Hollywood unions urged to educate themselves by expert 'AI won't take your job'

As the SAG-AFTRA strike nears the one-month mark, with the Writers Guild of America entering its 14th week on the picket lines, Artificial Intelligence revenue expert Jeff Pedowitz had an urgent warning for the unions and studios alike as he revealed AI in Hollywood is here to stay. 

Jeff cautioned in order for the two sides of the entertainment industry to create a lasting agreement satisfying both of them, they will need to educate themselves far more on the technology itself.

He told Daily Express US: “It’s easy to be afraid of something you don’t understand.

“You’re not going to replace the creative force of human beings coming together to produce a work of art.”

He emphasized AI won’t be taking over actors’ jobs completely, at least not in the near future, as the current limitations behind even the most advanced models require creative human input. 

He explained: “None of these tools and platforms can handle sophistication, context, they don’t have an emotional creative capability. One of the words in GPT, for Chat GPT, is 'transformer'. 

“It’s really good at taking someone’s creative input and transforming it into some type of output at a scale, it’s not going to sit there on its own and create things.”

This is why the tech expert is urging both sides of the Hollywood picket lines to properly educate themselves on AI, which will hopefully help them bring “something actionable to the table” to stand the test of time against the ever-evolving technologies. 

Some of the more shocking claims to have risen amid the strikes are background actors could be paid for a single day's work only for their likeness to be scanned into an AI model and then used throughout production and beyond, potentially without their knowledge or consent. 

Jeff revealed there is no real legislature actually preventing AI from being used like this and admitted: “The capability is there right now today.”

He advised artists across the entertainment industry, and any other sectors who may feel threatened by AI, need to “understand how to use AI as part of their different jobs” rather than trying to shun it. 

While he admitted he is a bit of an optimist, Jeff assured “AI is not going to destroy the world”, revealing there are plenty of ways creatives can implement it without being replaced by it.

Jeff explained: “Casting; you can use AI to analyze an actor’s past performances, how the audience reacted, box office returns and that can help you identify suitability for a particular role. It can be used for content creation, it can help with script creation, animation. 

“AI could analyze the story over the past five seasons, reveal the plot holes and give you options on how to close them.”

With the progression of technology, Jeff believes very soon Hollywood will have graduates in AI-focused animation design or voice actors that have honed their skills to be the mouthpiece of AI characters. 

Jeff also revealed that this could be a time of incredible growth for independent artists and productions, especially as many of them have been allowed to continue working through the strikes. 

He added: “We see college students all the time on a shoestring budget making movies and getting them out there so why couldn’t that continue? With help from AI, some of that could be done to scale that allows them to entertain audiences at a fraction of the cost. 

“I think we’re going to see even more of that and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a movie version of Sound Cloud.”