Is AI Really Taking Over Our Jobs?
The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strike and conclusion with SAG winning the fight really show's what the future battle between AI and human will be, it will be a fight for jobs and wages. I will not go into the details of what are the issues behind the strike and what did SAG-AFTRA get after movie producers give in to their demands, but try to answer, is AI taking over our jobs?
The advent of Artificial Intelligence usher in a new era of machine tools capable of copying human actions, i think it's still far from copying how human thinks, it made life easier for humans in some aspect of our daily lives, but it also took something from our daily lives, our jobs, our ability to earn a living doing what we love to do.
Taking the SAG-AFTRA as an example, acting is a job that requires a different set of skills, yes you can go to school to learn acting but it takes more than schooling to be an ACTOR/ACTRESS, it requires emotion and psychological preparedness to step into the shoes of the character you're acting and i don't think AI can do that. Even if AI copy the voice and likeness of an actor, they way of delivering a dialogue and the emotion that goes with it is something an AI can't do. Sure AI can write a story but will it have the same emotion in every line and paragraph a writer do? will it have the same delivery and emotion as a screenwriter does? Those things are skills AI can't learn.
But who will stop the movie producers and studio owners from using AI in making movies? The development of SORA, a AI that converts text prompts into video creating a scenery that really looks real, based on the early videos of it's release. SORA is trained on a million videos of a sunset, waterfall, rainy season, winter, summer, spring, dog or cat walking/playing so it'll be able to generate its own video, just like chatGPT but on a large scale of data or what the developers call "internet-scale data" to know what realistic videos look like, first analyzing the clips to know what it's looking at, then learning how to produce its own versions when asked. If this tool is used by movie producers and studio owners it will render a lot of workers in the movie industry jobless.
This scenario brings back the same kind of scenario that happened in the not so distant past when the manufacturing industry started automation of their assembly line, it rendered a lot of workers in the industry across the nation jobless, especially the car manufacturing industry because they became "Redundant" due to robots taking their jobs and with this redundancy also came redundancy in the supply chain of the needed parts to build a car or anything a manufacturer needs to build a product.
What happened to Detroit is the best example how automation (and other factors) affected the city, as manufacturing advances the need for massive assembly plant becomes irrelevant, transferring their plants out of the city and sometimes out of the country and leaving their massive plants, the city and workers wondering how will they cope with the development in the automobile industry. Will utilizing AI in the movie industry also result in a massive lay-offs and turning Hollywood into a second Detroit? A balance approach in utilizing AI not only in the movie industry but across all industries will help solve this bitter question, it does not need be a battle between human and AI meaning it needs to taper greed and exploitation.
Source
https://cdt.org/insights/the-sag-aftra-strike-is-over-but-the-ai-fight-in-hollywood-is-just-beginning/
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/openai-sora
https://www.pennlive.com/midstate/2013/07/auto_industry_troubles_racial.html
