The AI Crocodile Comes for Hollywood

And we're all supposed to care an awful lot.

I had plumb forgotten that the “writers” were on strike. That’s how much I (don’t) pay attention to TV and movies. But then I was reminded when the actors decided they were going on strike as well. And Fran Drescher, of Nanny fame, as the head of SAG is leading the charge.

Look, I know that most actors in Hollywood (and outside it) work hard for not much money. Many have second jobs (or third jobs). But that caveat aside? Oh, my, where to begin . . .

The actors basically have the same complaints the writers do, according to ABCNews: streaming has cut down on revenue and AI is a threat to their continued employment, one they want contractual restraints put on.

I started writing this being a bit snippy about Ms. Drescher, but I discovered that she was actually against vaccine mandates and all the crazy COVID “safety” protocols. Her Twitter feed is mostly health (I guess she’s a cancer survivor). She’s not overtly political.

And I kind of admire her for this:

But I still can’t help but roll my eyes at the arrogance in her speech, as if she doesn’t actually understand the general perception of Hollywood these days and hasn’t crawled down from her red-carpeted ivory tower to visit the peasants in a very long while:

It’s really important that this negotiation be covered because the eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labor are upon us. What happens here is important because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor. By means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.

The day of this strike, tweets like the following started trending under the hashtag #GeneralStrike.

Only on Twitter could anyone assume that most people can afford to walk off their jobs . . .

But that is Fran Drescher’s attitude: Hollywood is striking to bring attention to to the plight of all workers. However, with all due respect, that’s back-assward. This undercutting of actual laborers and the real working class has already happened. They’ve been sabotaged by outsourcing, immigration, and automation. That sabotage has been going on for decades. And up until now, has Hollywood noticed in any meaningful way?

Not one bit that I can tell.

Hollywood is very great at producing movies that signal virtue: they’ll talk about slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust until you want to claw out your ears and eyes. Climate change is popular topic for them, but you’ll never see a movie about how the push to go “green” also affects the environment or puts an even greater financial strain on the working and middle class.

And immigration? It’s all good, all the time. Think otherwise? Well, here’s a movie about a poor immigrant who’s just struggling to make a better life. You think there are drug dealers and human traffickers along with the economic immigrants? Well, there can’t be. We never made a movie about that. That’s just right-wing propaganda. (Ignore that Sound of Freedom movie. That guy is just a Qanon crazy. Those things don’t happen. “Experts” at Rolling Stone told you so.)

If you’re worried about automation, just make college free. But you like working with your hands? Well, McDonald’s is always hiring. Can you mow my lawn? Hmm, I’d let you but Tito here from Guatemala charges half what you do and he really needs to send money back to his family. What do you mean, you have to pay taxes and both sides of social security? That’s not my problem.

So you think I’m supposed to help you escape your problems for a while? I suppose I can, but there are a few rules: The villains are always white. The Christians are always loons. Growth is social awareness, not personal awareness.

What do you mean you don’t think the movies reflect America? I’m sure wherever you go there’s at least one gay couple, one black person, one Asian, and one Hispanic. There isn’t? Well, there should be. You’ll have to work on that.

You like the movie Gods of Egypt even though the gods are white? Bigot. Oh, here’s a new Snow White where the princess is—checks notes—Latinx. How can she be “snow white” and Latinx? Well, she has to be to pay for past injustices and so little Latinx girls can see themselves and know they too can be a princess. You think that’s shallow. Well, it’s not. It’s just too deep for you to understand. I don’t care that the brothers Grimm were European and they wrote fairytales about white people. They were white supremacists. What do you mean that Europe was all white? Well, you’re lucky we came along. So Snow White is now Latinx and the Little Mermaid is black but Horus should be Egyptian. Those stories are sacred. Yours are not.

I know the tribe featured in the movie The Woman King enslaved other people and sold them, but ignore that fact. And LBJ might have sacrificed the Democrat Party in the South to advance civil rights, but in Selma we had to make him a bad guy. Why? Well, we don’t want to muddy the waters and distract from the issue at hand, which is righting the wrongs of history. By demanding historical accuracy, you’re committing a microaggression. Nuance is a white supremacist concept, along with math and merit. We know, because we read it in The Atlantic.

