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Warner Bros. Discovery Says Ongoing Strikes Will Mean $300M-$500M Hit to 2023 Earnings

"The company now expects to exceed $1.7 billion in free cash flow for the third quarter of 2023, in part due to the strong performance of 'Barbie' as well as incremental impact from strike-related factors," the entertainment giant says in a regulatory filing.

matchphoenix ,

What these articles never talk about is the demands that actors and writers are making, and how paltry that pay raise would be in comparison to these losses.

The studios are being pennywise and pound-foolish, and pissing off the most valuable part of their industry, the talent.

givesomefucks ,

how paltry that pay raise would be in comparison to these losses.

It’s just the people who are striking aren’t just asking for a meager raise now.

There’s also stuff about stopping AI before that Black Mirror episode about AI pumping out completed shows come true.

The studios don’t want to agree to stopping that, because they want it to happen.

Which means the strikers are right, and should be striking.

pissing off the most valuable part of their industry, the talent.

A decade or two from now, it might be AI writers, AI actors, and making a whole movie happens on a computer that just spits out a finished product.

That is something studios would be willing to take a half a billion hit against. And if they didn’t think it was coming, they would have caved by now.

The workers only have leverage if they strike before they can be replaced, and demand a future where humans are more involved than typing in a couple prompts.

spez ,

I just hope AI plateaus before any of that cyberpunk shit happens.

givesomefucks ,

There’s no reason to think it will.

Like, it’s going to take decades, but it’ll eventually get to the point where humans only involvement is focus grouping AI shows. Have a group of 20 people watch 20 pilots (or whole seasons) and rate them.

Winners move up in an elimination style bracket and the best get pushed out to subscribers. Or they could just say fuck it and upload everything. A single service could easily upload more than 24 hours of content a day.

The cyberpunk shit won’t really start until companies start using those shows to try to change people’s stances on shit. Instead of seeing ads to make us want to buy stuff, people will pay the streaming services to change how people think on topics. Like Big Oil paying for Fast and Furious 35 to be about how gas vehicles are still better than EVs. Or a main character having random social/political views that are constantly being mentioned.

It won’t be as obvious as characters meeting at Starbucks and saying the name 27 times. But it would work on a lot of idiots.

greenskye ,

I still think people are vastly over-estimating how close we are to that kind of AI.

Reminds me of all the people who thought we were close to Ready Player One style VR back when VR was taking off a few years ago. And now VR stuff is clearly dying, the fad petering out with the technology only making relatively minor improvements from where it started (at least compared to what fiction portrays).

givesomefucks ,

I still think people are vastly over-estimating how close we are to that kind of AI

I mean, I said it would take a couple decades…

But the longer they waited to strike, the less leverage they have.

VR is completely different because your asking people to pay the price of a big screen for something only used while gaming. This doesn’t require consumers to buy any special equipment.

If you want a gaming analogy, look at the cutscenes in new games like Baldurs Gate 3. It won’t be long before AI eliminates the need for mocap. And at that point AI could write and generate a show all on its own

20 years is plenty of time for that

greenskye ,

I think we’re ‘20 years away’ from it in the same way we were ‘20 years away’ from practical fusion power in the 50’s. It feels close, but we don’t even know what we’re actually trying to achieve. People don’t even agree or understand what human intelligence is, what creativity is. You can’t progress down this path like we do with newer, faster processors. It’ll take a new epiphany, a whole new approach to get to the kind of AI people have been dreaming of and writing stories about. You could give the machine a thousand times the processing power and all the training data possible, but it will never really progress past a the current shallow mimicking of intelligence. There’s no mechanism for it to grow or be corrected on the facts. That will take something new.

alienanimals , (edited )

VR stuff is not dying. You’re just in the Trough of Disillusionment of the Gartner hype cycle. Look at Steam Sales or Oculus Sales for their VR games. Look at the new headsets that continue to arrive to the market. The VR market might still be relatively small, but it’s always improving and growing.

Edit lol no counter argument, just downvotes from kids who refuse to believe they might be wrong.

greenskye ,

VR headsets are still improving and still being sold, no disagreement there. But when I search for great VR games to play those lists look almost the same as when I got into VR several years ago. They’re still recommending only games that came out years ago and that I’ve already played. At most they might recommend a new mod to turn a regular game into VR. Where is the content? I thought I’d one day upgrade from my HTC Vive, but I don’t see the point if all I’m going to play are the games I’ve already played.

orclev ,

Yes, exactly this. The LLMs have done an amazing job of faking AI and it’s tricked a ton of people into believing that we’re nearly there, but we’re still a long way off from AI. Back in the 70s everyone thought AI was just around the corner as well, and while we’re much closer today, we’re still not close enough everyone should be worried about it. What everyone should be worried about though is the stupid executives buying all the snake oil and firing everyone before they realize they’ve been conned.

This isn’t a battle against AI, it’s a battle against dumb executives once again trying to figure out how to fuck their employees to make even more money for themselves.

spez ,

But doesn’t still work on the current level. We can but only speculate of what will happen. This is what people in 2000s must have felt about the internet.

givesomefucks ,

That’s not ancient history…

Plenty of people are still alive that were using the internet 20 years ago.

