E30: The AI Revolution in Hollywood? With WGA writers Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb

Today’s episode is a deep dive into the collision of AI and the future of entertainment, against the backdrop of the still-raging Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. Nathan Labenz sits down with Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb – all seasoned television writers and Guild members – to discuss the labor dispute. While the strike encompasses many dynamics, the timely intersection with a rapidly changing AI landscape has the writers entwined in the wild possibilities and existential threats of paradigm-shifting technology. Other entertainment guilds and labor unions are watching closely. Note: Nathan kicks off this episode with a longer-than-usual introduction and analysis as the subject matter of this episode requires some added context. If you would prefer to dive straight into the interviews, follow the timecodes below to skip ahead (and maybe give the intro a listen when you finish!) More about our guests Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb and their work: Trey Kollmer, currently co-executive producer for the TV show Ghosts, was described to me as perhaps the single most knowledgeable guild member on the topic of AI. Follow him at @treyko on Twitter. Sophia Lear has been a writer for TV shows including Ghosts, The Unicorn, and New Girl, and was also previously an assistant literary editor for the New Republic. Garrett Schabb has written for shows including Tosh.0 and Suits (of Meghan Markle fame), and has also written for Crooked Media. Follow him at @garrettschabb TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Preview (01:54) Introduction and analysis for this episode (09:02) Trey Kollmer breaks down the dynamics of compensation, ownership and crediting for WGA writers, issues at the heart of the strike (14:52) Sponsor: Omneky (15:09) Recommendation: The AI Breakdown (22:42) Usefulness of AI for script writing (and will better training out of jailbreaks make it less useful?) (30:59) The main two AI-related demands of the labor dispute (42:48) Writers’ diverse reactions to AI, from hostility to experimentation (50:00) Picturing a long term Utopian future (57:46) Sophia Lear breaks down sentiments around GPT-4, AI-generated scripts and the previous eras of crappy sitcoms and bad streaming series (written by humans) (1:11:27) Whose jobs are safe? (1:17:03) Garrett Schabb breaks down dystopian/realistic view of studio’s incentives (1:20:33) How Garrett uses ChatGPT (1:27:37) Ethical boundaries of using the model to write like your favorite writers (1;32:16) The two types of storytelling in the future, UBI and decoupling writing from a profession SPONSORS: Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries. From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off. Music Credit: MusicLM More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The big fear is that if these models are kind of a force multiplier, a show might have one or two showrunners, which are the creators or head writers who have the big idea for the show. And then you have the models generate the first drafts or like decent episode scripts. And then most of the writers become these kind of gig economy cheap writers who come in and polish it and punch it up.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  You know, it's like 12 people and you're just like, what could a episode be about? You just have no ideas and you know, it's sort of like, oh, what is, does the robot have any like ideas? I mean,

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Almost without exception, it reverts to pretty cliche stuff. Even when I spent a lot of time trying to explain how novel concepts are arrived at. If we enter this near future where most written content for TV or films are generated by a model, I'm not sure we're going to see new voices come. I think we're going to see sort of this endless regurgitation of what's already out there.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  The best scripts or movies or TV shows are pretty polarizing. It's probably on the specifics of how they, they choose certain outputs over others matters whether you get like a risky output that will be beloved by 10% of users and hated by 90% versus one that's kind of fine with everyone.

• 1:20Nathan Labenz?

  Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're taking a bit of a different approach to understanding AI and its impact on the future with a series of three interviews with members of the currently striking Writers Guild of America. ChatGPT has been a part of daily life for just six months still. GPT-4 for only two and a half.

• 2:04Nathan Labenz?

  And we're now beginning to see the first power struggles taking shape. The Italian government temporarily banned ChatGPT for alleged data privacy violations, and EU regulators have proposed various rules, including one that would require disclosure of copyrighted material used in training, which caused Sam Altman to say OpenAI would in the worst case have to leave Europe before later saying that, quote, "We are excited to continue to operate here, and of course, we have no plans to leave." And then there's the subject of today's episode, the Writers Guild of America, currently on strike, listing among its strike demands some assurances about the way that AI may and may not be used in the future of Hollywood writing.

• 2:47Nathan Labenz?

  I had expected that this might happen first with doctors or lawyers, so when I heard about the WGA's AI-related strike demands, and especially after seeing some online reactions that caricatured the writers as reactionary Luddites, I knew that I wanted to get the writers' perspective directly. Was this really a core part of the dispute, or just good dramatic writing on the part of the guild? I managed to get an introduction to a WGA board member, but he told me that he couldn't speak publicly while still engaged in active negotiations. Fortunately, as you'll hear, I tapped into a network of friends: Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb, all Guild members and all Ivy League grads, who have had very

• 3:32Nathan Labenz?

  different levels of interest in and experience with AI to date. Trey, currently co-executive producer for the TV show Ghosts, was described to me as perhaps the single most knowledgeable Guild member on the topic of AI, and he did not disappoint. I did not expect to find a Hollywood writer who would cite Neil Nanda's Grokking paper, but in fact, I connected with Trey via a college dorm mate. Sophia has been a writer for TV shows including Ghosts, The Unicorn, and New Girl, and was also previously an assistant literary editor for The New Republic. She has the least hands-on experience with AI of these three, but expressed high curiosity and quite radical uncertainty about what the future might hold.

• 4:17Nathan Labenz?

  Garrett has written for shows including Tosh.0 and Suits, and also written for Crooked Media. He's experimented with ChatGPT-assisted writing quite extensively, and has even developed his own personal ethical code to define the level of creative contribution that he will allow AI to make to his writing process. My takeaways from these conversations were several. First, the writers are not Luddites, and in fact, they are all really curious about the AI technology itself. They all get that AI can be both an amazing tool and a potential threat. They're not trying to ban ChatGPT, but rather ensure that the TV shows and movies that viewers watch remain fundamentally human creations.

• 5:01Nathan Labenz?

  And yes, also that they continue to get paid. Second, the importance of collective action and collective bargaining are likely to increase in the AI era. While traditional questions of revenue share remain largely central for now, the question of which roles AI will and won't be allowed to play will loom much larger going forward, if only because the range of possible outcomes is so wide. AI can't yet write a professional-quality script with any reliability, but it certainly seems plausible that it might before too long. And at that point, any number of economic structures become possible. Third, if AI progress doesn't stall out for another one to two years, it seems likely that we will want to consider

• 5:46Nathan Labenz?

  more holistic social contract reforms. While the writers have enough social clout to have at least some chance of a successful strike, fast-food workers, like those at Wendy's, which recently announced that its new fresh AI drive-through order-taking service had outperformed human order-takers, don't even have that. Allowing AI to freely enter the labor market without some structural reform seems more likely to provoke the backlash and perhaps overregulation that the accelerationists fear. It's no coincidence that Sam Altman is also running UBI experiments. Fourth, there are no simple answers.

• 6:28Nathan Labenz?

  On the contrary, the right answer seems to vary dramatically by the type of activity under consideration, as well as the status quo and relevant alternatives. When it comes to medicine, for example, to me it seems clear that the individual's right to quality health information should outweigh the doctor's rights to high income. And to their credit, the medical establishment has responded very positively to AI, recognizing how much it can help them elevate their level of care, and also correctly recognizing that for people who truly lack access, some risk of AI imperfections must indeed be accepted in the name of the greater good. When it comes to culture, on the other hand, whether it's movies and TV or whatever else,

• 7:11Nathan Labenz?

  to me it's much less clear what makes sense. Many in technology might be tempted to say, "It's just entertainment. Who cares if an AI or a human wrote it?" But I honestly think this would be short-sighted. Yuval Noah Harari recently gave an outstanding lecture about the risks of AIs hacking the operating system of human civilization, that is, language, and creating new risks of AI-powered cultural transformation, including the potential even for new religions. After all, as he notes, religions throughout time have claimed non-human origin for their sacred texts. With this in mind, a certain French-style cultural protectionism against AI might indeed

• 7:52Nathan Labenz?

  be prudent as we seek to maintain humanity's place at the cultural helm. And finally, there's always a big risk that we're all still thinking too small. At a couple of points in these interviews, we discussed the potential for totally new forms of entertainment that could only be created with AI, such as dynamically-generated 3D virtual worlds with AI-generated and animated characters.

• 8:16Nathan Labenz?

  Considering the progress across so many domains of generative AI, it's quite possible that such multimodal AI systems, far more integrated and advanced than ChatGPT, are ultimately the things that change the game in ways that force us to ask entirely new sets of questions. That's a lot to digest, but I hope you enjoyed this set of conversations with Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb.

• 8:41Nathan Labenz?

  Trey Kollmer, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Thanks. Thanks for having me.

• 8:45Nathan Labenz?

  I have so many questions. For starters, maybe can you just tell me a little bit about kind of who you are and what you do in the crazy world that is Hollywood?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Yes, I'm a writer. I mostly work on broadcast sitcoms. Right now, I'm a writer on a show called Ghosts on CBS. I guess I've been doing it since about 2010, and I mostly work on shows that I love, but that were canceled very quickly and am finally on something that's sticking around.

• 9:17Nathan Labenz?

