And The Oscar Goes To? AI

Article #8

**This is Part 3 of a 3 part series of articles on the harsh realities of making money as an actor. Feel free to dive in to Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy!**

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“Foreman says, ‘These jobs are goin’ boys and they ain’t coming back.’”

Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown

Viva La Luddites

Have you ever been called a Luddite?

I’ve been called a lot worse.

If you have, at worst, you’re maybe guilty of still using a Nokia 3210 (Snake anyone?).

Over two hundred years ago, it meant something else entirely.

In early April of 1812, on a barren plot of land in North East England, around 150 men, masked and armed up to the gills with pistols, hammers, you name it, are huddled together.

Their nervous attention is centred around their fiery young leader, George Mellor. His gaze is fixed on Rawfolds Mill, a factory owned by a wealthy businessman called William Cartwright. Rawfolds Mill has just introduced a pioneering first on the factory floor – a machine. A new type of power loom that can do the work of four skilled weavers.

Since then, unemployment among these Yorkshire men has only gone one way: up.

So, what were these brazen young bucks going to do about it?

Their options were limited. Labour unions were outlawed back then, so industrial action was out of the question. So, they opted for just the action bit.

They declared all-out war on Cartwright and his loom machines.

They called themselves the Luddites, inspired by the legend of Ned Ludd who was supposed to have smashed up two looms in a fit of rage 30 odd years before.

On a cool April nite, Mellor and company are masked, armed and seething. Under a blanket of thick northeastern darkness, they descend on Rawfold’s Mill to unleash hell. But like every good line manager, William Cartwright is one step ahead. He’s hired a heap of soldiers who are lurking in the shadows with their finger on the trigger.

The battle of Rawfold’s Mill wasn’t exactly Custer’s Last Stand. In under the half hour, bullets whizzed in all directions, two men had died and Mellor and his not-so-merry men went backward quicker than they came forward.

They might have been bloody and bruised, but they were undeterred. When another Mill owner, William Horsfall, was gunned down by Mellor two weeks later, the Luddite rebellion was up and running.

Yorkshire’s rage against the machine was in full swing.

Unhuman Intelligence

I don’t know about you, but I’m hearing an awful lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately. Is it just me or does it always seem like there’s always some existential threat over the horizon ready to clickbait the bejaysus out of us?

If it’s not robots, it’s climate change, if it’s not climate change it’s big pharma. If it’s not big pharma, it’s the Donald.

And another thing - what exactly is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

According to the Harvard Business Review there is ‘Strong AI’ and ‘Weak AI’.

Strong AI is tech that is indistinguishable from human behaviour with a genuine capacity for simulating human reasoning. This is the existential, Will Smith fighting the robots to save the world, kind of stuff.

Weak AI is where a computer system is able to perform tasks traditionally handled by people. So, rather than you and me crouched over the phone creating playlists, Spotify will do it for us, because Spotify knows what we like better than you and I know what we like.

Ever heard of Ant Financial?

Me neither, but in 2019, just five years after Ant Financial Services group was launched, the number of customers using its services passed the one billion mark.

The company serves, on average, 10 times as many customers as the largest U.S. banks with less than one tenth the number of employees. Its employee headcount is low because there are no humans in its ‘critical path’ of operating activities.

No manager approving loans, no smooth-talking financial advisors in a three-for-one TM Lewin shirt. Sure, they designed the software that made the algorithms work (they were spun out of Alibaba - the Amazon of the east) but once that heavy lifting is done, the central system runs the show.

Similar central ‘decision factories’ run millions of daily ad auctions at Google. The algorithm sets the price of golf balls and gazebos on Amazon, decide which cars offer rides on Uber and even cleans the floors in some Walmart stores.

When Uber look for a new CEO, they want someone who understands data. They couldn’t care less whether you’ve ever driven a cab or not. Or if you even have a drivers license.

You name a dozen sectors – from shipping to retail to health to financial services – and what binds them is the similarity of their technical foundations. And those foundations will employ common methods and tools in their ‘critical paths’.

Ant Financial, Alibaba and Amazon are into everything from healthcare to financial services to credit scoring. I mean, I remember when Jeff Bezos just flogged books and CD’s.

And then there’s generative AI.

Now, that’s when the craic really starts.

First to Fall

“This wholly experience of being human will be handed over to the machines and the 8 billionaires that own them. So if we lose that battle in the strike our industry will be the first of many to fall, including the way we treat medical patients to the way we fight wars. And disconnection paves the way for atrocities.”

Those were the words of actor Peter Sarsgaard during his acceptance speech at the Venice Film Festival for the Best Actor award. When it comes to awards I’m with Seinfeld, but fair play to Peter for winning. If they called my name out, sure I’d be up there reeking of cava, giving it my best Joe Connolly, sobbing like a hungry infant, before being dragged off stage for boring the holes of the poor unfortunates having no choice but to listen to me.

Actors are my tribe. But f*ck me we can be a dramatic shower and think we’re the only workforce who suffers.

And I hate to break it to ya Peter, me oul flower, but actors won’t be the first to fall - the revolution is in full bloom already.

