Currently, Hollywood’s labor unions for writers and actors, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, are on strike, and streaming residuals are one of the leading deal points being negotiated. I’m a proud member of both of these unions and strongly support their demands. But zooming out, so to speak, I think there’s a larger conversation to be had about residuals that go well beyond Hollywood.
Actors, writers, and the rest of us film and television professionals might be some of the first (but not the last) to have our jobs threatened by so-called artificial intelligence — technology that ingests enormous amounts of “training data,” crunches the numbers and spits out new combinations of the data, following the patterns it was trained on.
Tech giants, entertainment giants, and every other profit-hungry giant will soon claim that AI can do human-level work at an astonishingly small fraction of the cost.
However, this claim will hide something, like the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” What’s behind the curtain of AI? The cost of the human labor it took to produce the training data. “Generative AI” cannot generate anything without being trained on massive troves of data it then recombines. Who produces that training data? People do.
And those people deserve residuals.
For example, a new AI program could generate a complete…