I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Training AI

jjoozio about 3 hours ago 47 commentsRead Article on wired.com

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Aurornis•about 1 hour ago

I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs.

The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience.

I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner, or the long rant about not being invited to a Slack channel she needed for the work then later realizing they were in the channel from the start and just missed the required onboarding. There’s a section where we’re supposed to hate a coworker whose only offense is trying to do the job well.

Doesn’t sound like a great job, but the article was trying so hard to show this as an “everyone in Hollywood” instead of admitting it was one person’s bumbling misadventure.

delichon•about 1 hour ago

> claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner

I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My money angst was probably less than hers.

rsynnott•7 minutes ago

Well, presumably you didn't have a debilitating horse addiction.

alecco•about 1 hour ago

Today's Wired is a shadow of its former self. I don't know what happened. But it's sad.

NietTim•31 minutes ago

This article honestly read like some random blog post from the author.

pj_mukh•about 1 hour ago

I mean this is the K-shaped economy. A swath of workers + capital owners with infinite leverage, and another swath of workers still simply exchanging 1 hour of labor, for an hour of results with very little rent to be extracted. The lucky ones have union protection (with its own problems), but the rest are just this lady writ large.

orsorna•about 2 hours ago

> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks

I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.

Aurornis•about 1 hour ago

That was my first clue that the author was squeezing this for a story. The snide joke about taking their kid on vacation so they could ignore each other felt really cold, too. The section where she tried to dunk on a coworker for trying to do the job well was also consistent with someone just squeezing this whole thing for a writing piece instead of trying to do the job.

Nowhere in the article did she support the “everyone in Hollywood” claim, other than saying she found it in a Facebook group for writers.

glimshe•about 2 hours ago

"first world problems", as people say. And the tone also felt dismissive of the work done by the cleaner... If it's such a big amount, he could consider entering her line of business.

dist-epoch•about 1 hour ago

That's exactly how I feel when gamers complain that a GPU that used to cost $1000 now costs $2000.

ecshafer•17 minutes ago

Someone whose hobby is Gaming, saves up diligently to pay $1k for a GPU, now has the rug pulled from under them and its $2k. Amortizing a $1k GPU over 4 years isn't too bad, $250 a year, $20 and change a month vs $500 a year / $40 a month is pretty big.

IshKebab•about 1 hour ago

I mean doubling in price is pretty significant though? I used to happily (well, grudgingly) spend $500 on a GPU. $1k is crazy though.

sligbad•about 2 hours ago

If this is your takeaway, it's what you were looking to believe anyway...

fidotron•about 1 hour ago

This really depends. The author may know the maid well and appreciate that the maid needs the money, or that the trouble of finding a good one if/when the economic situation improves for them is worse than the temporary problems.

terseus•about 1 hour ago

I understand that it is not easy to relate to the author who pays (or was paying) $150 for a house cleaner, I understand that this is a 1-person history and may be highly biased, I understand the author is motivated to create a story from it.

However, if you think that any of the conditions described in the article are acceptable or that this is a fair price to pay for having AI, I think you are a horrible human being and I hope you'll be expelled from civilized society.

ffsoftboiled•about 3 hours ago

Mirrors my own experience doing this type of work (only made it two weeks before I gave up) and my partners. Excellent piece.

gwbas1c•36 minutes ago

> You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t.

I see two problems here:

1: The streaming platforms are filling themselves with slop shows. Maybe not "AI slop," but slop in general. When I browse, I keep seeing lots of shows that I have no desire to watch, and wonder who actually watches them. Every time I open a streaming platform, they keep wanting me to watch a new series that I have no time to watch.

2: It seems there is an over-abundance of screenwriters.

aleph_minus_one•about 3 hours ago

archive.is: https://archive.is/m19Zd

Imustaskforhelp•about 2 hours ago

with the recent google captcha requiring phones and some people facing this issue and multitude of other issues with archive.is

here is an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260511122830/https://serjaimel...

