“The company now expects to exceed $1.7 billion in free cash flow for the third quarter of 2023, in part due to the strong performance of ‘Barbie’ as well as incremental impact from strike-related factors,” the entertainment giant says in a regulatory filing.
It’s just the people who are striking aren’t just asking for a meager raise now.
There’s also stuff about stopping AI before that Black Mirror episode about AI pumping out completed shows come true.
The studios don’t want to agree to stopping that, because they want it to happen.
Which means the strikers are right, and should be striking.
A decade or two from now, it might be AI writers, AI actors, and making a whole movie happens on a computer that just spits out a finished product.
That is something studios would be willing to take a half a billion hit against. And if they didn’t think it was coming, they would have caved by now.
The workers only have leverage if they strike before they can be replaced, and demand a future where humans are more involved than typing in a couple prompts.
Less than a decade, I think. We won’t live to see the first completely generated movie star. We’ll live to see them become the default. We’ll live to see a time when live human acting is, in and of itself, a noteworthy occurrence.
AI isn’t even driving this forward. Square has been ringing this bell for more than a decade with its movies. AI is just making it cheap. And that fact alone is why it will continue, unabated and unhindered, come what may.
What the studios aren’t realizing is that it’s not just the end for human actors, it’s their end as well. If you can generate feature length films with effects and acting and sound, who the hell needs a major studio?