First comprehensive shutdown in 63 years! What is Hollywood afraid of? Artificial Intelligence | Intellectual Property | Hollywood

History seems to be repeating itself once again.

In the early 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, Europe gradually replaced manual labor with machine production. The decline in wages and unemployment have led to a large number of handicraft workers going bankrupt. People have started to use destroying machines as a means of opposing business owners. It is said that the first worker to destroy the machine was a worker named Luther, and this movement is also known as the Luther Movement.

Today, the scene being staged in Hollywood in the United States is always reminiscent of the "Luddites Movement"-this summer, the Hollywood film and television industry is facing a complete shutdown. On July 13, local time, the American Film and Television Actors Association, one of the three major Hollywood unions with 160000 members, announced a strike, affecting numerous projects that had invested heavily. Prior to this, the American writers' union has been on strike for more than 70 days.

"If we don't hold our heads and chest high now, we will all be in trouble and face the danger of being replaced by machines." SAG-AFTRA Chairman Fran Dreiser's words are very similar to the fear of British workers over 200 years ago.

What is Hollywood afraid of?

AI.

This strike is also seen as the first collective action by humanity to resist the threat of AI.

Currently, the rapidly developing AI technology is increasingly affecting our daily lives, and it has brought about a series of governance and ethical issues. What is the solution to this? Recently, the National Cyberspace Administration and seven other departments jointly released the "Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services", which will come into effect on August 15, 2023, and to some extent, set a "red line" for the use of AI.

What is Hollywood afraid of?

In 2001, the famous Hollywood director Spielberg made various ideas about AI in the future world through the science fiction film "Artificial Intelligence". In the story, humans have entanglements, hesitation, and fear towards AI. But Spielberg used a narrative style that was almost sympathetic, telling the story of AI's search for self-worth and love.

Ironically, 22 years later, the earliest collective action to resist AI happened to come from Hollywood——

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Screen Actors Guild and the Federation of Television Broadcasters announced last Thursday that they are joining the strike action of the Writers Guild of America. The simultaneous strike of actors and screenwriters marks the first complete shutdown of the Hollywood film and television industry in 63 years. The last time such a situation occurred can be traced back to 1960 when former US President Reagan served as the chairman of the Screen Actors Guild, during which the Hollywood strike lasted for about 6 weeks.

The absence of actors from the premiere resulted in the direct suspension of filming for films such as "Gladiator 2", "Deadpool 3", "Mission Impossible 8: Deadly Reckoning", and even affected the upcoming Venice and Toronto film festivals in August and September. All members of the Screen Actors Guild will not be able to participate.

According to The New York Times, this major strike has brought the $134 billion American film and television industry to a halt, due not only to dissatisfaction with salaries but also to concerns about a technology led future.

From the demands of actors and screenwriters, it can be seen what they are really worried about:

SAG-AFTRA requires production companies to ensure that they do not replace actors with AI and computer-generated faces and voices.

Previously, in early May, approximately 11500 film and television writers took to the streets of New York and Los Angeles on strike, calling for higher salaries and refusing to work for AI. Their slogans are very catchy, "AI cannot replace screenwriters", "Replacing executives with AI", "AI has no soul", "I asked ChatGPT to write a slogan, but it was written poorly."

The Writers Guild of America has also proposed that existing scripts should not be used to train AI, which opens the door to intellectual property theft. Writers and screenwriters are concerned that producers will use AI to produce a large number of scripts in order to save costs, and screenwriters can only be responsible for doing some low paying, low value-added work of modifying AI scripts.

Worry is not unfounded. The release of "Indiana Jones 5" this year uses AI to showcase the young lead actor Harrison Ford, who is 40 years younger, on the big screen. To this day, there is no clear standard on how to allocate benefits to actors after using AI clones.

The TV series "Black Mirror Season 6" launched by Netflix this year presents a more concrete future for people: the first episode tells the story of how artificial intelligence automatically generates scripts using personal information left by ordinary people on electronic devices, and then uses the virtual images of film and television stars to automatically generate dramas. The ending is also worth pondering: the protagonist prototype and the film and television star themselves stormed into the film and television company, destroying the AI quantum computer.

Of course, this kind of vigilance does not only occur in the film and television industry.

How should we interact with AI?

"Emerge."

In May of this year, when people used AI technology to have "AI Stefanie Sun" cover various songs, singer Stefanie Sun herself used this word.

"What else do you have to argue with someone who releases a new album every few minutes?" As Stefanie Sun said, "We used to firmly believe that the formation of ideas or viewpoints was a task that machines could not replicate, which was beyond their capabilities. But now it has emerged and will threaten thousands of jobs created by humans, such as law, medicine, accounting, and what we are currently discussing is singing."

What industry is most easily replaced by AI? On March 26th, Goldman Sachs announced in a report that AI will replace 1/4 of current jobs in the United States and Europe, and generative AI will replace 300 million jobs. Recently, a report jointly conducted by OpenAI and the University of Pennsylvania found that 80% of the workforce in the United States has at least 10% of tasks affected by GPT, and approximately 19% of employees will find that at least 50% of tasks are affected by it.

AI technology permeates various aspects of life and work, improving efficiency and saving costs to a certain extent, but it inevitably impacts traditional technology, and even evolves into problems such as spreading false information, infringing on personal privacy, and data security.

Therefore, we should adopt a dialectical perspective and make AI truly a "helper" rather than a "killer". The entry of AI is understandable for daily trivial tasks and tedious tasks. For cultural heritage work such as literary creation, driving that requires value judgment, and aggressive work such as security, humans may be better off.