Actors are freelancers. As are directors, stuntmen, make-up artists, casting directors, assistant directors, the lighting guy, the sound guy, the coffee guy.

And so too are freelance copywriters, virtual assistants, illustrators, call centre operators, interpreters, or just about anyone keeping the wolf from the gate with work they get on Fiverr, or any other platform.

As detailed by Andrew Deck in his brilliant article on the Rise of AI, there is a global labour force at the frontline of the ‘generative AI’ revolution.

Take Wu Dayu (35), a marketing designer living in Shenzen, China.

Wu Dayu’s Shenzhen-based design studio creates promotional materials for online fashion stores. Previously, a photo-shoot required a model, make-up artist, photographer, and a venue. Producing a catalogue of images featuring six sets of clothes would cost around $3,500, he told Rest of World.

But since Wu switched it up and started using generative AI in March, the same work can be completed in a day, with a crew of 2 people and a cost of $140.

Source: The Rise of AI: The Workers at the Frontline of the AI Revolution (Andrew Deck/Rest of World/2023)

Sure, some high-end brands want the real deal. But for small to medium-sized fashion brands, the savings are just too good to ignore. Last April, Wu laid of 60% of his staff.

I mean, would you splash out $3,500 big ones if you thought you’d get away with $140?

So, Wu Dayu’s eagle-eyed photography eye hasn’t been replaced by a robot. But he’s working alongside one and he needs fewer people.

And that’s just one quick example. Deck’s article also profiles Abisoye Otusanya-Azzan (29), a copywriter living in Lagos, Nigeria, who has to get to grips with ChatGPT and fast.

Or Santiago Bautista González (31), an illustrator living in Guadalajara, Mexico, who saw his monthly income drop by 30% in the blink of an eye, because visual generative AI tools like Midjourney started eating his lunch. So, he had to adapt, or starve. He adapted.

Release the Bots

“We will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots.”

These were the words of Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston talking at a union rally in Times Square in July during the SAG-AFTRA actors strike, a strike which also included writers - a first in sixty years.

So will actors be replaced by robots?

One of my mates reckons R2-D2 is ten times the actor I’ll ever be.

But AI-generated avatars that look, move and sound like Cillian Murphy are closer than we think. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern nearly pulled the wool over her colleagues’ faces with her AI-generated one.

So, maybe Cranston has a point. And what’s to stop an algorithm from ‘scrapping’ your image, or your ‘likeness’ and sticking it into a movie, using it in the background, or as the basis of a character in a video game?

Well, nothing really.

“Hey, my son just shot you!”

That’s how actor Eric Passoja found out his face was used in an online video game that, to date, has grossed about $1 billion dollars. A call from a mate.

Eric did receive a fee for a video game in which he played a ‘Belgian Geneticist’. He had no idea his likeness had been used in another game. Until his mate called him.

Source: Eric Passoja Facebook post, July 16, 2023.

Eric gets a big fat zero from a billion dollar beast.

I’m no Alan Turing, but those sums make no sense to me.

Granted it would be pretty tricky to put Leonardo DiCaprio’s face up there without someone noticing and his very well-paid lawyers getting all riled up. But Eric doesn’t have that same luxury.

So, let’s not kid ourselves comrade - it’s the wild west out there for AI at the minute.

But the west got a a little, just a little, less wild.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) agreed a deal with the studios a couple of days back. The deal is valid for three years. Among other things, it puts some basic parameters around the use of AI:

(i) AI can’t write or rewrite literary material and AI-generated material will not be considered source material, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights;

(ii) A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g. ChatGPT) when performing writing services;

(iii) The Company must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material;

(iv) The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited.

As I type, the actors union, SAG-AFTRA, are still on the picket line.

But it’s a start. And that’s half the battle.

Maybe, another way of thinking about it is this: rather than who is doing what - who actually owns what?

Colm Tobin had an interesting take on it when he spoke to Edel Coffey of the Irish Times recently.

“St Colmcille copied a manuscript and everybody said, ‘that’s great, thank you’, but he said, ‘No, no, I’m taking my copy away’. And there was this enormous conference and a big monk had to make the decision ‘Who owns the copy?’, and the monk said, ‘To the cow its calf,’ meaning the monastery that owns the original owns the copy.

If you own something, it’s your right to use it right? And if you’re not using it, you have a level of control over who else gets to use it, right?

Not exactly.

The thing about generative AI text platforms, like ChatGPT, is in order to spit out coherent sentences they need to be ‘trained’ on huge quantities of data. And we’re not talking just trawling the usual suspects on the internet, like Wikipedia. We’re talking huge datasets and often pirated ones, or ‘shadow libraries’ – basically a vast ocean of pirated text.

As Alex Reisner outlined in The Atlantic in August, the writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden filed a lawsuit in California, alleging that those bastions of virtue at Meta violated copyright laws.

And Meta did that by using a dataset called ‘Book3’ to train LLaMA - a large language model that can generate text by mimicking the word patterns it finds in sample texts.

