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UPS and the Teamsters union representing 340,000 workers at the package carrier on Tuesday said they reached a preliminary labor deal that includes raises for both full- and part-time workers and narrowly avoids a potential strike that could ha
“Generative models are the ones with the ethics problems,” he said, explaining how classifiers are based on carefully using limited training data — such as a viewing history — to generate recommendations.
Netflix offers up to $650,000 for its generative AI technical director role.
Video game writers have expressed concerns about losing work to generative AI, with one major game developer, Ubisoft, saying that it is already using generative AI to write dialogue for nonplayer characters.
Netflix, for its part, advertises that one of its games, a narrative-driven adventure game called “Scriptic: Crime Stories,” centered around crime stories, “uses generative AI to help tell them.”
Disney’s AI Operations
Disney has also listed job openings for AI-related positions. In one, the entertainment giant is looking for a senior AI engineer to “drive innovation across our cinematic pipelines and theatrical experiences.” The posting mentions several big-name Disney studios where AI is already playing a role, including Marvel, Walt Disney Animation, and Pixar.
In a recent earnings call, Disney CEO Bob Iger alluded to the challenges that the company would have in integrating AI into its current business model.
“In fact, we’re already starting to use AI to create some efficiencies and ultimately to better serve consumers,” Iger said, as recently reported by journalist Lee Fang. “But it’s also clear that AI is going to be highly disruptive, and it could be extremely difficult to manage, particularly from an IP management perspective.”
Iger added, “I can tell you that our legal team is working overtime already to try to come to grips with what could be some of the challenges here.” Though Iger declined to go into specifics, Disney’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings provide some clues.
“It seems clear that the entertainment industry is willing to make massive investments in generative AI.”
“Rules governing new technological developments, such as developments in generative AI, remain unsettled, and these developments may affect aspects of our existing business model, including revenue streams for the use of our IP and how we create our entertainment products,” the filing says.
While striking actors are seeking to protect their own IP from AI — among the union demands that Iger deemed “just not realistic” — so is Disney.
“It seems clear that the entertainment industry is willing to make massive investments in generative AI,” Zhao said, “not just potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, but also valuable access to their intellectual property so that AI models can be trained to replace human creatives like actors, writers, journalists for a tiny fraction of human wages.”
For some actors, this is not a struggle against the sci-fi dystopia of AI itself, but just a bid for fair working conditions in their industry and control over their own likenesses, bodies, movements, and speech patterns.
“AI isn’t bad, it’s just that the workers (me) need to own and control the means of production!” said Delaney. “My melodious voice? My broad shoulders and dancer’s undulating buttocks? I decide how those are used! Not a board of VC angel investor scumbags meeting in a Sun Valley conference room between niacin IV cocktails or whatever they do.”