The real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders
The studios fought like hell for the right to fire their writers and replace them with chatbots, but that doesn’t mean that the chatbots could do the writers’ jobs.
Think of the bosses who fired their human switchboard operators and replaced them with automated systems that didn’t solve callers’ problems, but rather, merely satisficed them: rather than satisfying callers, they merely suffice.
Studio bosses didn’t think that AI scriptwriters would produce the next Citizen Kane. Instead, they were betting that once an AI could produce a screenplay that wasn’t completely unwatchable, the financial markets would put pressure on every studio to switch to a slurry of satisficing crap, and that we, the obedient “consumers,” would shrug and accept it.
Despite their mustache-twirling and patrician chiding, the real reason the studios are excited about AI is the same as every stock analyst and CEO who’s considering buying an AI enterprise license: they want to fire workers and reallocate their salaries to their shareholders.
-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers
Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)
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Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.
Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.
So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.
This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:
If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:
The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."
Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:
This narrative is especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":
This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control – Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" – was a liar. Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.
But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:
The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:
Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers desperately wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted – I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting half of his advertising spending!
I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:
The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.
AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests – for example, it's great at helping people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God:
Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the same story. This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old. You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden).
In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo – and he's winning.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
They are hemorrhaging a river of cash, but that river’s source is an ocean-sized reservoir of even more cash.
To keep that reservoir full, the AI industry needs to convince fresh rounds of “investors” to give them hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of a multi-trillion-dollar payoff.
That’s where the “AI Safety” story comes in. You know, the tech bros who run around with flashlights under their chins, intoning “ayyyyyy eyeeeee,” and warning us that their plausible sentence generators are only days away from becoming conscious and converting us all into paperclips.
It’s pure criti-hype: “Our technology is so powerful that it endangers the human race, which is why you should both invest in it and use it to replace all of your workers.”
This form of criticism is entirely distinct from the legitimate realm of “AI ethics,” whose emphasis is on how bad AI is at the things that will supposedly generate those promised trillions. Things like bias, low-quality training data, training data attacks, data ordering attacks, adversarial examples, the endless stream of confident lies, and the high degree of supervision they necessitate.
Add to that the exploitative labor pipeline, the environmental damage, and the public safety risks and a very different critique emerges —one that’s grounded in AI’s shortcomings, not the supposed risks arising from its incredible power.
-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers
If the studios can’t use AI to fire writers and replace them with chatbots, they have no reason to shell out millions for enterprise licenses
If the studios can’t use AI to fire writers and replace them with chatbots, they have no reason to shell out millions for enterprise licenses.
And those enterprise licenses are absolutely vital for the AI companies. Mister Market isn’t going to keep pouring billions into Big AIs’ cash reservoirs forever. Eventually, they’re gonna have to rug us, get us to stop talking to each other and start buying things.
When the AI companies inevitably shut off the expensive supply of free amusing chatbot queries, individual writers might pony up a few bucks a month for a throttled trickle of stochastic parrot queries.
But the personal amusement price-tier can’t sustain the incredible burn-rate of AI companies, and it certainly can’t pay off for the suckers who handed billions to the eyeball-snatching would-be evil sorcerers who promised to make them all rich well before they were dissolved into grey goo.
-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers
For the AI sector, a 148 day news-cycle about how AI threatened writers’ jobs was a gift from the heavens.
For the AI sector, a 148 news-cycle about how AI threatened writers’ jobs was a gift from the heavens.
It’s not just that there’s no such thing as bad publicity — it’s that this bad publicity was very good for AI’s narrative of being the most powerful, amazing and transformative technology since fire, or possibly language.
Here’s how that works: “If the writers are convinced that AI can write scripts so well that they will all be out of a job in five years, then you should absolutely invest in AI technology, because it is obviously incredibly powerful.”
And here’s how that works: “If the writers are convinced that AI can write scripts so well that they will all be out of a job in five years, then you should absolutely buy an enterprise site-license so that you, too, can fire all of your workers and replace them with a chatbot.”
The term of art for this kind of bad publicity is criti-hype, wherein a critic is suckered into repeating the booster’s own claims, but as criticism.
-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers
AI hype completely misunderstands the point of science fiction
If the studios can’t use AI to fire writers and replace them with chatbots, they have no reason to shell out millions for enterprise licenses.
Remember, this is the true message of AI: not that it can do amazing things, but that it can shift value from workers to owners.
That story gets wrapped up in the mythology of “technological progress,” as though there is only one way that a technology can be used. Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” was always a demand dressed up as an eternal truth.
What Thatcher meant was stop trying to think of an alternative.
One of the supreme ironies of the AI Bro Hype Complex is how heavily it borrows from science fiction without absorbing the foundational tenet of the genre: that there is always an alternative
There is nothing foreordained about how — or even whether — a technology is deployed in our society. That what a technology does is secondary to who it does it for and who it does it to.
This is always and forever up for grabs, and the writers just grabbed it.
And in so doing, they established the playbook for every other group of workers that AI shills hoped to use as props in their big con.
-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers
No matter how horny your boss is for replacing you with an AI, a union will cool his ardor
If the studios can’t use AI to fire writers and replace them with chatbots, they have no reason to shell out millions for enterprise licenses.
Now, there are plenty of other workers in the film-production pipeline that bosses are hoping to make unemployed so that their salaries can be rendered unto the shareholders.
Hollywood is one of the most heavily unionized sectors in America, but there still gaps where workers are atomized and bosses can act without fear of a strike.
For example, there’s the visual effects (VFX) workers, famously unorganized, whose wage-bills are a big chunk of any film budget. These workers already have a heavily automated pipeline driven by sophisticated computer technology, so perhaps they can all be fired and replaced with software?
Well, maybe (especially if you don’t care whether the VFX the software produces is good, and only care about satificing).
Which is why Disney/Marvel’s VFX workers just voted to unionize. What’s more, if Disney doesn’t give them a contract ASAP, the hard-charging general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board is going to simply force the company to honor the terms that other unionzed workers get through their contract.
Unions are back, baby, and the NLRB has instituted a new, zero-tolerance policy for union-busting. Everyone is unionizing, from strippers to Starbucks baristas, and the writers just proved that no matter how horny your boss is for replacing you with an AI, a union will cool his ardor.
-How the Writers Guild sunk AI's ship: No one's gonna buy enterprise AI licenses if they can't fire their workers
