothing of a good one.

 

[Dausuul]

Me too. I don't think AI written things will be that "good", but what they WILL be is "average"

Not today, it won't. What it will be is an object lesson in what is required to produce even crappy formulaic TV.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I look forward to the day where I can ask an AI agent to go look up a bunch of data sets and assemble it into legible text or, better yet, bullet points or even a spreadsheet and associated line graph, but that's likely years away still.

It's already at the point where you can take a 37 page scientific or business PDF and press a button to tell your Edge browser to summarize the key points for you, or to contrast it with another paper and summarize the differences for you in table format.

Does it misunderstand parts of the paper sometimes? I doubt it not, so it will still pay to read the paper itself w/rt any important points. But for deciding whether it's worth my time to read a 37 page scientific or business paper it sounds great. I can't explain why I'm not using it today except that I'm used to Chrome and habits are hard to change...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

During a writer's strike in the 1980s, they made a new Mission Impossible series by recycling the old scripts from the original.

That's not as crazy as it sounds. It's basically the lifeblood of live theater. People love seeing a new production of Pirates of Penzance, Into the Woods, West Side Story, or Les Miserables, done with new actors/singers/dancersbut the same script.

As long as they're good actors/singers/dancers that is. With a good choreographer and a good director.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's already at the point where you can take a 37 page scientific or business PDF and press a button to tell your Edge browser to summarize the key points for you, or to contrast it with another paper and summarize the differences for you in table format.

I'm not denying there are some useful things it does now. But if you asked an AI to answer a question about that scientific concept without limiting it to that paper, you'd get hallucinatory nonsense.

 

[Ryujin]

Is the world really ready for Beat Poetry Prime Time?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm not denying there are some useful things it does now. But if you asked an AI to answer a question about that scientific concept without limiting it to that paper, you'd get hallucinatory nonsense.

You're not wrong. I just wanted to make sure you weren't missing out on a useful tool, since it sounded like you were interested in one.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You're not wrong. I just wanted to make sure you weren't missing out on a useful tool, since it sounded like you were interested in one.

I appreciate that. My work would actually benefit from a software agent that could do reliable research for me, which is still a ways off.