I think you’re confusing what scifi predicted it would be like in movies/TV which is almost always over exaggerated because that’s what sells.

Even when that stuff came out, no one back then took the crazy stuff seriously, if anything serious predictions underestimated what it would be like today.

I don’t think you realize how crazy today’s cell phones with 5G would be to someone from 2003.

girlfreddy ,
@girlfreddy@lemmy.ca avatar

Being in my 60’s I’d have to agree with you. The range and capabilities of cell phone technology now vs 2003 is a blow-out.

givesomefucks ,

Seriously, texting was a huge innovation, we couldn’t even send pics in 2003, now we’ve got fucking FaceTime and bitch if it’s not HD. Hell, we can Livestream HD to the entire Internet these days.

I think if you’ve grown up with touchscreen cellphones, you don’t understand how ground breaking they were.

alienanimals ,

We’re gonna need more than hope to cease further AI progress.

spez ,

I don’t want it ceased, just controlled.

alienanimals ,

That’s completely fair. AI control is a very difficult task, but one that is worth working on.

tinkeringidiot ,

Less than a decade, I think. We won’t live to see the first completely generated movie star. We’ll live to see them become the default. We’ll live to see a time when live human acting is, in and of itself, a noteworthy occurrence.

AI isn’t even driving this forward. Square has been ringing this bell for more than a decade with its movies. AI is just making it cheap. And that fact alone is why it will continue, unabated and unhindered, come what may.

What the studios aren’t realizing is that it’s not just the end for human actors, it’s their end as well. If you can generate feature length films with effects and acting and sound, who the hell needs a major studio?

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever ,

The pay raises are largely nothing burgers. Same with having a proper writers’ room and the like.

The two main sticking points of the WGA/SAG strike are:

  1. Royalties/residuals. Currently, even if talent IS eligible for them, the streaming services are set up in a way that they will never get them. This comes up near constantly with stuff like “This person wrote Stranger Witcher Tiger King and lives in a cardboard box” style stories. THIS actually would impact (some of) the companies and studios to a very large degree. Like, it wasn’t Band of Brothers or Run Fatboy Run that made The Schwim rich as all hell. Same with most of the sitcom royalty who basically buy a new house every time TBS does a marathon.
  2. AI generated content. I’ve said it many times before, but the only outcome that is likely will be “All past performances are not eligible to be part of training data. Talent will have the option to allow their performance/work to be added to a training data set no less than N years after the first public release”… with a lot of coercion regarding how optional that is (if you thought “Agree to show your tits or we find someone else” was a problem…). This has no real impact currently but will be MASSIVE amounts of money in N years and studios likely expect to be valued based on how much training data they will have.
hydrospanner ,

“All past performances are not eligible to be part of training data. Talent will have the option to allow their performance/work to be added to a training data set no less than N years after the first public release”

And how can that ever be truly ensured/compliance confirmed?

Studios can pinky swear then somehow, oops, some third party that they totally didn’t know about their practices uses the off limits material to generate AI results which are then sold to the studio.

Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever ,

The exact same way software licensing and corporate espionage work? If there is reason to be suspicious, paperwork and an investigation eventually happen. So in this case, if suddenly we see someone with John Wayne’s smile, people are gonna say “what the fuck?”

And this will likely be a legal issue at least on the same level as the DMCA (if not the actual DMCA…) because studios will have a LOT to lose if smaller companies steal their catalog and take away their competitive advantage.

ryathal ,

It’s unfortunate that these are the sticking points for the union, because they seem like really bad hills to die on long term.

Residuals are antiquated in the streaming world, gettingpaid up front is a far better deal. If you want recurring income, negotiate a stock grant. Residuals are chasing a shrinking pile of money competing with 40 years of content. Prestige TV makes headlines, but a big reason streamers aren’t releasing numbers is because those shows are crap for engagement. Shows like Friends are still likely dominating the streaming count.

AI is coming whether you like it or not, they would be far better off negotiating a way to include AI as it advances rather than seek to ban it. The fair use argument is really strong for model builders. Actors and writers are better off working with current producers to create a path forward for AI, because a complete ban is likely to result in an outside company coming in and disrupting the market. Yes the stance producers started with is extreme on this subject matter, but the actors and writers are similarly extreme.

TokenBoomer ,

Why is the world topsy turvy? And why do we allow it?

themeatbridge ,

Humans are good at compartmentalizing. The same father that shouts at a ref over a bad call in a tee ball game will happily support industries that will give his child cancer as long as he doesn’t have to think too hard about it.

Profit is amoral. If we want a fair and just society, we must ignore profit motives and accept the cost of being civilized. The capitalist will demonize unions and taxes and regulation, because those things cost the capitalist profit. And the capitalist is right, those things are the enemy.

Unfortunately, the capitalist has also convinced everyone else that we’re supposed to be on his side. The capitalist is not on our side.

TokenBoomer ,

Listen to meatbridge friends. Don’t turn away from the truth.

downpunxx ,
@downpunxx@kbin.social avatar

there's an old saying : "buy real estate when there's blood on the street". consider this for a while.

TokenBoomer ,

But what happens when banks won’t underwrite property insurance because of climate disasters?

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