(Side-note: I have created htmlpipe which archives archive.is pages on archive.org so I am more than happy to answer if someone has any questions about it and I have an submission of a blog regarding it too if someone is interested but yeah, enjoy the article now!)

trollbridge•about 2 hours ago

yes please!

bena•about 1 hour ago

I think I understand why she told people not to look up her credits.

It seems this may be a case of "I am representative of everyone's experience."

Her first credit was in 2008 and then there is a 5 year gap between that and her next credit. Then 8 years between that one and the next.

For comparison, I pulled up the crew for The Boys. Most of them have tighter credits.

While there is probably some people in her situation. I feel that she also could have written this with the title: "I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Waiting Tables."

And this isn't to disparage her. It was always a hard business and getting consistent work was always hard. Even if it is good.

mkzet•about 3 hours ago

I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.

bsenftner•about 2 hours ago

Maybe this is relevant? I worked in animation and VFX for an Academy Award winning VFX studio and several well known animation / game studios, starting around '90. I formally left the industry around '04 to work on my own tech startup. When I left, there was a lot of R&D work surrounding the huge amounts of data that an animation studio generates and works with; I was one of those people creating early deep learning systems for production forecasting.

Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media.

That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.

torben-friis•about 2 hours ago

I mostly skip triple A hollywood movies, but the bulk of movies being made nowadays don't make use of any of that, mostly because it makes no sense in their genres.

Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc.

Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China starting to develop a world-friendly industry...

throwforfeds•about 1 hour ago

American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.

torben-friis•about 1 hour ago

Much like everything else in the US, products suffer and sink in quality for being sidelined by individual interests.

Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified...

All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.

kylecazar•about 3 hours ago

I share your feelings, but the title is confusing... this is actually about people using gig AI training platforms for extra income (instead of bussing tables like they used to). Not building AI for cinema.

toyg•about 3 hours ago

> half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on

I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin women and dehydrated steroid-pumped men), mostly because they are abused to the point of absurdity.

DonHopkins•24 minutes ago

The Americans, a great television series, really leaned into the wigs:

'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wi...

>Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties.

>Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna.

>Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favou...

vasco•about 3 hours ago

There's so many indie movies without much cgi, or good old movies that you'll never live long enough to watch. Writing off a whole art form is a bit weird.

hnthrowaway0315•about 2 hours ago

I think OP was saying that he/she only watches movies made before 2010.

Coincidentally, I'm doing the same thing with movies, TV shows and games, and 2010 still feels too modern for me. I try to make it before 2005.

herpdyderp•about 3 hours ago

I, however, do look forward to a time when we can prompt our own TV shows. That second season that ruined your favorite show? Fix it. The second season that never happened? Create it. Of course AI needs to get better still for that to be bearable for many of us, but I'm still excited at the idea!

voidpointer•about 2 hours ago

Isn't the scenario you are describing the ultimate collapse of art and culture as we know it? If everyone sits at home and creates the content that they want, what do we talk about? How do we engage in shared culture if there is nothing to experience together?

darkwater•5 minutes ago

Well, that was a recent invention anyway - at least in Europe where I live. TVs did not really reach most of the households until late '70s and the shared pop culture based on movies (mostly from US), cartoons (mix from Japan and US), advertisements (usually national) was created quite fast.

It's not an immutable fact of the human society.

mantas•about 1 hour ago

Welcome to the life of fringe subcultures. Of course subcultures, even most fringe ones, still have some community. But even in generated content world, some people would end up with similar taste and that generated content being similar. They may even share that content and watch some of each other's content! And oh boy the joy of meeting that rare human who has similar taste! E.g. knowing some fringe band that created a demo tape 2 decades ago that you found in some strange torrent tracker.

But yes, mass/pop culture as we know it would be dead. And IMO the world would be better off.

I agree with other comments that may lead to people staying inside their comfort zone. But I think it's question of time when good portion of people would start sharing that content with other people. Expanding each others' imagination. And few that don't... Well, existing pop culture is not exactly good at expanding mind as well. And such decentralized content creation may be less prone to propaganda and other social control efforts.

trollbridge•about 2 hours ago

I want to watch things that expand my imagination, rather than being limited by it.

maplethorpe•about 1 hour ago

This + NFT integration will be the real game changer. Like it's Breaking Bad, except Walter White is decked out like one of your Slonks. Or it's Indiana Jones stealing a Bored Ape instead of the idol. Possibilities are endless.

