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Film Industry

Something’s Coming

January 6, 2025 Film Industry, Geek Alert, General, Psych 101, Tools

Last week, Dwarkesh Patel put words to an uneasy feeling that resonated with me:

I think we’re at what late February 2020 was for Covid, but for AI.

If you can remember back to February 2020, both the media and the general public were still in normal-times mode, discussing Trump’s impeachment, the Democratic primaries and Harvey Weinstein. Epidemiologists recognized that something big and potentially unprecedented was coming, but the news hadn’t yet broken through.

One of the first front-page articles I can find in the NY Times about Covid is from February 22nd, 2020.

image of NY Times front page, with covid story on left edge

Just three weeks later, markets had crashed and schools were closing. The world was upended. Covid had become the context for everything.

Patel foresees a similar pattern with AI:

Every single world leader, every single CEO, every single institution, members of the general public are going to realize pretty soon that the main thing we as a world are dealing with is Covid, or in this case, AI.

By “pretty soon,” I don’t think Patel believes we’re three weeks away from global upheaval. But the timeframes are much shorter than commonly believed — and getting shorter month by month.

Wait, what? And why?

This post is meant to be an explainer for friends and readers who haven’t been paying close attention to what’s been happening in AI. Which is okay! Technology is full of hype and bullshit, which most people should happily ignore.

We’ve seen countless examples of Next Big Things ultimately revealed to be nothing burgers. Many of the promises and perils of AI could meet a similar fate. Patel himself is putting together a media venture focused on AI, so of course he’s going to frame the issue as existential. Wherever there’s billions of dollars being spent, there’s hype and hyperbole, predictions and polemics.

Still — much like with epidemiologists and Covid in February 2020, the folks who deal with AI for a living are pretty sure something big is coming, and sooner than expected.

Something big doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophic; the Covid analogy only goes so far. Indeed, some researchers see AI ushering in a golden age of scientific enlightenment and economic bounty. Others are more pessimistic — realistic, I’d say — warning that we’re in for a bumpy and unpredictable ride, one that’s going to be playing out in a lot of upcoming headlines.

The sky isn’t falling — but it’s worth directing your gaze upwards.

The world of tomorrow, today

Science fiction is becoming science fact much faster than almost anyone anticipated. One way to track this is to ask interested parties how many years it will be before we have artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of doing most human tasks. In 2020, the average estimate was around 50 years. By the end of 2023, it was seven.

chart showing decline from 30 years to 8 years, with dashed lines indicating further declines

Over the past few months, a common prediction has become three years. That’s the end of 2027. Exactly how much AI progress we’ll see by then has become the subject of a recent bet. Of the ten evaluation criteria for the bet, one hits particularly close to home for me:

8) With little or no human involvement, [AI will be able to] write Oscar-caliber screenplays.

As a professional screenwriter and Academy voter, I can’t give you precise delimiters for “Oscar-caliber” versus “pretty good” screenplays. But the larger point is that AI should be able to generate text that feels original, compelling and emotionally honest, both beat-by-beat and over the course of 120 satisfying pages. Very few humans can do that, so will an AI be able to?

A lot of researchers say yes, and by the end of 2027.

I’m skeptical — but that may be a combination of ego preservation and goalpost-moving. It’s not art without struggle, et cetera.

The fact that we’ve moved from the theoretical (“Could AI generate a plausible screenplay?”) to practical (“Should an AI-generated screenplay be eligible for an Oscar?”) in two years is indicative of just how fast things are moving.

So what happened? Basically, AI got smarter much faster than expected.

Warp speed

Some of the acceleration is easy to notice. When large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT debuted at the end of 2022, they felt like a novelty. They generated text and images, but nothing particularly useful, and they frequently “hallucinated,” a polite way of saying made shit up.

If you shrugged and moved on, I get it.

The quality of LLM’s output has improved a lot over the past two years, to the point that real professionals are using them daily. Even in their current state — even if they never get any better — LLMs can disrupt a lot of work, for better and for worse.

An example: Over the holidays, I built two little iOS apps using Cursor, which generates code from plain text using an LLM.

Here’s what I told it as I was starting one app:

I’ll be attaching screen shots to show you what I’m describing.

  1. Main screen is the starting screen upon launching the app. There will be a background image, but you can ignore that for now. There are three buttons. New Game, How to Play, and Credits.
  2. How to Play is reached through the How to Play button on the main screen. The text for that scrolling view is the file in the project how-to-play.txt.