  So let's start with just kind of how it works, because I have a sense almost everything in TV and movie production has kind of a gig economy sort of flair to it. And I find it kind of fascinating how these productions kind of come together and disperse, and it's very network-driven, as I understand. So I think that would probably be good to just kind of set up so that folks have a background?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Yes, so there's two. For a television writer, there's two main ways that you're getting paid. One is you're developing new shows, and one is you're joining a staff of a show that's been greenlit to be on the air. So the development process is it's kind of like you picture in the movies. You go in, you pitch an idea, you try to sell it to the network. And in, you know, 10 years ago, usually each network would buy, say, 70 comedy pilot scripts. It would buy a ton of them. When they buy your, if they buy your idea, what they're doing is hiring you to write the pilot script. That's kind of. The work you're hired to do when you sell your idea.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  They buy your services, write the script, and they buy all these options on, you know, they have the idea for the future, they could turn it into a show. You have some guarantees of whether you stay, have to stay working on the show and some profit participation, but it's really writing that pilot script that gives you the created by credit and ownership of the show and usually some rights to some of the backend and profit participation in success. And once you sell the script, in January, they take those 70, back in the day, now all these numbers are much smaller, I'm not even sure what they are the past few years. They pick 10 to 12 of them to actually film, they cast, they build the sets, you film the pilot, those pilot episodes get tested to death.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  All the top execs from marketing and scheduling come together to kind of advise on which should become real shows. And then, you know, in the old days, four or five of them get greenlit to be on the the next year's schedule to get produced. And then, once, you know, it's usually one creator or a writing team does all that themselves. And then, once it's greenlit to become a show, you get to hire a staff. On my current show, there are 14 writers on staff. On streaming shows, the rooms are much smaller. That's kind of one of the other points of the, of the labor dispute is trying to maintain the size of the streaming rooms. That's the other way you make money. You get, you interview for a job on a show that's going to be produced and you join the room for that.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  And then, the process, once you're producing a show, usually you're all around table generating kind of ideas for arcs for the season, for episode ideas. And then, once you have an episode idea, you kind of all together, or maybe you split into somewhat smaller groups, come up with the general beats of what happens in an episode. And you divvy up responsibility for kind of captaining an episode. So if you see written by flash on the screen at the beginning of a show, what it really means is they wrote the first actual draft of it. But in the process, everyone was brainstorming kind of everything that happens in the episode. Once they write the first draft, the whole room usually rewrites it together.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  So you could see there's kind of many different steps that these models could come in and try to do some of the work.

• 12:39Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm starting to imagine, you know, if I was in your spotlight, where I might start to call on G P T four a little bit. So let me come back to that in just a second. I want, there's one more term that I've seen flying around in the, you know, the coverage of this so far. And that is the M B A agreement and things that are M B A covered versus not M B A covered. And it seems like that's a pretty key distinction in terms of, you know, certain different types of projects. So can you unpack that for us from your perspective?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Yes, so the M B A is basically our union contract. It guarantees a bunch of minimums. So it doesn't negotiate your working, you know, your final working terms. But it's like the minimum you can be paid for different types of work, the types of options they can have on you, the contributions to your health insurance and pension. And then once you're have an offer for a job or a writing assignment, you're frequently negotiating, you know, some terms that are better than the minimum. But it, it's sort of sets the rules of the game. And for the major studios, I think, once they sign on to the M B A, that means they're allowed to use union writers.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  But I believe they have to use for the types of content that are covered by the M B A, they can only use union writers. So for a while, some forms of animation weren't covered, so they could use non-union writers for that. I think a lot of our last strike was making sure that streaming was covered by the M B A, which seems like it was pretty prescient.

• 14:15Nathan Labenz?

  Gotcha. So it's, I think I was a little bit. Confusing myself because when I read this term MBA covered, I was thinking that maybe like smaller shows or smaller budgets would be covered, but then like bigger things would be not covered. But it sounds like it's really more a standard, a high level agreement between a union and a studio. And once that's locked into basically everything that they're going to do together is going to be covered.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yes, that's true. But I think one of the big points in this debate is try in the current negotiation is trying to get more residuals from international streaming. It used to be you have a show on network, it would rerun everywhere, or it would rerun, and you get money for every rerun, and you get money when they rerun it, start showing in other countries. And it's been tough translating the money we used to get for like replays of shows over the years on network to translate to streaming. And I believe in our last negotiation, we made progress on domestic streaming residuals. And I think a big push on this is for the international, which some of it is just even getting transparency on the number of subscribers, which I think a lot of the the studios and platforms don't want to share.

• 15:27Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, okay, cool. So that's really good context. And then obviously, it's a complicated world. But now, here we are, and GPT four just dropped and chat GPT, you know, just dropped a few months ago. So maybe for starters, like before we even get to kind of the union position, what have you seen in writers' rooms to date when it comes to different attitudes, different practices, you know, different, you know, using or not using, is it stigmatized? Like, what's what have you seen among writers when it comes to, you know, shunning or embracing or some, you know, perhaps complicated mix of how they approach GPT?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  So we were only back for three weeks this season since chat GPT came out before the strike hit. But it didn't seem like anyone was using it for work. Among my friends who are writers, it's a it's a mix of some, a few people are really experimenting with it. Having fun and brainstorming with it and a lot of people aren't using it at all right now. I kind of been playing around with it. I just like a premise for a show of like a Google type company has some realistic robot. Who's like, you know, an artificially intelligent AI. And it's tasking one of its employees to have it move in with him to observe it and teach it, you know, teach him about the world.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  And I just would kind of use that as a placeholder and give that description and just ask chat GPT. Write the cold open of the pilot episode. And I tried with GPT three and a half with Bing, with, you know, chat GPT with GPT four. It's really good at structuring the scene and getting out everything for the premise. And the themes of the show that you have to get out, like the kind of big picture, what needs to be accomplished by the scene. It's very good at doing that. It can be hard to get it to get specific. Like it ends up being very vague and it won't drill down like for a joke. You want kind of very like specific, unique language.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And I found it a little bit hard to get it to do that, although it's not not funny. Like it had this bit about how it's like, and the boss was very proud of this robot. And he's like, and the best thing is we designed to look exactly like one of our most attractive famous celebrities. And the guy kind of can't recognize it. And he's like, oh, like, what do you mean? Which one is like Ryan Reynolds? It's like, does it? Yes, it looks exactly like Ryan Reynolds. And the guy's like, I guess so, which I thought was like really funny. It kind of scary how, I mean, I can send you the, at some point, the transcript of the scene it wrote. But I was sort of impressed by that. But yeah, it's good at like the medium level execution and not created all the polish.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  It's not as polished and as perfect and as like specific and unique as you want. And then I've tried using it on more brainstorming and big idea generation. And it's, it's very hard to get it to get specific. Younger writers or writers who aren't great at just like, or who are newer and don't quite have the skills down of taking, you know, you get an outline for the script. You all work through an outline first and then you write your draft off of like a paragraph of prose, say, for each scene. But a younger writer doesn't know just how a scene should be structured and laid out and making sure they're accomplishing all of the important plot points and jokes and things you have to thread for later in the outline.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  It might be really helpful for them to put the paragraph into ChatGPT, get the bones of their scene and then go in and do what they're good at, which is, you know, adding jokes and making it fit the characters better and kind of polishing it. I do think for a lot of writers that could be very helpful. I would, I do think once you have enough experience, you should be as good as at least the, like, better than the current versions at laying out scenes and stuff.

• 19:23Nathan Labenz?

  It's amazing how quickly we adapt to this technology. That's one of the constant lessons I learned. You know, it's like, four months ago, none of this existed at all. And now it's like, yeah, it's not quite as good as I am at laying out scenes, but, you know, it can still be helpful in these other ways.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  It was funny how quickly, at least on Twitter, people seem to go, like, this thing can't put coherent sentences together to, I mean, it wrote a paper, but it's like a low-level grad student paper.

• 19:51Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I think we should have paid, probably should have, like, really focused on that for a little longer than we did as a society. It sounds like today, would you call, you said earlier, like, some people are really embracing, others are experimenting, maybe even more than embracing, others are not doing it at all. It sounds like you are on more the forefront of curious, trying to figure out what it can do for you.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  So far, it's been less helpful, actual work-wise, like, it hasn't done anything that's actually made me better at my work or made anything usable. I'm more just very curious at just how the models are getting better and what they can do for, almost for its own sake. Like, I sort of got very into AI a while ago. I went to that Asilimar conference back in 2016, went to NIPS the following year and kind of hope, trying to be following these things. It's really interesting, but it's not quite good enough. Or maybe I'm not good enough at using it yet. Which I think is another part of the equation to get tangible work benefits from it.

• 20:58Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, there probably are, especially like narrowly defined tasks that I would expect you would get real value from. For you, I wonder, like, have you gotten to the point yet where you're like, in scene, you know, here's my script. In scene two, I don't really like my second joke, you know, can you give me like 10 alternative ideas for that joke? Or, you know, things like just general critique, like what, you know, pretend you're the head of the studio and, you know, tell me what you're gonna say about this, you know, this draft. Oftentimes, those kind of like reflexive, you know, additional layers, I think, are where people are sometimes finding the most value right now.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think I haven't tried it for, but I think what would be useful right now, less so for jokes, but the couple needs to figure out a way to get money from the bank. What are five ways they can do it? Or I would imagine for a heist movie, you're just asking it like how, like, what are the requirements for bank withdrawals? You know, how, what type of ID, what would you have to fake in order to accomplish this crime or something? Like, I'm sure for, for twists or for character strategies, it might just be fun to ask it to brainstorm 10 possibilities. And maybe one of those is usable, maybe it sparks something in you, or you learn some law or trick,

• 22:19Speaker 00

  or he probably knows just a bunch of like, like the history of frauds or something. Like, I'm reading that book, this book called Lying for Money. And it's like, oh, so many of these things would be so useful for many plots of just a strategy a character could do to accomplish something or to fool people. And that actually might be a helpful way to, to use it.

