What Hollywood thinks about existential AI warnings

“We bargained for and achieved enforceable, meaningful guardrails around how this technology can be implemented by the major employers in our industry,” Crabtree-Ireland explained. “That doesn’t include companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google directly, but it does encompass all of the companies who have built up businesses around the creation of professional level entertainment content in the United States.”

Though Crabtree-Ireland believes we “should be concerned about the broader societal and social implications of AI,” he also thinks that some of the warnings about the technology being an extinction-level threat could potentially be hyperbole and overblown. Doomerism has become one of the more common ways that AI companies generate buzz around their products, but the fact that Coxon left Anthropic to sound the alarm has given Crabtree-Ireland pause. Hearing the message from “the CEOs of these companies or the billionaires who’ve made their billions off of doing the exact thing that they’re now warning us might not be good,” has left him unsure “what to trust or what to believe.” But he acknowledged that Coxon was able to achieve “traction with the public.”

“The recklessness of the tech oligarchs pushing AI on our society has been matched only by their rampant dishonesty.”

Getting people to believe that SAG-AFTRA’s fears about AI should be taken seriously was one of the union’s major goals when its members voted to strike. The key to doing that, Crabtree-Ireland told me, was leading the strike with a focused message that clearly laid out to the public what was at stake and steps that could be taken to prevent worst case scenarios. If not for that, Crabtree-Ireland thinks that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) might not have agreed to some of the union’s demands like requiring that studios gain permission and compensate actors for the use of their AI-generated replicas. “If that principle hadn’t been established, I think the economic incentive to use replication and to replace human performances would have been much stronger” and “would have resulted in a much greater and faster adoption of digital replication.” Had the protections not been codified, Crabtree-Ireland is confident that entertainment workers would be in a much more dire position now.

Writers Guild of America East (WGAE) executive director Sam Wheeler was much more pointed in his condemnation of the “tech oligarchs pushing AI on our society” whose recklessness “has been matched only by their rampant dishonesty.” But while Wheeler finds it hard to take AI companies’ warnings at face value, he noted that the WGAE “has long warned that unregulated artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to workers, to our democracy, and to the world.”

“Guild members have bargained meaningful AI protections into their contracts; in 2023 WGA members spent 148 days on strike before the film and television studios agreed to real safeguards for film and television writers,” Wheeler said. “But collective bargaining is not a replacement for government regulation, and we are grateful to states like New York that continue to enact meaningful regulations in the absence of federal action.”

Wheeler listed the disempowerment of workers, the degradation of the internet, the spread of disinformation, and increasing energy costs as some of the tangible societal harms AI has exacerbated. He urged policymakers not to be distracted by AI companies’ claims of ushering in an apocalypse because the real issue at hand is people behaving irresponsibly.

“These harms are the result of decisions made by human beings,” Wheeler insisted. “The WGAE believes that addressing those concrete harms and holding AI companies and their executives liable for the destruction their products cause is the surest way to safeguard against any worst-case scenarios.”

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