Hollywood Workers Strike and AI

Note: The article is on the author’s other social media accounts as well.

Workers and actors in Hollywood are on strike for better working conditions, and guarantee of the right work and pay, among other reasons. AI has the potential to change the world, it is used everywhere now, last time it made this big news was openAI’s chatGPT. ChatGPT threatened the world’s largest search engine, and many people were scared to lose their job profiles and livelihoods.

The use of AI and GPT has been profound in big-screen professions as well, such as in Hollywood. Hollywood movies have started using AI enormously for some time now. The use of AI can be for cinematographed and animated acting sequences to even actor replacement, singing, and special effects. The applications and their effects are not limited to this. Many scenes are AI edited, many sounds are AI created, many action sequences are created with AI, and now AI can use only actors’ images to create a complete scene. The AI can use sound and images of actors to make an entire movie as well.

This is one reason why actors and workers in Hollywood can be unhappy the other reason is workers’ pay and minimum worker’s remuneration. These are two major reasons for the current strike. Regarding AI, AI is here, no invention has gone back ever. These are new developments. Still, the solution needs to be found, as explained in the paragraph below. And regarding minimum worker remuneration, the workers need to sort it out with the management there. All professions are asking for pay rise, as seen in UK, so this seems to be a similar situation. We wish them luck in these talks with their management, apart from that guarantee work for coming years as well, work in proportion to the number of years they worked in these sets.

As with AI, AI has come of its age, but this does not mean actors should not be paid for using their images and voice. The first thing is why not actors be posing in movies rather than AI avatars? Yes, AI in some cases, can do some tasks in a much better way. So why not work in hybrid ways, wherein AI avatars and human actors both work seamlessly in roles? This seems to be the only solution when AI can’t be taken back, given the shine in work with AI and the human actors have full right to work as his/her profile is being used in the movie. The profile includes the image, body mass index, voice, sounds, and so on. Even if AI has come, no one can replace human testing, human acting, and human editing. The more you use AI the more human editing’s that would be required.

Rest it lies with the governments if they want to ban AI toolkits and software, to allow old-style movie making. This seems difficult. But as with time, things change, progress is made and new working styles are developed. The new entries may not be fully open but the old people at work, need to be paid compensation for their work and commitments. Let’s hope for new avenues to open. TV and Netflix series are more options that people can choose. Once again there are many avenues to choose from once this tussle is sorted. There may be many more options that are not part of this article that can be looked into.