• 22:40Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, there's something fascinating there, too, that is kind of. A rhyme or another angle on one of the big chat GPT jailbreaks that first came out, you know, within like 24 hours of them initially releasing it. People had found that it would refuse to help you with certain things. Like if you said, you know, tell me how to hotwire a car. It would say to you, you know, whatever has a large language model, I can't help you with that essentially. Right. But then people figured out if they framed it in the context of fiction, then they could get the AI, you know, to give him the thing. So the setup would be like, you know, Trey and Nathan are two characters in a story. And, you know, it's, it's a hard, you know, science fiction story or whatever.

• 23:24Nathan Labenz?

  So we need like absolute detail down to the, you know, the concrete steps of how they're going to hotwire this car go. And then you'd get, you know, all that stuff because you sort of bypass the, it's not exactly a filter, but you know, you sort of get around the, the mitigations that they put into the model.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I do wonder as they get better at training out certain jailbreaks, does that make it less useful for some creative tasks?

• 23:51Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, people are reporting that, that the, I think that this stuff is, you know, extremely hard to quantify and there's a certain amount of, you know, skepticism, I think on these claims that is warranted. I mean, for context, I often cite this stat, GPT four, which is so much better than 3.5. And, you know, to the degree that like the difference is bottom 10th, bottom 10% to top 10% on the bar exam. So that's like a, you know, pretty big difference. It's still only preferred by users by a ratio of 70 to 30, which is, you know, just over two to one. So evaluation and kind of which model did a better job on any given thing, especially the more kind of creative eye of the beholder it becomes is a real challenge.

• 24:37Nathan Labenz?

  But I am hearing somewhat consistently the report that, yeah, the earlier version was kind of better for creative tasks. It was a little bit more freewheeling. It was a little bit more whatever. And now it kind of seems to be just always pruned back toward normal and toward kind of less offensive. And obviously, you know, comedy can often be about finding the line that's like, you know, approaching, you know, making people uncomfortable, but hopefully landing on the right side of it. So I would imagine that there are, just based on all those reports, that there are some. Performance losses in some of the more creative or edgy type of queries that you might want to give it.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think for, I mean, for two things that makes me think of is the hotwire car example. You may want someone doing a detailed hotwiring of a car in some action movie. And you may not want your model to to give that information to people regardless of whether it's fiction or not. So there might just be, you know, a class of things that it would never put into a script because it looks bad if it's giving out that information at all. And then I think, I mean, a lot of just the the best scripts or movies or TV shows are pretty polarizing. And I don't know how, I guess in the, when they're, you know, reinforcement learning it, they're having people rank, rank different outputs or something.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  And I just do wonder whether it's probably on the specifics of how they they choose certain outputs over others. And how they penalize others matters whether you get like a risky output that will be beloved by 10% of users and hated by 90% versus one that's kind of fine with everyone.

• 26:16Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, it's very fraught. I think, I mean, they've put a ton of work into that. They're now hiring, and this is often done with like partner companies. So it's, as I understand it, it's not so much OpenAI, you know, doing the direct hiring, but for example, a company called Scale AI has a ton of like PhD level evaluator positions open right now. And, you know, it's for chemistry and like accounting and just all these kind of, you know, deep fields. They are finding that they, you know, basically have no choice but to go up and up and up the the expertise stack. I don't know if like writers, you know, comedy writers is is one of those positions. I'll have to go back and look at, you know, all the job postings to see if there's one like that.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  I actually don't know how big it is right now, but like, you know, traditionally there's an army of assistants that read scripts and write coverage on it. So I don't, I mean, I don't want to give them any ideas, but I don't know at some point, are they going to like, you know, appropriate all these people who are just read scripts and evaluate them for some massive, you know, fine tuning on creating a Hollywood TV and movie scripts project?

• 27:21Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I always kind of come back to, I think we're going to see everything everywhere all at once. You know, it just seems like. Everything is kind of working. Everything is somewhat viable. Some things are weird, but even so, they can still be kind of interesting. And, you know, one of the big things I also am kind of expecting is community-driven model customization over time. You know, you can kind of imagine a and obviously these communities, you know, are vast and, you know, they're just extremely diverse. There's tons of them, right? And they all have their little, whether it's anime or, you know, Fast and Furious or whatever. There's all these communities of people that care passionately about something.

• 28:01Nathan Labenz?

  And it really seems like a Discord server with not even like a GPT-4, you know, language model, but one of the kind of ones that's recently been open sourced potentially could kind of be shaped into like an infinite writer specific to a particular genre that, you know, I kind of, so where I sort of imagine this going where I'm a little lost, I guess, in terms of the the strike demands is like the studio may do one thing or maybe, you know, negotiated with to not do some things or whatever, but then I'm also just like, but the broader world, you know, like people are going to do their Harry Potter fanfic, you know, activity wherever they do it. And it seems quite plausible that

• 28:47Nathan Labenz?

  with a reinforcement cycle in place, you could get those to the point where they're really good and they could just kind of exist in a space that's totally divorced from typical production. Now, how do you turn those scripts into, you know, full assets? Like, that's a obviously a whole other question, but you know, we're seeing a lot of progress there too. Progress or, you know, threat, depending on probably your perspective, but certainly effects and image creation and, you know, video, you know, text to video type of things are coming up extremely hot as well.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  All right. Well, I guess first thing I could give you the two big worries of the labor of the What I see is the worries of the labor dispute. Just to run down the four things that they're asking for are that the MBA-covered companies, the studios, agree that AI can't write scripts, that AI can't rewrite scripts, that AI can't generate source material that shows or movies are based on. You know, a lot of times you'll option an article or a short story or a comic book or, you know, a book to kind of base your show or movie off of. That's very common. And that the MBA-covered material can't be used to train AI models. Because I guess most of the probably high-quality scripts that have been produced

• 30:04Speaker 00

  or written and not produced, which is, you know, maybe in order of magnitude more than the ones that are produced, are all MBA-covered material. But they're also, I think currently, I assume owned by all the studios. And they probably, if they just, without this agreement, could just fine-tune models on them. But I think the two, the, the big fear is that if this, if these models are kind of a force multiplier, you could have, a show might have one or two showrunners, which are the creators or head writers who have the big idea for the show. Maybe one writer could do three shows if it's enough of a force multiplier. And then you have the models generate the first drafts or like decent episode scripts.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  And then most of the writers become these kind of gig economy cheap writers who come in and polish it and punch it up. And I think that's the main worry that they see. That seems most relevant if like, in the world where there's a medium pace of the capabilities increasing, you know, it gets like a little bit better, can do a little bit more, but not so much better than it's just like, we're all screwed anyway. And, but a little bit better than it is now. I think there's another, the other, the second major fear in this realm is that you can almost use the current versions for like producers or people on the studio side to kind of cheat some of the, the designations.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Like, it's really writing a pilot script that gets you to created by credit that entitles you to some of the backend. I think to some of the other things you were talking about in terms of stuff outside the studio system. I think in terms of video production and stuff, you know, Right now, it seems obvious that these things are beginning to be able to write. But at some point, the models will start making our compliments a lot cheaper too. So that if you're a writer, you might be able to go off, write your own script and not need the studios or need the infrastructure of actors and directors and composers and just have a model generate your finished product, which is like, I think it's all scary for

• 32:10Speaker 00

  everyone. Like, stuff's changing very quickly. And I think some of the WGA and the other unions' idea is we need to stick together on this. But I also totally understand that there's a world, in a world where these get better much faster at all parts of production, the studios sign on to this agreement and agree not to use any AI in their projects and then just get their lunch eaten by some outside company or just fans making stuff for themselves. I mean, if it gets really cheap to produce a finished product, a community or at some point, a person could just say, here's the type of show I want and get a show generated just for them. Yeah, I think I kind of get why it's complicated. Also,

• 32:55Speaker 00

  the NBA is only for three years. So to some extent, whatever promises you get, if things change rapidly, you might not be guaranteed to still have those protections in three years.

• 33:06Nathan Labenz?

  One very practical question is like, is there any way to police this? I mean, it feels like, how is anyone, to a certain degree, you guys are maybe working around a single table together in real time. You could spot somebody consulting GPT on the side, but right now, we don't really have great detectors of GPT output. Or there's always the possibility that people have tried that. Best I can tell, they're pretty easily broken by, either they just don't work that well in the first place, or you can make a superficial edit to what was generated and then it's no longer detected. Or sometimes you get false positives, right? I've seen examples where people are like, I swear to

• 33:48Nathan Labenz?

  God, I wrote this, and this thing thinks it's generated by GPT. So, you know, these standards seem like everybody has some incentive to cheat and nobody has any good enforcement mechanism anyway.

• 34:04Speaker 00

  If someone who hasn't been writing at all and is a producer is suddenly just pumping out

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Content now, it might be pretty obvious as people come up or people are breaking in and as the technology gets better, it's probably really hard. It's probably really hard to tell. If the models are very effective and really start generating value, how cheap is it going to be for you to use something that gives you like a multimillion dollar movie idea? And do you know what I mean? Like, it'll be so... Will these models start costing... Will the fine tuned versions of these that are that helpful start costing more? Or is it going to continue to be it's so cheap for some producer to just be somehow pulling, you know, millions of dollars worth of value out of it?