  3. New Game screen is reached through the new game button. It has two pop-up lists. the first chooses from 3 to 20. the second from 1 to 10. Clicking Start takes you into the game. (In the game view, the top-right field should show the players times round, so if you had 3 players and five rounds, it would start with 1/15, then 2/15.

  4. the Setup screen is linked to from the game screen, if they need to make adjustments or restart/quit the game.

Within seconds, it had generated an app I could build and run in Xcode. It’s now installed on my phone. It’s not a commercial app anyone will ever buy, but if it were, this would be a decent prototype.

Using Cursor feels like magic. I’m barely a programmer, but in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, it’s easy to imagine technology like this tripling their productivity. ((Google’s CEO says that more than 25% of their code is already being generated by AI.)) That’s great for the software engineer — unless the company paying them decides they don’t need triple the productivity and will instead just hire one-third the engineers.

The same calculation can be applied to nearly any industry involving knowledge work. If your job can be made more productive by AI, your position is potentially in jeopardy.

That LLMs are getting better at doing actually useful things is notable, but that’s not the main reason timelines are shortening.

Let’s see how clever you really are

To measure how powerful a given AI system is, you need to establish some benchmarks. Existing LLMs easily pass the SAT, the GRE, and most professional certification exams. So researchers must come up with harder and harder questions, ones that won’t be in the model’s training set.

No matter how high you set the bar, the newest systems keep jumping over it. Month after month, each new model does a little better. Then, right before the holidays, OpenAI announced that its o3 system made a huge and unexpected leap:

chart showing o3 performance and cost, both vastly higher

With LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude, we’re used to getting fast and cheap answers. They spit out a text or image in seconds. In contrast, o3 spends considerably more time (and computing power) planning and assessing. It’s a significant change in the paradigm. The o3 approach is slower and more expensive — potentially thousands of dollars per query versus mere pennies — but the results for certain types of questions are dramatically better. For billion-dollar companies, it’s worth it.

Systems like these are particularly good at solving difficult math and computer science problems. And since AI systems themselves are based on math and computer science, today’s model will help build the next generation. This virtuous cycle is a significant reason the timelines keep getting shorter. AI is getting more powerful because AI is getting more powerful.

When and why this will become the major story

In 2020, Covid wasn’t on the front page of the NY Times until its economic and societal impacts were unmistakable. The stock market tanked; hospitals were filling up. Covid became impossible to ignore. Patel’s prediction is the same thing will happen with AI. I agree.

I can imagine many scenarios bringing AI to the front page, none of which involve a robot uprising.

Here are a few topics I expect we’ll see in the headlines over the next three years.

  • Global tensions. As with nuclear technology during the Cold War, big nations worry about falling behind. China has caps on the number of high-performance AI chips it’s allowed to import. Those chips it needs? They’re made in Taiwan. Gulp.
  • Espionage. Corporations spend billions training their models. ((DeepSeek, a Chinese firm, apparently trained their latest LLM for just $6 million, an impressive feat if true.)) Those model weights are incredibly valuable, both to competitors and bad actors.

  • Alignment. This is a term of art for “making sure the AI doesn’t kill us,” and is a major source of concern for professionals working in the field. How do you teach AI to act responsibly, and how do you know it’s not just faking it? AI safety is currently the responsibility of corporations racing to be the first to market. Not ideal!

  • Nationalizing AI. For all three of the reasons above, a nation (say, the U.S.) might decide that it’s a security risk to allow such powerful technology to be controlled by anyone but the government.

  • Spectacular bankruptcy. Several of these companies have massive valuations and questionable governance. It seems likely one or more will fail, which will lead to questions about the worth of the whole AI industry.

  • The economy. The stock market could skyrocket — or tank. Many economists believe AI will lead to productivity gains that will increase GDP, but also, people work jobs to earn money and buy things? That seems important.

  • Labor unrest. Unemployment is one thing, but what happens when entire professions are no longer viable? What’s the point in retraining for a different job if AI could do that one too?

  • Breakthroughs in science and medicine. Once you have one AI as smart as a Nobel prize winner, you can spin up one million of them to work in parallel. New drugs? Miracle cures? Revolutionary technology, like fusion power and quantum computing? Everything seems possible.