NickC25•about 1 hour ago

You can stop watching big budget productions, but you shouldn't skip out on your local independent cinema scene. If you're in or around a large metro area, there will be local(ish) folks out there making interesting stuff. Might not be super fancy CGI or incredible sound design, but it will be humans telling human stories, which is the heart of cinema.

amazingamazing•about 3 hours ago

It is interesting to see how all of these folks are out of main work and doing gig work instead, with productions being moved to Canada and other places abroad. I wonder why. All of the strikes?

fullshark•about 1 hour ago

A lot of money was thrown around the last 10 years trying to pump up entertainment companies in a bid to either take over the industry in a winner take all streaming world or get acquired. Now that the consolidation has finished, it's about cutting back. How Paramount has managed Star Trek, and where it is now is informative in my opinion here.

vrganj•about 2 hours ago

The very AI they have been reduced to training.

What a wonderful dystopia we're building.

spwa4•about 2 hours ago

The writer's guild and other striking organizations put it to:

1) general decline in wages

2) only short-term work being available

3) streaming platforms never pay the way Hollywood/Broadcast TV did: bad pay, but with a share of show profits for decades afterwards. Now just bad pay

So it was generally about getting their pay increased. Instead, the strike lead to a big decrease in pay that Netflix and Skydance (Paramount) are blamed for.

doitLP•about 2 hours ago

Not just writers…there’s unions for every piece of the pie and they all have members and pensions and have to justify their existence.

There’s the ever-increasing restrictions and cost of shooting in California and the huge incentives other localities offer to film and even commercial (advert) projects. My friend just flew the whole production to Louisiana to shoot a 30 second commercial because of the incentives.

There’s the fact that even if a new show or movie is good, it is competing not only with other new stuff but also with the entire back catalogue of everything ever made that is instantly available for viewers.

There’s streaming rights, that never paid as much as traditional TV even though it had broader reach.

There’s competition with phone / social platforms that continue to optimize their content and algorithms with shorter feedback loops and more additive content, against trad production which takes a ton of money and time and upfront cost.

ido•about 2 hours ago

Cost

maxglute•about 1 hour ago

IMO AI already doing better creative writing than most hollywood shows, I see myself enjoying premium mediocre slop.

godzillabrennus•about 1 hour ago

IMO, AI is still not there, but getting better quickly, and I'm excited about how it is going to unlock so much creative talent held back by an expensive system that requires a lot of labor to create content. I know someone who has been trying to raise money for a while to create a movie he wrote a script for. He's registered it with SAG-AFTRA. He's put on dinners. He's worked tirelessly to pull it together. He is an unknown quantity with a couple of roles in movies but no track record of making movies. I keep watching the progress, counting down the days until I can feed his script into a tool and show him a version of his vision come to life. I don't doubt he'd still rather do it with human talent the old school way, but, like tens of millions of other people on earth who have a creative vision and aren't named Bezos, Musk, or Gates, he may never succeed in raising, and I think some version of those visions becoming a reality is better than none. It's also like watching people who understand the problems in an industry work on tech tools by vibe coding solutions.

LogicFailsMe•about 1 hour ago

So... Hollywood... They were an oligarchy of billionaires living off minions living paycheck to paycheck before it was cool... Below the line talent always gets shafted there. And it would all collapse without the minimum viable safety net of the guilds...

Musicians seem to be embracing AI as a platform given that's another oligarchy itself. Where's the Robert Rodriguez of AI film-making? We haven't even seen the Ed Wood here yet.

Edit: and here we go with the enablers of the overlord status quo again. I'd love to know why people think Hollywood's effective caste system is worth preserving. You don't like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel? Cool, the smarter Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood are much worse and they're the ones that didn't get caught to this day.