A high-profile dispute between Scarlett Johansson and the maker of ChatGPT has brought the subject of AI voices to the fore, but many others in the entertainment industry are affected too. Jennifer Hale and Linsay Rousseau say fair treatment for voice actors is important. (May 23, 2024)
from The Canadian Press
This commentary is from labor disputes last year, I wanted to post it here so that people would remember whose jobs they are trying to steal by pushing fake ai VO. We don’t have to push corpo propaganda here. This is our space, err, [Chris Remington, alyaza [they/she], TheRtRevKaiser, gyrfalcon, rs5th, coldredlight, Leigh, TheRtRevKaiser]'s space. I don’t think any of them are corporations, but maybe I am wrong?
Pushing AI propaganda is a bad move for infinite reasons, here are four:
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it’s usually an attack on workers
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the industry steals directly from artists
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these companies are massive polluters/ emitters
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it makes you look like a rube
*edit 1 According to the laws of debate, one of you must reveal whichever podcast has you parroting comparisons of VO artists to horse workers *edit 2 Horse husbandry is also a major craft and fine art that ought not be mocked, whether or not it is useful to capitalists
Thanks for your comments. Say, what industry do you work in? How’s your retirement fund looking?
I automate business processes across multiple industries (not using AI currently)
My retirement fund looks crap, I’m worried about all of this too but it’s still a terrible idea to try to retain a job when it’s no longer necessary. Just tax the company a little bit less than they saved, and pay people to go enjoy their lives.
The problem is that this isn’t happening. Instead it’s greedy board members trying to find ways to exclude every creative artist so that they can hoard all of the wealth for themselves.
Marx predicted that automation would allow the worker to live a more leisurely life when they were maintaining the machines, vs doing the work manually. This is a nice premise, but it turned out to be wrong. Instead, the workers get replaced entirely and third parties come in to occasionally fix and maintain those machines. Automation is not a bad thing by any stretch, but the point of creative work is to retain humanity and emotion. Using AI voices and artwork is counter to that. At that point it’s no longer artwork and is simply a husk to drive revenue and nothing else. If we replace humans with AI, where does it stop? Why not throw all the creatives out and have AI write the script, storyboard, edit, etc? Mindless entertainment on autopilot sounds miserable.
I think you just identified the actual problem, while shying away from identifying it as such. People shouldn’t take issue with ai, they should have issues with capitalism.
IMHO, the point of creative work can be debated, and you’re more than welcome to only be interested in non-ai work, but obviously that differs person to person. Some people might think that creative work is there to be enjoyed and if it brings joy then it’s valid. Plenty of people can enjoy AI work, even if you’re not one of them.
If what you’re fighting for is jobs for creatives, then I think it’s a bad argument. Nobody should be fighting for more things for capitalism to demand from anyone. Creatives should do their work separate and apart from the threat of capitalism, like everyone else. Anti-AI rhetoric serves to make people look like luddites while distracting from the actual problem - capitalism.
This is it. People keep blaming the literal lifeless machines for the choices of the capitalists masters. No bro, AI is not replacing you. Your boss is replacing you, if it weren’t AI it would be anything else that saves them a buck.
The problem at its core is definitely capitalism. That said, AI itself is nothing more than a massive plagiarism machine that is extremely cost-prohibitive to run, which means the only ones that control it and have a say are the ones with the most money. There’s a space for ethical AI that isn’t trained haphazardly on copyrighted works, but what we have today in the mainstream is not that.
As much as I personally hate building anything with AI (programmer that has had to build tools that use it), I don’t hate the concept of AI itself. I hate the fact that the people with the most money to innovate with it are churning out the most boring products so they can go to market faster, while also burning the planet down in the process.
It’s only not happening because companies aren’t going to do it on their own, the government needs to force it to happen, and the people need to force the government.
Yeah the current admin, at least in the US, ain’t enforcing that lol. They’re all in on AI’ifying everything in sight. AI is a hellscape in the hands of capitalists.