  • Environmental impact (bad). When you see articles about the carbon footprint of LLMs, they’re talking about initial training stage. That’s the energy intensive step, but also way smaller than you may be expecting? After that, the carbon impact of each individual query is negligible, on the order of watching a YouTube video. That said, the techniques powering systems like o3 involve using more power to deliver answers, which is why you see Microsoft and others talking about recommissioning nuclear plants. Also, e-waste! All those outdated chips need to be recycled.

  • Environmental impact (good). AI systems excel at science, engineering, and anything involving patterns. Last month, Google’s DeepMind pushed weather forecasting from 10 days to 15 days. Work like this could help us deal with effects of climate change, by improving crop yields and the energy grid, for example.

  • So how freaked out should you be?

    What is an ordinary person supposed to do with the knowledge that the world could suddenly change?

    My best advice is to hold onto your assumptions about the future loosely. Make plans. Live your life. Pay attention to what’s happening, but don’t let it dominate your decision-making. Don’t let uncertainty paralyze you.

    A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. But denial isn’t. I still hear smart colleagues dismissing AI as fancy autocomplete. Sure, fine — but if it can autocomplete a diagnosis more accurately than a trained doctor, we should pay attention.

    It’s reasonable to assume that 2027 will look a lot like 2024. We’ll still have politics and memes and misbehaving celebrities. It’ll be different from today in ways we can’t fully predict. The future, as always, will remain confusing, confounding and unevenly distributed.

    Just like the actual pandemic wasn’t quite Contagion or Outbreak, the arrival of stronger AI won’t closely resemble Her or The Terminator or Leave the World Behind. Rather, it’ll be its own movie of some unspecified genre.

    Which hopefully won’t be written by an AI. We’ll see.

    Thanks to Drew, Nima and other friends for reading an early draft of this post.

    Movies We Haven’t Seen

    March 30, 2024 Film Industry

    I’ve seen 54 out of the 100 films on AFI’s list of [all-time greatest American films](https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies-10th-anniversary-edition/). Of the ones I’ve missed, there are a few I do genuinely want to see. But will my life or career be negatively impacted if I never see Intolerance (1916)? I doubt it.

    In episode 637 of Scriptnotes, Craig and I discuss which movies screenwriters “should” see. That is, of all the movies out there, which ones are most likely to come up in meetings, or be relevant to projects we’re writing in the 2020s?

    Inevitably, one’s viewing is going to be greatly affected by when you were born. Craig and I were both born in the 1970s. Is it realistic or necessary for a screenwriter born in 2000 to have the same breadth of 1980s cinematic knowledge?

    Preparing for the segment, Scriptnotes producer Drew Marquardt and I went through online lists of the 100 best movies for past four decades. Some of the lists were from Rolling Stone, others from IMDb. ((IMDb lists reflect an individual user’s preferences, which is why there’s occasionally a film you’ve never heard of. Still, this is probably better than just looking at the Oscar-nominated films from each year, which can include entries that don’t hold up.)) Drew and I marked which films we’ve never seen.