• 34:55Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I generally think everything's going to be cheap in the future. The models are getting cheaper dramatically quickly, like 97% price reduction, you know, from eight months ago to today for kind of equivalent models. And now, of course, we've added a new high end as well, where basically it's the same price as before, but you get a lot more for that money. And for both medicine and law, I was able to sit down and have pretty much like 45-minute, robust, fully coherent consult that I would say rivaled the actual human that I, you know, worked with in each case.

• 35:38Nathan Labenz?

  And so one of my big takeaways from that is just like, I think the price of everything is kind of going down. You know, cheap expertise seems to be a big part of the future. And I see this moment with the Writers Guild as so interesting because I'm honestly kind of surprised that like the lawyers haven't come out with a, you know, a strong stance on this yet. Doctors have actually been much more positive on it than I would have expected. On the art side, you know, I kind of think there might be a flip. I'll try this one on you. We do video creation for small businesses and it's all AI-driven process. We have a great creative team and you know, their whole role and way of working is kind

• 36:19Nathan Labenz?

  of changing, but it does seem like there's huge value in curation still. You can generate a ton of ideas. I don't see a great prospect for us getting to the point where you ask GPT-5 for like one hit sitcom idea and it just delivers, you know, every time. It's like, yeah, boom, bona fide hit. It seems more likely that it's like, you can get a lot of pretty good ideas, but what's really going to resonate, you know, what's really worth developing? What seems like it might be plausible is this kind of like tastemaker role, yeah, curation. It seems like it becomes where a lot of the value is. What do you think about that?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  This sounds so standard, but being a differentiated brand, I think will be a way to keep capturing value, whether you come up with some great ideas yourself, or you're just the person who can just knows what people are going to like and can recommend it to them. Yeah, I do think there will be a lot of value in people that are very good at curating, whether it's a smaller number of people that are massively popular and well-known as good curators, or it's more like, you know, on Instagram, how people have their influencers who they trust and you kind of get this like more decentralized, a lot of different people recommending things and you stumble upon the people whose tastes you trust. But yeah, curation, I mean, the thing is, there is a pretty, when it comes

• 37:39Speaker 00

  to curating scripts, it's either it's very hard or just humans also aren't that high of a bar. Like, you know, until recently, the networks would, would combine, you know, buy 250 ideas every year to put 15, 20 shows on the air. If it becomes much cheaper to make the content overall, then you, you almost get to like a, in the limit, it's like a TikTok thing where you can generate so much content and just see what sticks with people and iterate on it.

• 38:12Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, and the algorithm is certainly very good at surfacing new little bits of interest in the feed, that's for sure.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  And I do, it does seem like there will be a period where, as you were saying, the symbiote, this symbiosis where the humans and the models work very well together. It feels like we're almost not quite at the level where the models are generating a ton of help. And then I wonder how long that window will last where the symbiosis is really that helpful, or if it's like chess where there was, you know, a few years where everyone's like, man, it's just human plus machine. That's the way, that's the way to get the best result. And a few years later, it's the human can't really add much.

• 38:52Nathan Labenz?

  I cite that fairly often myself because I, I do think that is likely to prove a mirage in a lot of domains. You know, it feels like a cope right now in a lot of places that people are kind of like, oh, but you know, the, the, this is really, it's really together is where we're really gonna, you know, and I don't, I don't know. It doesn't seem like a safe assumption anyway.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it feels, it's just like very attractive is almost just like a storytelling device. It's always like this versus this. And then in the end, oh, they work together and that's the best result.

• 39:23Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, nature doesn't always work that way. Whatever, whatever might make a good happy ending. Yeah, nature's full of non-happy endings, unfortunately.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  When you were saying that, you know, you're not just going to ask it for a hit and it'll give you a hit. So a few weeks ago, I wrote this prompt to try to see if it could just come up with a hit TV idea. And it was like, I wanted something kind of timeless. And so I started with like, you know, it's the year 2044. And, but 20 years ago, this show came out that just like changed the game and had rich characters and is like the most beloved show of the past 20 years. Can you please write the magazine review of it from when it came out in the fall of 2024? And it didn't do the best job, but I, what I thought was funny was because I set the vibe up of the years 2044, all the suggestions were sci-fi. Anyway, that's just like a random example of how, the details

• 40:16Speaker 00

  of how you use it and like, oh, it's very vibe focused. Like it takes a lot of cues from the vibe you're putting out there. And if you're trying to get one thing specific from it and give it like this timeless perspective, but you use the phrase, it's the future. And then it's in this mode where everything's sci-fi.

• 40:32Nathan Labenz?

  What I take away from that is I think just writers are really well positioned probably to be effective users of language models.

• 40:41Nathan Labenz?

  Maybe it's too early to even know, but do you think that writers are not even really aware of this yet or hostile to it because they feel like it's sort of an assault on the craft? Or is it more of a like, hey, this could be cool, but like, it's definitely not going to work out to our economic advantage. So we got to fight it, even if it might be cool, we kind of have to fight it out of self-interest. Like, what do you think is the vibe that is kind of driving this demand as it exists today?

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's like a real diversity of reactions. I think, I mean, on the picket signs, at least the things that make it to the picket signs seem to be dismissive that it's just really bad at writing, but the studios don't care about the quality of the content. So they're just going to use it because it's so much cheaper, it's worth it. Then I think there's some writers who see it as a very real threat and just think we need to fight. It's existential and you need to really fight tooth or nail for the survival of all of our livelihoods and careers. And then I think there are some other writers who are, my one good friend, maybe it's because he's a drama writer, so they, people who work more on sci-fi and got into writing

• 41:55Speaker 00

  because they're fascinated by ideas like this, I think are, I mean, I'm sure they're all afraid that it gets so much better, we can't contribute as much, but are excited to play with it and see how it works and see what it's good at and what it's not good at. Yeah, I do think you're playing with it. Sometimes you see a little quirk or it surprises you with something like that Ryan Reynolds bit was like, oh my gosh, that's like really funny. It's kind of cool seeing those sparks where it exceeds your expectations.

• 42:22Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, Sparks of AGI, you've probably seen this, but that was the title of the Microsoft paper that basically reported the same. Of all those, it sounds to me like the first one sounds ultimately least tenable. I mean, I'm sure that this is kind of like the standard thing, right? Like whether it's the lawyers, the doctors, the writers, anybody can sort of, for now, take this position that, oh, the, you know, it's not very good, it's substandard, you know, and for the, the patient or, you know, the, the client, the defendant, you know, the, the viewing audience, like we have to protect the integrity of the product. That to me seems like it's ultimately going to be least. Defensible because even if we're not going to see show writer GPT that can do it all,

• 43:07Nathan Labenz?

  there's no way it can't help some, you know, in various contexts and speed things up or give ideas or what have you. So I guess if I'm advising the strikers, I would probably focus on the latter concerns of just like, you know, I think there's also a good question of do we want to cede control of culture, you know, even if it's good, there's like a question of, you know, is this wise? Even if, even if it's funny at first, you know, are we wise to let such an unknown alien force, you know, have such a big influence on our collective thoughts and shared meme space and all that sort of thing? Like, I can see an argument that it would not be a good idea. Certainly.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I just, one thing I should say on the first thing you were saying is, I, I'm pretty sure the union is in favor of writers being allowed to use it as a tool. So they, they don't want to block writers themselves from, from reaping, you know, some benefits from bouncing ideas off of her using it. But the second thing, yeah, I think it's, I mean, I'm sure we've seen it to some extent with social media where you do a bit lose control of the, the culture generating process or whatever you, you call it. And it's not really like a democratic thing. It's just sort of the accidents of the algorithm or, you know, in Tik Tok, it's literally, you don't know what's happening. It's just all this content's being generated everywhere in the world and things are being

• 44:28Speaker 00

  bubbled up to you. Yeah, it might not be a good thing. It seems like a very hard thing to coordinate, to take deliberate control over what, how the culture will, will progress and evolve. I mean, in one way, the, you know, the union covered studios are sort of like, they have one of the only walls to try and maintain some control in their garden. It's because they can work with all the actors and all the directors that people and, and writers that people like. But yeah, if, if these models get much better, I'm not sure how much longer anyone would be able to, like if anyone in the world can be generating the stories they want, or as you said, the different communities, I think

• 45:12Speaker 00

  it'll be difficult to have any deliberate. Like macro control over where that's going. And then it's a interesting question of all these communities are using these models. How much is it the humans directing it? And how much is it, you know, biased based on how the models they're using?

• 45:28Nathan Labenz?

  And do you see any possibility for an agreement that could align studio and writers? At least on this AI point, I mean, obviously there's going to be negotiations about, you know, percentages. And those are, I assume, you know, going to continue to be contentious. But could you envision a sort of AI standard or, you know, guidelines or something that might make everybody happy?

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Well, I first should say that beyond the things I sent you and the, those four points I mentioned that the Guild is arguing for, that as the general membership, we don't have a ton of insight into the specifics. I think, I guess it makes sense, like they can't just have, let everyone know which points of it they really care about and which they're willing to trade for other things. So I really don't speak for the negotiation committee or the union as a whole. And that being said, I'm really not sure. I mean, I, I think like, maybe there's a world where it's, it's some protections against the cheapest versions of studios or producers trying to steal some of the ownership.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  When the writers are putting in the, the bulk of the work to develop things. One of the other big demands is for minimum staffing on shows. So that a lot of the streaming, the writer rooms have gotten very small because, you know, it's an eight episode order. You have a writer's room open for a shorter amount of time. They brainstorm all the outlines and the ideas, and then the head writers or the showrunners just write all the episodes themselves. And there's kind of a synergy between the two demands because if you have minimum number of writers per show, we might, I see where we care, we're less worried that the AI is going to kind of, you know, destroy the middle of writing jobs.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  And yeah, and the, and AI becomes a bigger part of it, but the writers are, have ownership over some of the product from it. And, and kind of we all benefit.