For social development, it is necessary to find a balance between policy regulation and technological development. For this reason, China has taken a proactive move.

Recently, the State Cyberspace Administration, in conjunction with the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, announced the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services, which will come into effect on August 15, 2023. The Measures have marked out the scope of supervision, which happens to be the most illegally used generated text, images, audio, video and other content by AI, and to some extent, have set a "red line" for AI usage.

The Measures have a total of 24 articles, which put forward relevant requirements in terms of algorithm design and filing, training data and models of generative artificial intelligence service providers, protection of user privacy and trade secrets, supervision and inspection, and legal responsibility.

For example, in response to the concerns of Hollywood screenwriters that the training data of generative artificial intelligence, including works already published and copyrighted by others, may infringe upon intellectual property rights. Article 4 of the Measures stipulates that intellectual property rights and business ethics shall be respected, trade secrets shall be kept confidential, and advantages such as algorithms, data, and platforms shall not be utilized to engage in monopolistic and unfair competition behaviors; Respect the legitimate rights and interests of others, do not harm their physical and mental health, and do not infringe upon their portrait, reputation, honor, privacy, and personal information rights. Article 7 stipulates that "if it involves intellectual property rights, it shall not infringe upon the intellectual property rights enjoyed by others in accordance with the law.".

Artificial intelligence algorithms have a "black box" characteristic, characterized by uncontrollable behavior and difficult decision-making mechanisms to explain. The Measures specify that those who provide generative AI services with the attribute of public opinion or the ability of social mobilization should carry out security assessment in accordance with relevant national regulations, and fulfill the procedures of algorithm filing, change and cancellation in accordance with the Administrative Provisions on Recommendation of Algorithms for Internet Information Services. The second is to clarify the requirements for information disclosure. The Measures clearly stipulate that relevant competent departments shall supervise and inspect generative artificial intelligence services based on their responsibilities, and providers shall cooperate in accordance with the law, explain the source, scale, type, annotation rules, algorithm mechanisms, etc. of training data as required, and provide necessary technical and data support and assistance.

This is not the first time our country has resorted to AI governance. In June 2019, the National Professional Committee for the Governance of Next Generation Artificial Intelligence in China released the "Principles for the Governance of Next Generation Artificial Intelligence - Developing Responsible Artificial Intelligence"; In September 2021, a new generation of ethical standards for artificial intelligence was released. In March 2022, China issued the Opinion on Strengthening Ethical Governance in Science and Technology. Based on its own policy practice in the field of artificial intelligence ethics, China has submitted the "Position Paper on Strengthening Ethical Governance in Artificial Intelligence" to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, calling on the international community to adhere to the principle of "ethics first" and implement the concept of "people-oriented and intelligent for good" in the management, research and development, and use of artificial intelligence technology. A series of Chinese wisdom and solutions demonstrate the responsibility and responsibility of a major country to actively build a community with a shared future for mankind.

It is worth noting that relevant legislation in China has also been put on the agenda. According to the State Council's 2023 Legislative Work Plan released in June this year, China is preparing to submit the draft of the Artificial Intelligence Law to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress for review this year.

Have humans ever been afraid of new technologies?

From the Lutheran movement to the Hollywood strike... humanity has always been mixed about technological revolution. And this fear of new and unknown things may have long been ingrained in human genes.

Can you imagine it? In the era when writing emerged but not yet popularized, even Western philosophical founders like Socrates opposed the use of writing. Socrates believed that if people learn to write, they will rely on what they have written and no longer strive to remember. Socrates also believed that if a text is misinterpreted, it is powerless to defend itself and always requires its author to rescue it.

However, it is interesting to note that Socrates' rejection of written language is precisely due to his student Plato's use of written language to be recorded. The above views of Socrates are derived from Plato's work "The Dialogues of Philo".

After the invention and popularization of television, Neil Bozeman believed in his masterpiece "Entertainment to Death" that the rational, orderly, and logical expressions brought about by traditional printing would be influenced by television and replaced in a superficial, fragmented, and entertaining way. At this time, text has become a form of "justice", while visual expression has become a raging beast.

Looking back at the history of human development, almost every technological change brings about human fear. However, after repeated iterations, humans still manage new technologies very well.

So, how should we face the emergence of new technologies?

Firstly, face new technologies head-on. The birth of AI may lead to the extinction of some professions, but it will inevitably bring new professions as well. Just as the emergence of cars made carriage drivers unemployed, it also gave birth to car drivers; The emergence of machines has caused some industrial workers to lose their jobs, but it has also given birth to machine operators. Accepting the emergence of AI and continuously learning to adapt to the new changes that AI has brought is the fundamental reason why we are not abandoned by the technological wave.

Secondly, face up to fear. New technologies will bring efficiency and change, but of course, they will also face the risk of losing control. And fear is precisely the sobering agent that keeps us vigilant and prevents us from falling into a "technological frenzy" while adapting to new technologies.

Finally, pay attention to those who fall behind. A healthy technological revolution should not abandon those who have fallen behind. Just like when smartphones were popular, many elderly people fell behind. However, now the whole society is helping the elderly to bridge the digital divide as soon as possible. Apps and government websites have launched versions for the elderly, and in many scenarios where only mobile payments can be used, volunteers are specially arranged to help the elderly in need. The emergence of AI is no exception. As we enjoy the huge dividends brought by technology, we must always take care of those who are separated by the divide.

After all, in the near future, humanistic care may be one of the few things that AI cannot replace labor.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his 2017 graduation speech at MIT, "What worries me is not that artificial intelligence can think like humans, but rather that people think like computers, without values, empathy, and reverence for results."