    Key: John hasn’t seen | Drew hasn’t seen

    Movies of the 1980s

    1. Do the Right Thing
    2. Videodrome
    3. Raging Bull
    4. Blue Velvet
    5. Ran
    6. Shoah
    7. Blade Runner
    8. Stranger Than Paradise
    9. The Thin Blue Line
    10. Raiders of the Lost Ark
    11. Sex, Lies, and Videotape
    12. Come and See
    13. The Thing
    14. Brazil
    15. Die Hard
    16. The Shining
    17. Raising Arizona
    18. Say Anything
    19. Something Wild
    20. Blow Out
    21. Stop Making Sense
    22. An American Werewolf in London
    23. The Right Stuff
    24. Paris, Texas
    25. RoboCop
    26. The King of Comedy
    27. E.T.
    28. The Terminator
    29. This Is Spinal Tap
    30. Elephant
    31. Repo Man
    32. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
    33. They Live
    34. Wings of Desire
    35. Risky Business
    36. Fanny and Alexander
    37. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
    38. The Elephant Man
    39. My Neighbor Totoro
    40. Reds
    41. The Decalogue
    42. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
    43. The Times of Harvey Milk
    44. Mad Max 2
    45. After Hours
    46. Once Upon a Time in America
    47. The Blues Brothers
    48. She’s Gotta Have It
    49. Koyaanisqatsi
    50. Fitzcarraldo
    51. Aliens
    52. Thief
    53. Sophie’s Choice
    54. Roger & Me
    55. My Beautiful Laundrette
    56. Big
    57. Modern Romance
    58. Purple Rain
    59. My Dinner with Andre
    60. Bull Durham
    61. Cutter’s Way
    62. Evil Dead II
    63. Broadcast News
    64. Akira
    65. Back to the Future
    66. The Long Good Friday
    67. Desperately Seeking Susan
    68. Blood Simple
    69. Caddyshack
    70. The Killer
    71. Possession
    72. 48 Hrs.
    73. Ghostbusters
    74. Drugstore Cowboy
    75. Vagabond
    76. Heathers
    77. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
    78. Police Story
    79. Full Metal Jacket
    80. Sweetie
    81. River’s Edge
    82. Hollywood Shuffle
    83. The Little Mermaid
    84. Midnight Run
    85. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
    86. Withnail & I
    87. Atlantic City
    88. The Brother from Another Planet
    89. Amadeus
    90. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    91. The Vanishing
    92. Airplane!
    93. Near Dark
    94. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
    95. Matewan
    96. Scarface
    97. Miracle Mile
    98. The Decline of Western Civilization
    99. Gregory’s Girl
    100. Testament

    Movies of the 1990s

    1. Pulp Fiction
    2. Goodfellas
    3. Fargo
    4. L.A. Confidential
    5. The Big Lebowski
    6. Saving Private Ryan
    7. Fight Club
    8. The Silence of the Lambs
    9. Magnolia
    10. American Beauty
    11. Unforgiven
    12. Se7en
    13. The Shawshank Redemption
    14. Forrest Gump
    15. Heat
    16. Sling Blade
    17. Out of Sight
    18. Dazed and Confused
    19. American History X
    20. Election
    21. Miller’s Crossing
    22. Boogie Nights
    23. Groundhog Day
    24. Schindler’s List
    25. Good Will Hunting
    26. True Romance
    27. The Usual Suspects
    28. Being John Malkovich
    29. Rushmore
    30. Reservoir Dogs
    31. Braveheart
    32. JFK
    33. Ed Wood
    34. Waiting for Guffman
    35. Dances with Wolves
    36. Kingpin
    37. Dumb and Dumber
    38. Clerks
    39. Mallrats
    40. Jackie Brown
    41. Boyz n the Hood
    42. Get Shorty
    43. Jerry Maguire
    44. Bottle Rocket
    45. Rounders
    46. The Matrix
    47. Malcolm X
    48. Quiz Show
    49. Titanic
    50. The Rainmaker
    51. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    52. As Good as It Gets
    53. Barton Fink
    54. Toy Story
    55. Dead Man Walking
    56. Jurassic Park
    57. Dead Man
    58. Toy Story 2
    59. The Sixth Sense
    60. The English Patient
    61. Edward Scissorhands
    62. The Fugitive
    63. Donnie Brasco
    64. Three Kings
    65. The Thin Red Line
    66. Glengarry Glen Ross
    67. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
    68. The Green Mile
    69. Trainspotting
    70. Scent of a Woman
    71. In the Name of the Father
    72. Scream
    73. The Last of the Mohicans
    74. Leaving Las Vegas
    75. The Lion King
    76. Apollo 13
    77. Short Cuts
    78. Aladdin
    79. The Grifters
    80. Beauty and the Beast
    81. Philadelphia
    82. Wag the Dog
    83. Wayne’s World
    84. The Player
    85. My Cousin Vinny
    86. The Truman Show
    87. There’s Something About Mary
    88. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    89. Léon: The Professional
    90. Office Space
    91. Thelma & Louise
    92. The Insider
    93. Nobody’s Fool
    94. Swingers
    95. A Few Good Men
    96. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    97. Chasing Amy
    98. Lone Star
    99. The Fisher King
    100. 12 Monkeys

