I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

aleph_minus_one

archive.is: https://archive.is/m19Zd

mkzet

I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.

ffsoftboiled

Mirrors my own experience doing this type of work (only made it two weeks before I gave up) and my partners. Excellent piece.

amazingamazing

It is interesting to see how all of these folks are out of main work and doing gig work instead, with productions being moved to Canada and other places abroad. I wonder why. All of the strikes?

orsorna

> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.

LogicFailsMe

So... Hollywood... They were an oligarchy of billionaires living off minions living paycheck to paycheck before it was cool... Below the line talent always gets shafted there. And it would all collapse without the minimum viable safety net of the guilds... Musicians seem to be embracing AI as a platform given that's another oligarchy itself. Where's the Robert Rodriguez of AI film-making? We haven't even seen the Ed Wood here yet. Edit: and here we go with the enablers of the overlord status quo again. I'd love to know why people think Hollywood's effective caste system is worth preserving. You don't like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel? Cool, the smarter Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood are much worse and they're the ones that didn't get caught to this day.

Aurornis

I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs. The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience. I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner, or the long rant about not being invited to a Slack channel she needed for the work then later realizing they were in the channel from the start and just missed the required onboarding. There’s a section where we’re supposed to hate a coworker whose only offense is trying to do the job well. Doesn’t sound like a great job, but the article was trying so hard to show this as an “everyone in Hollywood” instead of admitting it was one person’s bumbling misadventure.

bena

I think I understand why she told people not to look up her credits. It seems this may be a case of "I am representative of everyone's experience." Her first credit was in 2008 and then there is a 5 year gap between that and her next credit. Then 8 years between that one and the next. For comparison, I pulled up the crew for The Boys. Most of them have tighter credits. While there is probably some people in her situation. I feel that she also could have written this with the title: "I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Waiting Tables." And this isn't to disparage her. It was always a hard business and getting consistent work was always hard. Even if it is good.

maxglute

IMO AI already doing better creative writing than most hollywood shows, I see myself enjoying premium mediocre slop.

terseus

I understand that it is not easy to relate to the author who pays (or was paying) $150 for a house cleaner, I understand that this is a 1-person history and may be highly biased, I understand the author is motivated to create a story from it. However, if you think that any of the conditions described in the article are acceptable or that this is a fair price to pay for having AI, I think you are a horrible human being and I hope you'll be expelled from civilized society.

gwbas1c

> You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t. I see two problems here: 1: The streaming platforms are filling themselves with slop shows. Maybe not "AI slop," but slop in general. When I browse, I keep seeing lots of shows that I have no desire to watch, and wonder who actually watches them. Every time I open a streaming platform, they keep wanting me to watch a new series that I have no time to watch. 2: It seems there is an over-abundance of screenwriters.

ForHackernews

> Then our managers announced that a “golden batch” of tasks would be released to the most talented, the most special, the royalty of annotators—the folks, we were told, who consistently scored a perfect 5 with an average handling time well below the recommended amount. Shades of Glengarry Glen Ross "These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads, and to you, they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers."

insane_dreamer

If you worked hard to get a degree from a prestigious college, and worked hard to get to the place where your skills were valued and used to generate value (script-writing in this case), and suddenly AI is taking lots of jobs so you're doing AI-review gig work, you'd be angry too. It's the equivalent of losing your job and having to run DoorDash to pay the bills. All the while you're being lied to with promises that this will somehow set you free to "work on your own terms". That's fine if you are gainfully employed and want to earn some extra cash, but not if that's all you have. This is just the next step in the gig economy, which strips away rights and security from employees and hands profits to employers.