Midjourney

• The ongoing strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were sparked in part by artificial intelligence and its use in the movie industry.
• Both actors and writers fear that the major studios, including Amazon/MGM, Apple, Disney/ABC/Fox, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount/CBS, Sony, Warner Bros. and HBO, will use generative AI to exploit them.
• Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that learns from text and images to automatically produce new written and visual works.
• So what specifically are the writers and actors afraid of?

The fear

• Writers fear that, at best, they will be hired to edit screenplays drafted by AI.
• They fear that their creative work will be swallowed whole into databases as the fodder for writing tools to sample.
• And they fear that their specific expertise will be pushed aside in favor of “prompt engineers,” or those skilled at working with AI tools.
• They fear that deepfake technologies will become the norm, and real, live actors won’t be needed at all.

On the road to the AI future

• The use of AI by a major studio sparked controversy due in part to the timing and fears about AI displacing people from their jobs.
• Further, series director and executive producer Ali Selim’s tone-deaf description of the use of AI only added to the sense that there is little concern at all about those fears.
• Finally, Volkswagen recently produced a commercial that features an AI reincarnation of Brazilian musician Elis Regina, who died in 1982.
• However, for others, the AI regeneration of someone who has died prompts worries about how one’s likeness might be used after death.

Keeping actors and writers in the credits

• If the dismissive attitude toward writers and actors held by many of the major studios continues, not only will there be little consideration of the needs of writers and actors, but technology development will lead the conversation.
• However, what if the tools were designed with the participation of informed actors and writers?
• Answering these questions could give actors and writers the assurances they seek and help the industry adapt in the age of AI.

• Working conditions, adequate pay, and the increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) into their professions.
• But in the current strike, the specific concern is a subset of AI known as generative AI.
• It is crucial that an equilibrium is reached between protections for creative professionals, and the application of generative AI as a useful tool.

Remind me, what is generative AI?

• What is significant about generative AI is the capacity to undertake the so-called “learning” process relatively autonomously and to generate original content.
• Many of us are most familiar with generative AI as the technical process that gives us increasingly sophisticated deepfakes.
• Generative AI has taken off in the mainstream through companies such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Meta and OpenAI.

So what is happening in Hollywood?

• This would significantly reduce opportunities for people entering the workforce to gain necessary expertise in their craft.
• Questions arise around how these works would be attributed, who or what would be given credit, and consequently how payment would be allocated.
• But many experts and industry professionals see this proposal as alienating writers from the creative process, repositioning writers as copy editors.
• One of the most dystopian scenarios to be put on the table by big studios has been termed “performance cloning”.

It’s also a question of copyright

• With generative AI, consent is closely bound together with issues of copyright.
• Comedian Sarah Silverman is currently suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement.
• She alleges their AI models were trained on her work without her consent, and were consequently able to roughly reproduce her comedy style.

We need collaboration without exploitation

• An early example is David France’s 2020 documentary Welcome to Chechnya, which explores the persecution of LGBTQ+ people in Russia.
• We need regulatory measures that enable creative collaboration with generative AI while ensuring creative workers are not exploited to further centralised power.
• Read more:
  The exploitation of Hollywood's writers is just another symptom of digital feudalism

• This includes everything from the naturalistic (think a soccer player’s headshot) to the surreal (think a dog in space).
• At the same time, however, these outputs can reproduce biases and deepen inequalities, as our latest research shows.

How do AI image generators work?

• AI-based image generators use machine-learning models that take a text input and produce one or more images matching the description.
• Although Midjourney is opaque about the exact way its algorithms work, most AI image generators use a process called diffusion.
• Read more:
  AI to Z: all the terms you need to know to keep up in the AI hype age

How does bias happen?

• Beyond this, however, the model will also have a default tendency to return certain kinds of outputs.
• This is usually the result of how the underlying algorithm is designed, or a lack of diversity in the training data.
• Six months later, to see if anything had changed over time, we generated additional sets of images for the same prompts.

1 and 2. Ageism and sexism

• For non-specialised job titles, Midjourney returned images of only younger men and women.
• For specialised roles, both younger and older people were shown – but the older people were always men.

3. Racial bias

• All the images returned for terms such as “journalist”, “reporter” or “correspondent” exclusively featured light-skinned people.
• This trend of assuming whiteness by default is evidence of racial hegemony built into the system.

4 and 5. Classism and conservatism

• For instance, none had tattoos, piercings, unconventional hairstyles, or any other attribute that could distinguish them from conservative mainstream depictions.
• Many also wore formal clothing such as buttoned shirts and neckties, which are markers of class expectation.

6. Urbanism

Without specifying any location or geographic context, the AI placed all the figures in urban environments with towering skyscrapers and other large city buildings. This is despite only slightly more than half the world’s population living in cities. This kind of bias has implications for how we see ourselves, and our degree of connection with other parts of society.

7. Anachronism

• Instead, technologies from a distinctly different era – including typewriters, printing presses and oversized vintage cameras – filled the samples.
• Since many professionals look similar these days, the AI seemed to be drawing on more distinct technologies (including historical ones) to make its representations of the roles more explicit.
• Otherwise you might unintentionally reinforce the same harmful stereotypes society has spent decades trying to unlearn.

• SALT LAKE CITY, June 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- QuHarrison Terry presents David Holz, Founder & CEO of Midjourney , with the WTF Innovators Award for accelerating the adoption of generative art tools, and expanding the imagination and creative abilities of more than 17 million people.
• The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators.
• We present "Like Picasso", produced by Nimso , to David Holz.
• Prior to founding Midjourney, David co-founded Leap Motion, which designed hand tracking hardware to make mid-air hand motion into a user interface.