    Movies of the 2000s

    1. Gladiator
    2. The Dark Knight
    3. Slumdog Millionaire
    4. The Departed
    5. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    6. Pan’s Labyrinth
    7. Blood Diamond
    8. City of God
    9. Finding Nemo
    10. No Country for Old Men
    11. Cinderella Man
    12. V for Vendetta
    13. There Will Be Blood
    14. Donnie Darko
    15. Sin City
    16. Mystic River
    17. 300
    18. Let the Right One In
    19. A Beautiful Mind
    20. Munich
    21. Up
    22. Memento
    23. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    24. The Prestige
    25. WALL·E
    26. Requiem for a Dream
    27. Into the Wild
    28. The Pianist
    29. Inglourious Basterds
    30. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    31. Lost in Translation
    32. The Hurt Locker
    33. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    34. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    35. American Psycho
    36. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    37. Road to Perdition
    38. Walk the Line
    39. The Last Samurai
    40. Million Dollar Baby
    41. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    42. Downfall
    43. Black Hawk Down
    44. Hotel Rwanda
    45. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    46. Eastern Promises
    47. Little Miss Sunshine
    48. The Incredibles
    49. American Gangster
    50. Gran Torino
    51. Zombieland
    52. The Wrestler
    53. Big Fish
    54. Crazy Heart
    55. Doubt
    56. 28 Days Later
    57. Thank You for Smoking
    58. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    59. The Bourne Identity
    60. Taken
    61. Snatch
    62. Casino Royale
    63. The Bourne Ultimatum
    64. Almost Famous
    65. Letters from Iwo Jima
    66. Gangs of New York
    67. Children of Men
    68. The Pursuit of Happyness
    69. Tears of the Sun
    70. Avatar
    71. Collateral
    72. Batman Begins
    73. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    74. The Aviator
    75. Saw
    76. Kung Fu Panda
    77. Ocean’s Eleven
    78. Superbad
    79. Man on Fire
    80. Minority Report
    81. Seven Pounds
    82. Traffic
    83. United 93
    84. The Bourne Supremacy
    85. Monsters, Inc.
    86. Shrek
    87. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    88. Catch Me If You Can
    89. Iron Man
    90. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    91. Training Day
    92. Sunshine
    93. 21 Grams
    94. 3:10 to Yuma
    95. District 9
    96. The Others
    97. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    98. In Bruges
    99. Crash
    100. Shaun of the Dead

    Movies of the 2010s

    1. Parasite
    2. Mad Max: Fury Road
    3. Django Unchained
    4. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    5. La La Land
    6. Dunkirk
    7. Whiplash
    8. The Irishman
    9. Your Name.
    10. Avengers: Endgame
    11. Inception
    12. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    13. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    14. Blade Runner 2049
    15. 1917
    16. Avengers: Infinity War
    17. Locke
    18. Calvary
    19. The Hunt
    20. Interstellar
    21. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
    22. Guardians of the Galaxy
    23. The Hateful Eight
    24. Logan
    25. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    26. Captain America: Civil War
    27. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    28. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    29. Inside Llewyn Davis
    30. Baby Driver
    31. Marriage Story
    32. The Social Network
    33. The Dark Knight Rises
    34. Her
    35. Manchester by the Sea
    36. Knives Out
    37. Confessions
    38. Arrival
    39. Gone Girl
    40. A Silent Voice: The Movie
    41. Ford v Ferrari
    42. A Quiet Place
    43. Nightcrawler
    44. Fruitvale Station
    45. Prisoners
    46. Skyfall
    47. Warrior
    48. Thor: Ragnarok
    49. The Avengers
    50. Joker
    51. Wind River
    52. Frank
    53. Green Book
    54. Deadpool
    55. Spider-Man: Far from Home
    56. Jojo Rabbit
    57. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    58. Deadpool 2
    59. Nocturnal Animals
    60. Kick-Ass
    61. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    62. Gravity
    63. Room
    64. 12 Years a Slave
    65. Inside Out
    66. Toy Story 3
    67. Argo
    68. Moonrise Kingdom
    69. Moonlight
    70. Burning
    71. A Star Is Born
    72. The Great Beauty
    73. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    74. 13 Assassins
    75. Coco
    76. Hell or High Water
    77. The Farewell
    78. The Wind Rises
    79. The Martian
    80. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    81. Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
    82. Get Out
    83. Toy Story 4
    84. Black Swan
    85. Sound of Metal
    86. Dallas Buyers Club
    87. Black Panther
    88. Midnight in Paris
    89. 127 Hours
    90. The Big Short
    91. Sicario
    92. True Grit
    93. The Revenant
    94. Drive
    95. Zootopia
    96. The Wolf of Wall Street
    97. Bridge of Spies
    98. Masquerade
    99. Rush
    100. Weathering with You

    A few thoughts on Sora

    February 16, 2024 Film Industry, Geek Alert, WGA

    Yesterday, OpenAI announced [Sora](https://openai.com/sora), a new product that generates realistic video from text prompts. ((Sora is a great name, btw. It doesn’t mean anything, and doesn’t have any specific connotation, yet feels like something that should exist.)) The examples are remarkable.