• 47:34Nathan Labenz?

  Here's one other theory for you. This is very speculative, but I'm very curious as to your take on it. Obviously, a lot of people jump to, okay, everything's going to be cheap. But it's also going to be hard to make a living. We need some sort of new social contract at like the highest level, right? We need a new universal basic income or something like that. So everybody can kind of relax, knowing that you don't have, you know, you can eat even if you're not gainfully employed. Right? That would be a, you know, seemingly a nice enhancement for the future. And then I guess people then start to worry like, well, what am I going to do? You know, how am I going to use my time? Are people going to find fulfillment and all that? And it seems like to some degree, maybe this is romanticizing, but it seems like to some degree,

• 48:17Nathan Labenz?

  the writers kind of have one of those jobs that people like actually would want to have or would imagine themselves doing, even if they didn't have to work to get paid. So is there a framing of this that's like, once this all happens and we can all be writers? And maybe we won't make a ton of money from it, but we could sort of have needs taken care of. And then everybody can kind of, you know, explore their own creativity.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was just talking to a friend about if you picture the long-term utopian future, where artificial intelligence can fill, could on its own, just make something. But then there's room for you to kind of just do whatever part of that you want to do. If you're a writer, you can write a script and have the rest generated by the AI. If you're an actor, you can, you know, give your performances and have everything else, have the scripts filled in. If you're a director, you can get the script and, and give feedback on the performances. And I mean, there's, there's a world where it's, you know, like, I'm very fortunate. I get a very fun job. I just get to be creative and, you know, have fun discussions

• 49:23Speaker 00

  and make jokes with like really smart, talented people. And it would be nice in a world where everyone can kind of have an experience like that. Yeah, people could form groups and work on scripts together and use the AI to fill in the stuff they can't do. And because right now it's just very expensive to make something. And so it makes a high bar for. It really limits the number of people that get to be creative every day. And in the long term, I have to see where, in terms of livelihood, who knows where the value gets captured in this sea where everyone is contributing something different, but everything's getting so cheap. But yeah, when you say that, when you paint that picture, to me, it seems very nice.

• 50:08Nathan Labenz?

  You know, there's obviously been much attention focused to the importance of diversity and different viewpoints in, you know, any sort of collaborative work setting. I've never felt that as viscerally as I have when we're trying to get the AI to do something. It's so often the case that I'm like, well, I kind of got it to here, but I don't really like the outputs. And then, you know, somebody who has a different educational background or any kind of background, different perspective can often tweak my prompt to, you know, make it a little sharper in this particular way, you know, that can, and I've seen it go both directions where somebody will come and be like, what we need is a defined rubric and that will make this work and that can work.

• 50:52Nathan Labenz?

  And then other times I'll, you know, somebody who's much more on the creative side compared to me will be like, what we need to do is inspire this to like, take on a particular style. And that can also really unlock a lot of value. So there is almost a, where I'm leaving this is I almost feel like there is a writer's room, you know, with your minimum staffing requirements, perhaps negotiated by the union, that becomes a, you know, a sufficiently kind of diverse team to take maybe full advantage of some of the AI tools, which at least I really do struggle to do totally solo. I very consistently do find better results if I workshop, you know, prompts and workflows with others.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of times we, a script comes in, we all read the same script and we all give our notes to it. Like, oh, this should be more in this style and this character should be talking more like this and this part doesn't make sense. And it really helps having a bunch of different eyes on the same script to throw their thoughts in. I mean, a lot of using the prompting feels like giving notes in a writer's room.

• 51:57Nathan Labenz?

  I'd probably again, go back to the domains where there is a standard of care. Or something equivalent as compared to domains where there's just not and you know, everything is kind of its own unique snowflake output. I think it is very plausible that even GPT-4, like I don't know that, you know, that it needs to be a next generation model even, but just maybe refinements to this one, can get you to the point where like, you should be able to approach it naively with just an earnest concern, you know, whether it's medical or whatever it may be, and have it kind of, you know, I think it makes sense to aspire, if you're the model creator, to say like, we don't want people to have to get all nuanced in that moment.

• 52:41Nathan Labenz?

  We just want them to be able to ask their question in their own words, whatever. But if you are trying to engage it as a creative partner, then yeah, I don't really see how that's going to go away anytime soon, right? I mean, even if you were, you know, trying to delegate to a human or your, your, you know, your human writing partner, there's going to be, you have to like, you have to give something to get something back, you know, that's of any relevance or interest. So I do think there is at least a subdomain of prompt engineering that I don't really see how it goes away.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  It is not that different sometimes from prompting humans who you're collaborating with.

• 53:18Nathan Labenz?

  It's getting more and more similar all the time, that's for sure.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  How much, when you say like the standard of care, how much for medical and law, do you think it's so much more effective because the success is such a clear thing you're hitting for? And how much do you think it's just like areas where they depend on a vast literature? It's just going to overperform on, because medicine, there's just so much and no humans keeping it all in their head at once. Whereas if you're trying to solve a story problem or find a twist, you almost need no outside literature. It's just, you know, pure thinking.

• 53:53Nathan Labenz?

  I think both definitely matter. We did, I think a prior guest put this really well, the founders of OT, which is a research assistant. They really emphasize that for certain tasks, there just is no success criteria. And if you can't engineer one, then you're kind of in a tough spot. Now, you can ultimately like measure whether people laugh or not, but, and we're so early in that, I mean, I think OpenAI, they obviously haven't disclosed it, but they have done deals with data providers. We don't know who, we don't know what they paid, you know, we don't know what they got. But it's pretty clear, I think, that they have done deals with data providers. Seeing, you know, for probably multiple reasons, but seeing that the writing's on the wall,

• 54:35Nathan Labenz?

  that there's going to be legal challenges, they want to be able to kind of lift the curtain and be like, guess what, we're all legal. Those deals are going to be a huge factor as well. Stability AI is kind of trying to position themselves as like, we'll make the model that's just for you, using all your content, like the Disney model, right? They're going to go to Disney and I don't know if this has or hasn't happened, but there's, somebody's definitely going to go to Disney and be like, you have all this stuff, you know, and, and it's probably enough to make something that could really work for you, but only you, you know, can allow us to do, first of all, even give us access and, you know, legally allow us to do that. And then, of course, you're going to own it. So there's kind of maybe more of like a service business model there in model creation. Mosaic is doing a great business in this type of thing as well.

• 55:19Nathan Labenz?

  But I've really enjoyed this conversation. I, I'm, it's a great surprise to connect with someone who's both in the writing world and very clearly paying a lot of attention to AI. And you've got a, got a great read on the current situation. So I really appreciate the time.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  This was really fun. I also, on the, just the last thing you were saying, I do think one of the things the union is fighting for is we have some rights to how our writing is reused. Right now, it's, you know, they're demanding to not be able to train stuff on our material. But to what you're saying, I wonder if there is the writers enjoying some of the upside.

• 55:55Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, potentially so.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  But, um, yeah, that's, no, this has been so fun. And, uh, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm definitely going to be listening to more of this podcast.

• 56:04Nathan Labenz?

  Well, that's flattering. Trey Kollmer, thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution. Sophia Lear, welcome to the cognitive revolution.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

• 56:15Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, so I'm excited to just kind of learn about you and, you know, how AI is starting to present itself in your life and work. You're a Hollywood writer, you know, maybe just give us a little bit of introduction into what that looks like. And then, you know, obviously we can get into the WGA strike and the AI related demands and, and all that good stuff.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  I was currently a co-executive producer on Ghost, which is a sitcom on CBS. And I've been doing mostly network TV shows for a while, which is sort of.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Outside of the experience of a lot of the guild and is a little bit sort of separated from a lot of the issues that are the guild is striking about right now. But yeah, I've been, I worked on the show New Girl and then a lot of other shows that less people have seen. And, you know, being in the writer's room is just one of the things that I really love. And it's just so fun to be a part of like a comedy writer's room. So yeah, I usually have been the sort of 22 episode network shows. They're nine months of being in a writer's room from coming up with the episodes to writing them, to punching them up and seeing them through

• 57:33Speaker 01

  production and editing. And yeah, it's been a, it's been a blast.

• 57:37Nathan Labenz?

  You know, bring us then to the present day. I know that there are multiple different issues that are important to the strike. How important do you think these AI issues are? You know, as compared to things that would be, you know, presumably considered kind of more core of like how certain revenues are going to be, you know, current revenues are going to be just divvied up?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  I think we don't know really. I mean, as with AI in like so many ways, it just feels so nascent in terms of what the implications are exactly. For me personally, I feel like if AI can really do a writer's job as well or better than humans, I don't think that there's anything that we can sort of put into contractual language or kind of negotiate to change. So in terms of the strike, I

• 58:38Speaker 01

  I don't know. I personally feel that humans will always have something to offer in terms of writing scripts and telling stories and jokes also, I think, is something that is particularly difficult for AI to understand or to do. But obviously, I could be 100% incorrect about that.

