Just FYI, the CEO of Fable Studios is one Edward Saatchi. His father is Maurice Saatchi whose advertising agency was partially responsible for ten years of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher. The family absolutely has previous with union bashing.
I remember how, years ago, an AI was asked to write a script for a Batman comic book, given a bunch of real comic issues as its learning input. The resulting script was horribly stilted, and hilarious to read. It was popular enough that an artist turned it into an actual comic book.
Today’s AIs have come a long way.
Edit: just out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to “write a Batman comic book script, with The Joker as the villain”. That’s it. No other input.
What came out was far less stilted than the one mentioned above, but bare-bones, extremely generic, and boring. The real Batman writers have little to fear at the moment.
When the printing press came out during the Ottoman Empire, those who wrote handwritten books started a rebellion. Today, there is no professional group that writes by handwriting. There will always be anti-AI protests. But if a technology has emerged that makes a job cheaper and faster, you can’t avoid it. I recommend that you eliminate the professions that will disappear when directing professions for your children.
In a world where you must work, making jobs disappear is a death sentence. And don’t you start babbling about “new jobs being made”. There’s no guarantee they’ll pay as much and be as available as the ones lost. AI is not a thing to look forward to, judgning by how it’s used. It probably could’ve been used for good but tech millionaires aren’t good people.
Agree, AI is going to extrapolate. As AI becomes more capable it will replace more jobs. At the limit there will be zero jobs for human beings. So what happens then? The economy will no longer function. Even the argument that new technology creates new jobs falls down because AI could eventually design and build itself along with any other machine that’s needed. We’ll be wards of our technology, but it won’t even be ours anymore. AI will be in control.
Some like to say people concerned about jobs lost to mechanization are just reacting to some kind of irrational fear and are failing to understand progress. However there is some rationality there. If you take mechanization to the limit it could upset our society at the least, or at worst cause our extinction.
They say pretty clearly in their Twatter post that they are not the IP holders and the episode is for research only, so I seriously doubt Trey and Matt will care.
Likely worst case they get a cease and desist to take it down, so they do.
We think the timing is correct — we are right in the middle of the biggest strike in 60 years, by releasing the research (but not the ability for anyone to create episodes of protected IP) we hope [for] the Guilds in Hollywood to negotiate strong, strong, strong protections that producers cannot use AI tools without the express permission of artists. Frankly the IP holders also need to figure out how to negotiate with AI chatbot companies who are profiting from their work.
And what’s the problem here? They aren’t trying to profit off this tech here, they’re building a stronger case for the strike. Did the writers of this article read their source material?
"Fable started in 2018 as a spinoff from Facebook’s Oculus (how times have changed since then), working on VR films — a medium that never really took off. Now it has seemingly pivoted to AI, "
I wonder how much of the ai hype is just huge investments into hardware, looking for profits.
‘Animate’ is a generous term here… there’s no animation beyond a simple idle animation, lips and eyes. Other then that every character is just frozen in place.
I took a look and it’s honestly a lot further along than I was expecting in terms of capability. In all honesty, for low level conent this is already surpassing the minimum necessary and I can already imagine greedy, low effort art thieves going all in on these and jaming out completely shows. And I expect people will watch them, or at least tolerate some of them.
I'm rather impressed by how coherent it was. It had themes, distinct characters, a plot arc, and so forth. And some very nice meta humor. I don't know how much of this comes entirely out of the LLM scriptwriter and how much was prompted in, but even assuming that this was done from a human-created outline it's still a big step.
Its so wooden and all the jokes replaced with generalized statements. Did you actually watch it? Most low grade Youtube content knocks this out of the park.
The only thing these media companies will be doing by replacing a single writer with AI is making their content closer to the static noise floor of content that comes out of Youtube and similar sites already.
Ugh I’ve left autoplay on other some science videos while indie other stuff and it took me a long while before I realized it had progressed to ai jargon space videos. So fucking annoying
My thinking is that from a studio’s perspective it may be like a proof of concept that AI can get close enough to do what they care about make a passable imitation that gets buts in seats that will generate ad revenue or ticket sales. Fundamentally they aren’t really concerned about producing quality material as long as it sells, so if the AI can get them to something kind of good its likely worth their attention. I think that’s what writers and actors are concerned about and that is why even an unfunny south park episode is a threat. Fable can say their work is research all day long but their goal can easily change the second a studio shows up with a check in hand.
Also it is not clear here is how much human editing and tweaking was done after the AI was finished with it’s part. I suspect people kind of helped the AI get to a final product, but without them disclosing their procedure it’s hard to know.
You are making the same mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to AI, which is looking at the status quo as a snapshot rather than a change over time.
There are a few fields where there’s capped demand so extra supply would mean less humans.
But I think people will be surprised by just how much of our economy is capped by supply, and what happens to niche demand as supply rapidly increases.
The people most in trouble are the ones that really suck at what they do, and whose only job security is constrained supply.
But at the same time, lowering transactional costs (in the sense of the essay “the nature of the firm”) will mean a lot more opportunities for small and medium entrepreneurship around passion side gigs suddenly being economically viable as full time gigs.
In reality, the groups most screwed long term here are going to be larger corporations who lose the advantages of scale but are still weighed down by the hindrance of slow moving bureaucracy.
I think you’re making the same mistake as people who thought self-driving cars would be here 5 years ago. You can’t just extrapolate out technological progress. The relatively easy things get solved first and relatively quickly but we may need a decade to solve some of the most challenging scenarios.
Self driving cars were here five years ago, which is when Waymo first had driverless cars on roads. Tesla had a wide release of FSD ‘Beta’ three years ago.
And there’s a gulf of a difference on the speed at which hardware that has an 8 year average refresh cycle grows in a market and software that can reach a hundred million users in 3 months.
You’re right. We all love our fully self-driving cars and by 2026, chatbots will write longform narratives so beautifully, we won’t even need cars because we’ll all be transported anywhere we want to go by the magic of books.
Thanks! Clips were dull and weird. The first clip felt like “insert name here” material. The longer episode everyone just stares straight ahead and speaks in monotone. I have to wonder how much the material was “massaged” or edited to get the final result.
I'm not so sure. There were some bits where there was simply stage directions or general descriptions of things happening, like "(Mett Porker makes some racist jokes)", with the characters just standing there staring instead of doing what was described. That looks bad, but suggests to me that very little human touch-up was done to the output. Those would have been obvious and easy for a human to fix if there was a human touch intervening any of this.
I wouldn't be surprised if the AI was provided with a paragraph or so of prompting telling it what sort of episode to generate, and then it just let fly and we got this.
I almost feel like the AI proposal was a form of ‘dead cat’ strategy; while everyone is understandably angry about AI and fixated on that, no-one is talking about the actual issue that kicked all this off (the share of residual royalty payments)
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