    A TV writer friend texted me to ask “is it time to be petrified?”

    I wrote back:

    > I don’t think you need to be petrified. It’s very impressive at creating video in a way that’s like how Dall-E does images. A huge achievement. For pre-viz? Mood reels? Incredible. We’ll see stuff coming out of it used in commercials first.

    > For longer, narrative stuff, there’s a real challenge moving from text generation (gpt-4 putting together something that looks like a script) to “filming” that script with these tools to resemble anything like our movies and television.

    > Writers, directors, actors and crew have a sense of why they’re doing what they’re doing, and what makes sense in this fictitious reality they’re creating. I don’t think you can do that without consciousness, without self-awareness, and if/when AI gets there, stuff like Sora will be the least of our concerns.

    With a night to sleep on it, I think there are a few larger, more immediate concerns. Writers (and humans in general) should be aware of but not petrified by some of the implications of this technology beyond the obvious ones like deepfakes and disinformation.

    1. **Video as input.** Like image generators, this technology can work off of a text prompt. But you can also feed it video and have it change things. Do you want *A Few Good Men*, but with Muppets? Done. Need to [replace Kevin Spacey](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/05/removing-kevin-spacey-from-movie-was-a-business-decision-says-ridley-scott-all-the-money-in-the-world) in a movie? No need to reshoot anything. Just let Sora do it.

    2. **Remake vs. refresh.** Similarly, any existing film or television episode could be “redone” with this technology. In some cases, that could mean a restoration or visual effects refresh, like George Lucas did with Star Wars. Or it could be what we’d consider a remake, where the original writer gets paid. What’s the difference between a refresh and a remake, and who decides?

    3. **Animation vs. live action.** How do we define the video material that comes out of Sora? It can look like live action, but wasn’t filmed with cameras. It can look like animation, but it didn’t come out of an animation process. This matters because while the WGA represents writers of both live action and animation, studios are not currently required to use WGA writers in animation. **We can’t let this technology to be used as an end-run around WGA (and other guild) jurisdiction.**

    4. **Reality engines.** In a [second paper](https://openai.com/research/video-generation-models-as-world-simulators), OpenAI notes that Sora could point to “general purpose simulators of the physical world.” The implications go far beyond any disruptive effects on Hollywood, and are worth a closer look.

    It seems like a long way to go from videos of cute paper craft turtles to The Matrix, but it’s worth taking the progress they’ve made here seriously. In generating video, Sora does a few things that are really difficult, and resemble human developmental milestones.

    Like all models, Sora is predictive, making guesses about what just happened and what happens next. But it feels different because it’s doing this in a 3D space that largely tracks with our lived experience. It remembers objects, even if they’re not on screen at the moment, and recognizes interactions between objects, such as paintbrushes leaving marks on the canvas. ((Not to dive too deeply into theories of human consciousness, but the ability to internally model reality and predict things feel like table stakes.))

    Sora makes mistakes, but the results surprisingly good for a system that wasn’t explicitly trained to do anything other than generate video. Those capabilities could be used to do other things. In a jargon-heavy paragraph, OpenAI notes:

    > Sora is also able to simulate artificial processes — one example is video games. Sora can simultaneously control the player in Minecraft with a basic policy while also rendering the world and its dynamics in high fidelity. These capabilities can be elicited zero-shot by prompting Sora with captions mentioning “Minecraft.”

    Sora “gets” Minecraft because it’s ingested countless hours of Minecraft videos. If it’s able to create a simulation of the game that is indistinguishable from the original, is there really a difference? If it’s able to create a convincing simulation of reality based on the endless video it scapes, what are the implications for “our” reality?

    These are questions for philosophers, sure, but we’re all going to be faced with them sooner than we’d like. Sora and its descendants are going to have an impact beyond the cool video they generate.

    FTC proposes new merger guidelines

    August 21, 2023 Film Industry, News, WGA

    The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have drafted new [merger guidelines](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-doj-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines) outlining how the agencies should approach corporate consolidations.