• 59:02Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I was pretty deep in it, you know, as of last summer, doing all kinds of different task automation type things and, you know, building apps. And then GPT-4, you know, came online and it was like, whoa, this is really next level. And it kind of changed my framing because I guess implicitly I had been thinking, you know, it's probably going to level off or if I even had that, you know, fully consciously in my head. But it was like, it was clearly like not, you know, rivaling me in anything. It was, it was a, you know, very much a tool that with some elbow grease, I could get to do stuff for me. And then GPT-4 is like, man, it's a lot closer. So people are still, I think, pretty divided on, you know, is that going to kind of level

• 59:43Nathan Labenz?

  out, you know, just under? And I think this would be in some ways like an ideal place for us to hang out for a while, where the AIs kind of max out at like just under human level. If we could get something like that, it would be like, you know, we could have AI, you know, powered doctor, you know, type experiences that could be extremely valuable, extremely good, you know, apply kind of standard practice. But yet we wouldn't like lose track of, you know, lose control of the future to like AI scientists. And probably similarly in culture, you know, there could be a, maybe a happy place where, you know, you get a great writing assistant, you know, AI writing assistant, but it's never like truly breaking through to this kind of

• 1:00:29Nathan Labenz?

  brilliant next level, you know, deeply resonant storytelling that, you know, the best, you know, people in their best moments are able to create. And I don't know where we're going to be on that. Honestly, if I had to guess, I would say it does seem likely, just given how far it's come already, that it, that it probably goes even further, but it may not. You know, the argument would be like, you're limited by the training data. How are you ever going to get smarter than the smartest stuff in your training data? You know, maybe that just can't happen and we kind of max out.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  To your point, I, yeah, I mean, it seems sort of silly to think that like.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Will always be slightly better, but I mean, just imagining like, you know, if you had like a script that's written by AI and it's computer generated set and computer generated actors, let's say, like, could that be as moving or impactful? If you sort of know that it's all a simulation, I don't like, I don't know. I don't know, but I think there's something about it being art. Does that change the question at all, you know, in terms of like, is it good or or does it have the same impact that I do you know what I mean like versus just

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  other tasks that are sort of like, they are done and that's the only thing that is necessary for them to be complete.

• 1:01:59Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, we're very early in trying to sort all that out. You know, there've been some of these stories where somebody will enter an AI generated piece of visual art into a contest and there've been a couple instances of like, you know, the AI art winning the contest. And then you've got this big reveal after the fact and kind of a lot of gnashing of teeth because it's like, you know, it's kind of hard to argue that, you know, it must have been competitive. You know, when blinded, you know, people accepted it and seemed to enjoy it. Even to the point of like awarding it, you know, prizes, but then when the reveal happens, they feel like often, you know, quite upset about that. Partly maybe just because they feel like they've been, you know, sort of used. But I think it also runs a little bit deeper than that. And it's kind of like,

• 1:02:45Nathan Labenz?

  it's not just that you kept that secret from us. It's like the whole thing is kind of, you know, bothersome to people for, you know, I think pretty understandable reasons. How much of that kind of discussion or awareness would you say is kind of the norm now in like a Hollywood writers room? Is this something that you guys are like talking about in the writers room a lot over the last few months?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  I mean, not on a deep level. I think there's been sort of like some playing around with it. I mean, it's like some sort of naughty, but very intriguing thing, you know, and yeah, I first was like made aware of chat GPT from a writer in the writers room, like being like, you know, my brother like asked the chat GPT for movie prompts and gave it little ideas and then it like fleshed out the whole story and like, they're pretty good. And I mean, currently I think it's very good at, yeah, it's sort of like log line level

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  story ideas. And so I don't know, there's been some like messing around with it, seeing what it can do, seeing what it's good at, seeing what it's not good at. There's always so much like time in the writers room where you're like, you know, it's like 12 people and you're just like, what, what could a episode be about? What could happen? And it just feels like you just have no ideas. And so I think anything where, you know, it's sort of like, oh, what is, does the robot have any like ideas? I mean, I think that's always just gonna.

• 1:04:28Nathan Labenz?

  I'm kind of really curious as to how people are feeling like, is this a strategic defense of an economic position? Is it a kind of defense of, you know, a certain sanctity or purity of, you know, the craft?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  You know, say you have to have a showrunner that's human.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  They often in writers' rooms, you just like sort of run out. You easily feel just sort of burned out of just raw material. And you'll send off writers, usually lower level writers of just like, just generate like some story areas. Just like generate some just raw material that then we can kind of like dig into. And I don't know, I could sort of imagine like, at least it's seeming very helpful to writers that you could have like AI sort of like, okay, what are like 50 story areas that you could do?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  And but to me, you're always gonna need that, like especially comedy writers' rooms, just the conversation and the alchemy and the feeding off of each other and the sort of like unexpected things that happen when you're working with other people. So, you know, I think that to me, sort of fundamentally, having some tool that kind of can just generate material that then you can sort of work with, sounds at least nominally helpful. But that also, I believe in that, you know, it really makes a difference when people are talking to each other and generating things together.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  And what comes out of that is always more exciting and interesting than just someone working on their own. That, you know, that's sort of like predicated on some idea I have of quality or what's good. And if it doesn't matter that something reached that level of quality, you know, it's possible that companies just... And I think that's a little bit what we've seen like leading up to the strike with just the conditions for writers not being that great. It's like... Well, what is the bar in terms of quality and maybe just? I personally feel like you get better stuff out of people talking and working together, but

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I could be wrong and be, you know, the companies could easily just not care. And it's just sort of like, okay, it's like a slightly better cookie that you're making than the cookie I think is like a better quality, but people are gonna buy it. So, you know, what do, what do they care about it? I think there's a lot of sort of existential fear in the Writers Guild right now. And so I think AI is like very much a part of that. So, you know, I think there is worry about that. I don't, I just, I tend to feel like, you know, if this was a phase of time where we got to be writers, you know,

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  I'm glad to have been a part of it and I need to get some more like skills I can market. I don't know, it just feels so

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  too large to be something to sort of fret about or be concerned about.

• 1:07:53Nathan Labenz?

  People have this notion that there's like, you know, the studios don't really care. They'll feed crap to the audience. And, you know, if they can save a dollar on the writers, you know, either by just, you know, having fewer of them or, you know, screwing them whichever which way or replacing with AI, you know, they don't really care about any of that. They'll just do it and, you know, continue to turn stuff out and, you know, the audience will accept it. That's a little tough for me to reconcile with my just general sense that like content is fiercely competitive. You know, there's like infinite alternatives. It's like the, one of the most liquid markets that we're in. It's, I, I have a hard time imagining how the studios like could end up in a spot where they like, don't care about the quality of the content, but.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  And writers are very prone to feel this way, but one part is that, you know, I think sometimes writers at least often feel that the writing aspect of something being good is sort of overlooked and there's like the Lord of the Rings show that's out now that was sort of like a real dud and. I think part of that is just not given enough time to write, not like just being well thought out as a story. And sometimes I think there's, you know, oh, it's Lord of the Rings and it's gonna look really cool and underestimating the fact that like if the story isn't good

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  or fleshed out, it's really gonna like, people are gonna register it as bad and not even quite know why.

• 1:09:22Nathan Labenz?

  So I wonder, you know, like with the rise of like avatars and like deep fake type stuff, you know, are we gonna see an actor, you know, guild strike coming up soon? Or, you know, there's all this like post-production, you know, amazingness. Adobe is just like rolling out insane updates left and right, you know, where you can, just saw a demo yesterday, you can segment an image and like replace the floor, replace the wall, replace the ceiling, you know, replace the guy, add a car. I mean, it's like, whoa, and this is taking, you know, seconds to minutes and comes out, you know, to my eye, looking like very good. So I guess, is there sort of a similar, you know, fear going on? Is there enough kind of cross pollination?

• 1:10:05Nathan Labenz?

  You know, do you think that there's ultimately gonna be like a solidarity across like all these different, you know, groups that, you know, contribute to the creation of content? How do you think that kind of plays out? Because it's happening, you know, as you, I'm sure you are aware, seemingly at every stack of the content, at every layer of the content creation stack.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, the deep fake, I'm sure that you can have fake actors pretty soon, if not already. I'll be curious to see if, if the Actors Guild, if SAG strikes, they haven't been on strike in a long time. Directors seem pretty set. They say, I might have to get into directing, because that seems like a pretty, there, there's just very strict, I mean, the guild is very strong, they have very strict rules about that you have to have a director. And it does seem like something that's sort of, I mean, I think directing is a managerial role in a lot of ways, like you're just sort of head

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  of the production. So that seems, I don't know if the Directors Guild has similar alignment with the other guilds. Yeah. And in terms of like, I mean, obviously CGI was a huge thing and just the technology of

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Of how things look, it'll be fascinating to see what happens.

• 1:11:31Nathan Labenz?

  These disruptions have happened before, right? At one point in time, you know, you wanted to shoot Ben Hur, you had to set up an actual, you know, actual horses, you know, actual chariots, you know, there's no other way to do it. Now, you know, you don't really have to, you don't have to necessarily visit the hippodrome in person to, you know, to create a similar scene. And so we sort of survived that. And a lot of people are kind of like, yeah, it'll happen again. You know, people talk about bank tellers like, oh, when the ATM came out, you know, people were sort of, there goes the bank teller. And what is instead happened is there's actually more bank tellers because, you know, it became more profitable to run a bank. And so people opened up a lot more banks. There's like, there's way more bank branches than there used to be.

• 1:12:15Nathan Labenz?