Mind you, Meta weren’t the only ones with their hand in the cookie jar. Bloomberg were at it too. And you can be sure the suspects line-up doesn’t stop there.

Depending on who you listen to, ‘Book3’ has upward of 170,000 books in its dataset. Either way, it’s a truckload of data. Tóibín is one of many Irish writers whose work has been reported to have been used in ‘Book3’ without express permission.

I’m no legal eagle, but the copyright legal tekkers are a bit sketchy here. It basically comes down to ‘fair-use’. Rebecca Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard, told Alex Resiner that the law was “unsettled” when it came to fair use cases involving unauthorized material. There’s no strong precedent to guide which side a judge might favour in a courtroom.

But one man’s copy and paste job is another man’s work of art. After all, open source software has been invaluable since the 1980’s. Making sure it’s not just Bill Gates that calls the shots over the web browser we use.

Yet, lines of code on a screen are one thing. Lines of words on a page are another.

Paul Murray, currently on the short shortlist for the Booker Prize told Edel Coffey how he felt about it:

“One thing we need to be clear about is that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a misnomer’ he said. “Even words like ‘trained’ and ‘learned’ are misleading. There’s no consciousness at work here. Large language models are just reproducing patterns… my fear would be that, in the long term, AI will do for art what Facebook did for friendship – that the world will be so flooded with fakes that we stop being able to tell what real art even looks like, we forget what the meaning of the original concept even was.

We won’t even look to literature as a means of self-expression or for consolation or as a way of making sense of or celebrating or mourning the crazy flux of reality. It’ll just be another app on our phone, producing a few seconds of distraction.”

Hello Distraction

Aaaah… distraction, my old friend.

Distraction is where it’s at these days. The phones in our pockets are riddled with apps that are meant to keep us doomscrolling for as long as possible, so they can put as much stuff as possible in front of our eyeballs. From gurus to gazebos.

It seems like we’re drowning in content. But the way we value that content is shifting.

Neal Stephenson wrote a pretty out-there science fiction book called Snow Crash in 1992. It introduced several concepts that are part of our everyday lives today.

“My theory is that when we experience art – whether it’s a video game or a Da Vinci painting or a movie – we’re taking in a huge number of micro decisions that were made by artists for particular reasons. In that way, we’re communicating with those artists and that is really important.

Something generated by AI might seem comparable to something prepared by a human, which is why people are so excited. But you’re not having that awareness of communing with the creator.

Remove that and it’s hollow and uninteresting.”

Fill Your Boots

If I want to watch some mindless shit on TV or YouTube, then I can fill my boots all day and all night. Spotify’s DJ X will break it down for me left, right and centre. But if I want an experience, if I want to feel something, then that’s a different ball game – that takes some conscious effort. It even involves leaving the house and looking up.

Mark O’Halloran’s work moves me. It moved me 16 years ago and it still moves me today. And someday, I might even get to meet Mark, chat to him about Garage. Ask him what it was like to work with Tom Murphy. Even ask him what it was like to lose Tom Murphy.

As someone who tries to produce his own work, if I thought I could shave a zero or two off my overhead by using technology, then I’ll be on it like a car bonnet. The very image for this article was generated by Midjourney in seconds flat (using the prompt: ‘laughing robot, tuxedo, red eyes, accepting best actor Oscar, glamour, red carpet, Hollywood’). The power of that thing is just mind-blowing.

And I’m sure the image I used has been generated by scrapping images that are someone else’s hard graft.

Very often, the answer to the big things is in front of our very eyes – like the Detective’s curse. During and after the pandemic, I’ve been fortunate to work in Europe, filming in Budapest on a number of occasions.

I love Budapest. It’s a city steeped in history and character and she’s a real looker. Anyway, on nights off when I had fock all to do, I would go to a comedy club rather than sit in my hotel room. Those clubs were packed to the rafters. I had the pleasure of seeing Victor Pătrăşcan perform and he told me there was a real hunger for comedy right across Europe. People wanted to be in a room with strangers and laugh.

I was that inspired, I got a few like-minded people together and set one up in Transylvania. And, same deal, people want to experience the in-the-moment thing. Maybe it’s just a post-pandemic thing, but there’s a yearning for it. You can see it in the whites of their eyes.

In 2022, Netflix released a stand-up set made by a bot, after feeding it some 400,000 hours of stand-up material. You can watch it here.

And you know what?

I’ve seen worse, let me tell ya.

Maybe in a world of bot output, we’ll value the human output more. Assuming of course, we can tell the difference.

Oh and before I forget, our Yorkshire rebel with a cause, George Mellor, and his rage against ye olde power loom machine…

Well, long story short, within a few weeks Mellor and four other revolutionistas felt the tight squeeze of the hangman’s noose. The rebellion was over.

William Cartwright and his machines had won.

The robots will win too.

But maybe all will not be lost.

When Henry Ford’s grandson, Henry Ford II, was giving labour union leader Walter Reuther a tour of Ford’s shiny new, fully automated car manufacturing plant, he thought he’d have some fun at Reuther’s expense: “Well Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?”

Reuther didn’t blink: “Well Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”