    Here are the key points:

    1. Mergers should not significantly increase concentration in highly concentrated markets.
    2. Mergers should not eliminate substantial competition between firms.
    3. Mergers should not increase the risk of coordination.
    4. Mergers should not eliminate a potential entrant in a concentrated market.
    5. Mergers should not substantially lessen competition by creating a firm that controls products or services that its rivals may use to compete.
    6. Vertical mergers should not create market structures that foreclose competition.
    7. Mergers should not entrench or extend a dominant position.
    8. Mergers should not further a trend toward concentration.
    9. When a merger is part of a series of multiple acquisitions, the agencies may examine the whole series.
    10. When a merger involves a multi-sided platform, the agencies examine competition between platforms, on a platform, or to displace a platform.
    11. When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers or other sellers.
    12. When an acquisition involves partial ownership or minority interests, the agencies examine its impact on competition.
    13. Mergers should not otherwise substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly.

    These are good principles! Notably, they’re not obsessed with whether a merger is likely to raise prices for consumers. Rather, they look more broadly at how consolidation impacts all the components of an industry.

    The FTC has invited public comment on these draft guidelines. As of today, there are over 1,000 comments. The WGA has encouraged its members to [share their experiences](https://secure.everyaction.com/FsY4lF9SsEmjHM4YWKB7lA2). Citizens working in every industry should write in as well. Mergers affect all of us, and these policies could shape the next few decades.

    I submitted my comment today. Here’s what I wrote.

    —

    I’m a screenwriter and novelist who has seen firsthand the impact of mergers and consolidation in the film and publishing industries. That’s why I’m writing in support of the FTC and DOJ’s Draft Merger Guidelines. We need to revive and rethink antitrust enforcement in this country so that it recognizes consolidation’s impact on workers, sellers, consumers and citizens.

    My work as a screenwriter has found me working for both Disney (including 2019’s *Aladdin*) and what remains of Fox (where I currently have a series in development). I believe Disney should never have been allowed to buy 21st Century Fox in 2019. Not only did it increase concentration and reduce competition for consumers, it did the same for writers. This issue is addressed in Point 11 of your draft guidelines: “When a merger involves competing buyers, the agencies examine whether it may substantially lessen competition for workers or other sellers.”

    When Disney bought Fox, it came at the immediate cost of redundant employees’ jobs. It then created downward pressure on the wages throughout the industry, with one less buyer for the services of writers, directors, actors and crew.

    I can offer a specific example from my own experience. In 2018, Fox brought me in to meet on a high-profile book adaption for their Fox Family division. By the time it came to make my writing deal, the proposed Disney merger was announced and the division wasn’t allowed to pursue any project that might compete with Disney’s own. All of the executives on the project were let go.

    In the process of Hollywood development, projects disappear and executives get fired all the time. What was unique is how this merger broke so many pieces simultaneously, from studio feature films to indies to cable to broadcast television. We should consider not just the immediate negative impact, but also the after effects. Tom Rothman, who used to run Fox’s film division, noted that “Consolidation under giant corporate mandates rarely promotes creative risk-taking. And in the long run, it is always a challenge to compete against horizontal monopolistic power.”

    I also work as an author, with three books published by Macmillan and an upcoming book published by Crown (Penguin Random House). Consolidation in the industry means that 60% of books published in English come from just five publishers, and we nearly dropped to four. They have unprecedented control over the market, limiting options for retailers, authors and readers.

    I’m a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, West, and have served on both its board and negotiating committee. The entertainment industry’s history of unchecked consolidation is a major factor in the strike of 11,500 writers including myself on May 2 against our employers, who collectively negotiate our three year contract as the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). SAG-AFTRA has joined us on strike, their 170,000 members seeking a contract that fairly compensates us for the value we create.

    It is essential that antitrust agencies consider how any future proposed mergers in this industry — such as the long-rumored Apple/Disney deal — would impact writers and other industry workers. It’s not enough to wait and see; antitrust agencies should proactively investigate and announce decisions, so CEOs don’t propose deals that paralyze the industry.

    These Draft Merger Guidelines are the solid principles we need to maintain a vibrant, competitive environment that serves all Americans.

    Thank you for the consideration of my comments.

    —

    You can submit your own comment on the FTC’s [public comment page](https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FTC-2023-0043-0001).

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