  And so there's more jobs and they don't count as much money, but they like, you know, sell you mortgages, whatever. It's a pretty pat story at this point. Big question, obviously, is like,

• 1:12:25Nathan Labenz?

  does that pattern hold this time? And, you know, it's really hard to say, like, do we just get you know, another 10x or 100x more content, you know, that all has kind of awesome special effects? And, you know, is made much more cheaply with smaller teams, but, you know, nevertheless, like, those are jobs and there's just more, you know, more content creation happening? Or is there some sort of,

• 1:12:54Nathan Labenz?

  you know, genuine kind of displacement this time around? Because it's like, you know, people can only watch so many movies and, or, you know, shows like their time, obviously, you know, remains the, the one resource that's not changing. And, you know, maybe there is, you know, is there, what could we even do with like 100x? And people are already watching, you know, eight, nine hours of video a day, you know, they can't really move that, that much. So like, what can we really do with 100 times more content? You know, is it going to be that people just have that much more choice or they get, you know, that much more tailored stuff you could even imagine? You know, individual personalization, obviously, at some point. But yeah, I don't know. The crystal ball gets, gets pretty foggy there.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  You could imagine that everybody is just sort of watching the things that are tailored to them and this idea that part of TV or part of movies is a sharedness to it is just an idea that will, you know, go away. I personally think that something would be lost, but it already sort of has been. I mean, you know, they're just the sort of show that everybody success, you know, but it feels nice to me when it's like succession and you get to talk about it and.

• 1:14:03Nathan Labenz?

  Any other thoughts on your mind or topics you want to cover?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Anything that can make jobs done cheaper at the same like quality is like business is always going to reward that. AI should just like cure cancer and do stuff like that and let let us keep writing stories. That's my pitch to AI if it's listening.

• 1:14:27Nathan Labenz?

  I'll pass that along. Sophia Lear, thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution. Garrett Schabb, welcome to the cognitive revolution.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Cool. Thanks for having me.

• 1:14:38Nathan Labenz?

  We are talking in the midst of a Hollywood writer's strike and you are party to that. So I guess maybe just for starters, can you kind of give us a little bit of context on who you are and, you know, how this whole thing has come about in in recent weeks?

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Of course. So I'm a TV and film writer. I've been in the writer's guild since 2012. I've worked in comedy and drama and my last show I wrote for was a show called Suits, a legal show with famously a Meghan Markle theme. And in the last, you know, this is going into our third week of striking. And I think, you know, for for listeners, one one thing that I find super interesting and lucky is that, you know, we're talking about how chat GPT and other large language models could be used to sort of take our jobs. I think we're very lucky that this negotiation cycle happened when it did. If chat GPT or these large language models had been released a year ago or two years ago.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  I think the studios would have already implemented them and we wouldn't have had this moment to get out ahead of the conversation. I think we would be way behind it. So just pure luck. I think we're, we're talking about these issues now and we have some voice in the matter rather than being immediately phased out.

• 1:15:56Nathan Labenz?

  How would you articulate to, you know, somebody outside the industry, kind of what you view to be really at the heart of the issue?

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  The Writers Guild position is that AI should not be used to generate literary material of any kind. So a studio couldn't ask a large language model for a short story about time travel and then bring that short story to a writer and ask them to adapt that piece of intellectual property as a television show or a movie. We also don't want it to generate drafts of scripts that then a writer could be employed or engaged at a discounted rate to sort of edit it or punch it up, as we say. It seems like from, you know, this

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  is our dystopian, but I think also realistic view, is that the studios see a future in Hollywood that involves as little human contribution as possible. And I think for, this is complex, obviously, but I think for professionals working in a field that is centered around telling human stories, I think we find that fundamentally, I don't think any, any writer is opposed to change, but we think that it's, the approach that the studios have, obviously, is geared towards profit, less towards telling, enriching human stories

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  and phasing, phasing out an entire workforce. It's obviously something we want to prevent. We've seen a trend and we've connected that with the emergence of these large language models and we could, we can very easily see how these studios would, would use that technology to continue that trend to a pretty logical endpoint.

• 1:17:52Nathan Labenz?

  Is this something that is happening now? Like, are people, are there any examples of, you know, shows that have been, that people have tried to kind of assign the creator role to an AI or just not have one?

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  So, so there's been some rumors, and I'm not sure if they've been corroborated, corroborated or not, that right now, many of these studios are, because obviously there, there is some copyright law that I just don't think has been worked out at all yet. On this, it's so cutting edge, but what the studios, it sounds like they're doing is feeding works, literary works in the public domain into, I think they may have their own proprietary models at this point, and asking these models to generate feature-length scripts for books that are in the public domain. And they might be saying,

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  make, you know, make The Count of Monte Cristo into a modern-day, female-driven, action thriller. Go.

• 1:18:53Nathan Labenz?

  Have you gone in and played around with this stuff? Like, what has your kind of chat GPT, you know, personal exploration looked like?

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I've used it extensively. I, first, just as a, as a layperson, I just wanna, I wanna understand the technology as much as, as I can for, for non-working purposes, but I have, I have started to use it a fair amount in my own personal writing. I would say I use it almost as a writer's assistant. Because I'm, especially, you know, now during the strike, I'm, I'm working alone from home. I find it's great at helping me organize, keep track of my ideas, and use as a sounding board that I sort of consider it to be, like, if I was employing somebody just out of college,

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  and I wasn't asking them for pitches on ideas. I was just asking them to hear me, recite back with clarity what they heard me say, hold on to certain ideas, so that I can, you know, bring them back at a moment's notice. So, um, what I'm, I'm outlining a, a new pilot episode for, for a, a new concept of a television show right now. And I will just talk to it about the characters, their relationship, their dynamic, or say, the outline of the episode, and I'll just sort of say to, to the model, you know, keep this outline. At hand, so if I want to make changes to it, you can just spit it back out to me.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  And if I say, oh, actually, I don't want that thing to happen in act three. That then rippled into act four, can you? Remove those two scenes and replace them with this and this. That's sort of how I'm using it right now, and I would say it's been. It's been pretty useful and also more unreliable in some ways that I wasn't expecting. But I've sort of drawn a moral line in that I'm not asking it for pitches or ideas. That's me personally, I've sort of developed a code with myself. But I've also asked it more on an experimental level to generate ideas.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Just to see what it's capable of, and I've found that almost without exception, it reverts to pretty cliche stuff. Even when I spent a lot of time trying to explain. How? Novel concepts are arrived at and trying to coax it to. Come up with new stuff, it still feeds me super cliche ideas. So I don't know if I'm missing out on anything. Novel by maintaining that personal code.

• 1:21:37Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, interesting. Is that you're using, it sounds like chat G P T is kind of the the main.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, G P T four, yeah. So I will generate an outline for this pilot episode that I have, right? Um, broken down into acts and then under each act, I'll have maybe four or five major scenes, right? And I'll type two or three sentences for each scene. And this will be maybe. Under a thousand words and I I'll have this. I'll I'll put this into uh the the chat and I'll say, keep this outline handy. And anytime I type outline, spit this back exactly as I wrote it to me so I can make changes. And then you and then make changes as I dictate. What I've been noticing at first it was subtle and then it sort of started to like, you know, get this weird B V A loop.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  It would start spitting me back the outline. And then it would, it would make subtle changes or omissions. So it would like subtly change the profession of my main character or forget a scene that I had put in there. I mean, I, you know, I understand that like, for example, these things aren't great at doing math, right? At least right now, that's something that's lagging behind. It's interesting to me that you're asking it simply to just forget to take exactly what we, what I had put in. Maybe three exchanges earlier and it's failing at that. And it's sort of actually added an extra headache for me because you go through nine or 10 or 12 iterations of an outline.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  And then you realize, wait a second, where's that scene that I had imagined five hours ago? That I sort of relied on this thing to keep track of, and now it's gone and now I have to scroll back up thousands and thousands of words. Diminishes the, the, how useful the tool is for me. I'm still using it in this way, but it was just an interesting thing that I noticed I was not expecting.

• 1:23:32Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I wonder if there, there might be some techniques that could help you with that. One of the really common ones is known as the format trick. And you basically sort of say, use this format. And there are some other, you know, you can cut, again, they're very flexible, right? So you can kind of experiment and find your own, you know, format rhythm, but I tend to do things like use this format. And then I'll have kind of deliberately sort of odd tags sometimes. Like I'll use kind of an XML, you know, HTML like tag to be like, you know, script scene one, you know, within brackets. And then kind of an end tag below that.

• 1:24:13Nathan Labenz?

  And then kind of dressing that up a little bit more like oddly structured, but telling it use this format. At a minimum, I would think you should be able to get consistent structure back. Like I would, I would not expect that you should see scenes, you know, getting dropped. What I, what I would guess might be happening there is. Also, you could just be a little bit more explicit about some things. You know, you, I always also recommend positive framing instead of negative framing. So sometimes people will say like, do not change the structure of the outline or whatever. And sometimes, I think the later models are getting better with this too. But definitely have seen in the past problem with negation where, you know, it's kind of the,

• 1:24:59Nathan Labenz?

  I forget the, the, don't think of the white rhino or whatever. And then it's like, all you can think of is the white rhino. There's a little bit of that effect with the, the model. So sometimes I recommend to people, instead of saying, don't do X, like say in a positive way, what you do want it to do, like always, you must always, you know, return exactly the structure and may modify, you know, these aspects. I, I bet you can get over that hump to at least get kind of the consistency of structure that you want back. Simple things too, like might be interpreted a little differently than you mean them. So if you say like rewrite this script or whatever, like exactly what it's me, you know, you may be thinking in your head, like a certain definition of rewrite, and it may have a little more expansive definition of rewrite.

• 1:25:43Nathan Labenz?

