AI Will Change Your Job. Can You Change Along With It?
Unions such as the Writers Guild deserve credit for leading the discussion about the best ways to address the risks posed by artificial intelligence.
Sign of the times.
Photographer: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFPArtificial intelligence is going to eliminate jobs — millions of them. The uncertainty surrounds which jobs will be lost, and what kinds of jobs will arise to replace them. Whatever else they achieved with their recently ended strike, Hollywood writers deserve credit for raising these and other important questions about how AI should be used.
One of the reasons for the strike was that writers are afraid their jobs will disappear and their skills devalued. It is a reasonable fear, given the rise of large-language models and Hollywood’s reliance on predictable story lines. One of the sticking points in contract negotiations was how studios would use human writers and how they would credit generative AI.