You see, the entertainment industry has two jobs: (1) cast light upon the issues in a way that brings people together to solve them and (2) provide an escape.

They have failed miserably at both, and they’ve been failing at them for a lot of years. Hollywood is shallow and it lacks creativity, and even when it gets its hands on great source material, it mucks it up because it can’t find it’s way out of its own bubble.¹

Hollywood has been struggling financially for years because of this fact. People don’t want to pay a lot of money to see rehashed remakes where they simply do a “color” or gender swap. They also don’t want to pay a lot of money to be lectured. They’ll just watch it on streaming, so if it’s bad, at least they didn’t pay for it and they can turn it off.

And that brings us to the last point, one well illuminated by an article from Lee Fang’s Substack:

Disney, Paramount Global, Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony, and other major studios are investing and partnering with AI firms to enhance and in some cases replace the work of writers, artists, composers, special effect designers, and even actors.

Generative AI technology was used, for example, throughout the production of Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Oscar award winner. Disney deployed cutting-edge AI technology to modify the appearance of main cast members for the latest Indiana Jones movie, and has used it to simulate the voice of James Earl Jones, who plays Darth Vader, in its Disney+ television streaming show “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

During the investor call, Iger, while speaking to analyst Michael Morris of Guggenheim Securities, hinted at more sweeping shifts. “It's pretty clear that AI developments represent some pretty interesting opportunities for us,” said the Disney chief executive.

Iger declined to go into specifics, but said he’s “bullish about the prospects” of AI, particularly around the creation of new “efficiencies.”

The transformative technology allows a studio executive to mine screenplays of television shows to rapidly generate new scripts with little human input. Generative AI can project artificial images of performers onto the screen with such realistic detail that audiences won’t be able to tell the difference.

So basically they’re looking to phase out workers. Simple as that. Warm bodies cost money, especially when they are little more than, well, warm bodies who regurgitate past works with a new “woke” spin.

This phasing out of the American worker has been happening everywhere. But now the crocodile has come for Hollywood. Just because the threat is AI and streaming rather than immigrants, outsourcing, and automation doesn’t really make a difference. It’s a chopping block, and it’s the writers and actors turn.

And from an outside-Hollywood point of view, I’m not sure that an AI that can “rapidly generate new scripts with little human input” while “project[ing] artificial images of performers onto the screen with such realistic detail that audiences won’t be able to tell the difference” is really going to serve the customer (that would be the rest of us) any worse than a nepotistic, unimaginative, narrative-driven warm-bodied (but narrow-minded) Hollywood does. Will we out here notice the difference? Can quality actually slip?

And if you want to know the truth, I think that’s exactly what the writers and actors are worried about: that they can very easily be replaced and no one will care because the quality will be the same (or better, if the scripts they “mine” are from a time before the Ministry of Propaganda took over the City of Angels).

So I suppose it comes down to one question: with all that the American workers have lost, with Midwest towns decimated by fentanyl because the people there are purposeless after the manufacturing left, with immigrants pouring in and willing to work off the books while still pulling from a system American-born and visa workers struggle to support, with automation threatening the remaining jobs and the gig economy a way to exploit people, and Hollywood having not only not said a word but thrown fundraiser after fundraiser for their chosen color in the Uniparty game . . .

Am I willing now to suggest we all align ourselves with Hollywood “labor” so once they get what they want, they can go back to spitting on us (because you know they won’t learn)?

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I rewrote this a few times. It was getting too serious. I really do wish these people the best of luck, but karma’s a bitch. NotFromTexas has been doing a daily update, gathering headlines, waiting for the sky to fall and the world to end because “Hollywood” is on strike. (Just kidding. He’s having fun with it, as we all should.)

Interestingly enough, after I was done, I went onto FoxNews.com and found this little gem:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has led the charge for guardrails on AI in the upper chamber, and says he can devise a regulatory framework to ensure the technology remains innovative while protecting user security and American jobs.

Really think this is a coincidence? Your job, my job, those don’t matter, but when it comes to protecting their PR arm in Hollywood? The Democrats are right there.

1. Books to movies: The Inferno, Revenant, and In the Heart of the Sea to name a few.