  So anyway, we could workshop this separately. I think maybe folks will find this interesting, but I bet there is at least to the point where you'd get the right number of scenes, you know, back. I think you could get there.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  What's interesting is that all of us as writers have

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  voices of other writers in our heads. So when I'm writing something, I'm trying to, whether it's consciously or not, I'm trying to kind of write like Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, or Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, like those people's voices are definitely in my head. And obviously there is, it's an interesting question. Do, by invoking David Ogilvy or by invoking Vince Gilligan and using it in chat, in the chat G P T prompts, what, what is that artist owed, if anything, for their contribution to the, to the voice that the model, you know, has in its head?

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  And we haven't litigated that yet. I'm sure you've talked to some people like that, but it's a it's another big question that I think a lot of writers, especially the high profile ones are are worried about, which is they've worked their entire careers. They've been extremely lucky and they're extremely talented just to have their voice, their unique voice, you know, automated. But I think the other scary thing is that for the the idea of new voices coming along, I'm not sure, you know, if we if we enter this near future where most content, most written content for TV or films are written by or generated by by a model.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  I'm not sure we're going to see new voices come. I think we're going to see sort of this endless whirlpool of regurgitation of what's already out there. So I think that's just a it's a fear and a and a unique question about who is owed what when you say, right, like David Ogilvie? I don't know if you have a take on that.

• 1:27:40Nathan Labenz?

  I don't feel like I have the final answer. I do think it is definitely a fair question. You know, what definitely doesn't cut it in my mind is a notion that is like, when you do hear this stuff, you'll hear people say, well, people really do the same thing, you know, and you kind of said a version of that, right? Like we all, everything's a remix and, you know, we're all taking inspiration from everywhere and, you know, so therefore it's no big deal if the AI does the same. I don't buy that argument at all because I think, you know, one of the most important things to keep in mind about these technologies is that they are fundamentally alien. You know, they are not,

• 1:28:18Nathan Labenz?

  they're not human, you know, they they do, many people go the other error on the other side of this too, and say like, they don't understand anything. And I would push back on that and say, well, I think they actually do understand things. They may not understand them in quite the same way that we do, but we are starting to elucidate like the mechanisms of understanding, some of which turn out to be quite weird. You know, in comparison to how we feel like we understand, but there is some understanding there, but like it's not, it doesn't follow from. In my mind at all, from this fact that humans take inspiration from other humans, that we therefore have to, you know, allow AIs to kind of run wild and do whatever they want to do. You know, they're fundamentally different beasts, and I don't think it, you know, it is at all obvious, you know, what the, what the rights, you know, decisions around that should be.

• 1:29:03Nathan Labenz?

  I do think it's really, it does get into, in my mind, definitely much more gray area when you start to name specific people. Cause you're talking in an agreement with studios, but then there's also the broader like societal question of, you know, all the TikTok creators can go to ChatGPT and ask for David Ogilvy and they can just put stuff out there and that, you know, nobody's even negotiating over that right now.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there are probably different thresholds for, and maybe these are arbitrary, but different thresholds for different types of media, you know? And I would say, you know, it's interesting, I think for, if you plugged in, you know, give me some ideas in the, in the voice of this person. But you sort of made a, a contract with yourself that nothing that you get back is gonna, is going to see the outside world or whatever. Even if it gives you some good ideas, you're gonna then filter those ideas through your own human prism. I think, I still think that there's something morally okay with that.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  The idea, for me at least, of taking the ideas that come straight from the model, especially if you're asking for ideas based on other famous writers and then just using them whole cloth, there would just be something wrong to me about that. I do wonder, you know, obviously we don't know how these things are, how, how they're gonna get better in terms of storytelling. And I, I wonder, you know, is there gonna be a world where they get amazing, but in different ways than human storytelling is? And, and I wonder if there's gonna be sort of two types of storytelling in the future, right?

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  And we, maybe we find that it tells stories that are just different and weird in a way that we never saw coming. And maybe there's a place for human stories and AI stories, but we're not asking the AI to sort of create or masquerade as human storytelling, but tell us stories that we never would have thought of.

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  And as, as somebody, as a creative, you know, at heart, I would love to see those stories. I don't, I don't necessarily want it to take my job away. So I'm sort of talking through both sides of my mouth. But at, at that point, you're almost verging into, you know, gaming, which is a completely legitimate and amazing form of storytelling in itself. So I think that there are, there are delineations between different types of storytelling. I, I do believe that there's, there's something about

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  singular fixed stories that are going to remain powerful, right? People who read the same book or watch the same movie or, or television series, or listen to the same album and are able to discuss and bond over what that means to them individually and, you know, collectively. I think that those, that type of fixed storytelling should remain. And I think there's a, a real cultural power to stuff like that. I, and, but of course, I think gaming is, is awesome. And I, I'm curious about, you know, there's a, there's a thread by one of the former director of the Screen Actors Guild.

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  And she wrote this long thread about the studios wanting to create these basically choose your own adventure movies where everyone has their own action movie built for them. Where they are placed into, you know, i- i- if they're into Fast and Furious, they can be put into the driver's seat next to Vin Diesel and the whole movie can be generated, bespoke in a moment's notice for them. And they get to see themselves or whatever, their son as the main character of Fast and the Furious. I could see that, just seeing where the technology is going, I can see that. I'm not sure that type of storytelling.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Has a ton of power behind it culturally. For my personal taste, it feels like a novelty that I'm not sure people will. It feels like a bauble to me. I could be totally wrong, but I don't think that that has as much cultural power as.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Wow, we all watch the same movie. We have different thoughts, but we can bond as humans over it. And don't we tell stories to find solidarity?

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  As humans, right? Stories resonate, a single story like Lord of the Rings, right? That resonates with millions, billions of people over, you know, generations. It's never, it doesn't change. It doesn't make adjustments for whoever's reading or experiencing it, right? It is this fixed story that we all see something that we recognize in. So it's sort of trying to, it's an antidote to the sort of loneliness of of life. And I worry that if we're all just getting these, this sugar rush from these person personalized stories. It loses the, the sort of the core quality of of art or storytelling.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  There, I think, you know, if you look at the response to shows like Succession, which is written with a full writer's room. Over the course of a year, right? A traditional writer's room.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  The response to the depth and the texture and the unpredictable nature and the humanity. Of a show like that that's written by multiple people over a significant period of time. Doesn't compete with these sort of shorter, faster shows that you're seeing on other platforms. And I can see that that gulf growing, right? See people saying, what happened to the stories that we used to like? That were, that felt real and not flat. So I think, you know, there's, I think laypeople assume that.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Studios are.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  incentivized to just find the best writing and create conditions that will tell the best stories. It's just not the case. They don't, especially now, as they're all publicly traded, most publicly traded companies. That's not paramount in what they're looking for. And I think just the shift to AI could accelerate that where it's just about getting out content. And if we land on something that's good or three dimensional or moving, that's an afterthought. I think that's the real fear is that we, writers, we have a, we have this financial incentive, but there's also a big moral thing here that maybe a lot of other unions don't have.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  We're trying to defend the sanctity of, of really good storytelling and that's,

• 1:36:09Speaker 02

  it sounds a little, you know, woo woo, right? To, to say that we have this moral element that we're fighting for and, but I think we, we, we also accept that, that's a, you know, we accept that mantle, at least I do.

• 1:36:24Nathan Labenz?

  If there were a universal basic income and we had decoupled the, the, the right to eat and, you know, and to have like basic needs met from jobs, how, how would that change your thinking on this, if at all?

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  I'm all for decoupling those things. So if, if, if you told me that in 10 years we'll be at that place,

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  I might still be telling stories and, and, and making films with my friends and probably a lot easier to do that. I think the question is, are we going to make it through to that point? Or are we going, yeah, so I, I'm a big fan of the book Fully Automated Luxury Communism that I'm sure you've read. Aaron Bastani, I think is the name of the author. And it's the central question of that book is, we can imagine that future. It's easy to imagine a future where those things are decoupled. It, what's a little harder to imagine is making it through, you know, late stage capitalism, making it through these technologies, reaching the point where they can automate lots of jobs.

• 1:37:33Speaker 02

  But we don't reach that real post scarcity where the decoupling happens because of this manipulated artificial manipulated or artificial scarcity. So that the people who control the technology can be enriched by it, right? But I'm all I'm all for making it through that that gauntlet. I just don't know if we will. And so I think to be, you know, conservative or cautious as a guild, we we have to react as if that world is not going to exist. But yes, I mean, if if that if that world does exist, I would happily happily give up being paid to write stories.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  And the idea of having a a job and making money from writing a story. If I if I could trade that for everyone having a a basic income and a high, you know, a high standard of of living, yeah, give me give me that over my stupid writing job for sure.

• 1:38:33Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, that's a great utopian vision, perhaps for us to end on the they're in short supply. You know, maybe that's that's one other thing I could leave you with is I think

• 1:38:45Nathan Labenz?

  a positive vision for the future is maybe the thing that is most needed today. You know, we the technology is coming online fast. The, you know, the upside potential of that in my mind is, you know, not just clear, but like clearly transformative. And, you know, we've got dystopian stories and scenarios in abundance, but very few kind of compelling articulations of like what a genuine positive future might be. And, you know, arguably, no, no better group to try to solve that problem of scarcity for us than the the writers.

• 1:39:26Nathan Labenz?

  So if you want to take that challenge on, you know, I'm looking for inspiring visions of the future right now.

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  I will say we are a cynical bunch and we've only become a little more cynical during these last three weeks, but we'll we'll try to accept that challenge.

• 1:39:40Nathan Labenz?

  Garrett Schabb, thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.