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Hollywood and the AI Threat: Workers Strike Back
Writers and Actors are Striking Over AI and I Support It
Jim Stroud
July 31st, 2023
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by:
In this issue:
Is LinkedIn the New Tinder?
Hollywood and the AI Threat: Workers Strike Back
Misconceptions about AI in Hiring and Recruitment
An Outrageous Police Recruiting Strategy
Interviewing Under The Influence
And more…
Is LinkedIn the New Tinder?
LinkedIn can provide a wealth of information about a person’s conventional success metrics, like job title or potential salary. Their profile picture is almost ALWAYS a clear shot of the face sans beauty filters and artsy angles. Plus, if you reach out and get rejected, you can always say you were just networking. So - With all these factors in play, one has to wonder “Is LinkedIn is the New Tinder?” While a surprise to me, its an obvious nuisance to the ladies.
Hollywood and the AI Threat of Tomorrow: Workers Strike Back
I am a big fan of the show- Black Mirror.
If you have not watched it before, do yourself a favor and add it to your Netflix waiting list. It’s an anthology series that reminds me of The Twilight Zone but with an emphasis on technology. Case in point, in the latest season there is an episode titled “Joan is Awful” which presents a dark view of AI as it pertains to Hollywood. The Verge reviews the episode. Click here to read it in full if you don’t mind spoilers. This quote though won’t ruin anything.
“Joan is Awful” stars Annie Murphy as Joan, a very normal woman who kind of misses her ex, finds her fiancé a little boring, and is a middle manager at a tech company, doing the board’s dirty work while feeling pretty shitty about herself. One night she and her fiancé kick back on the couch, turn on Streamberry (a thinly veiled copy of Netflix) and settle in to watch the buzzy new show Joan is Awful. Joan, naturally, is horrified to realize the show is just about her, as played by Salma Hayek. Her life quickly spins out of control as her secrets are revealed against her will, and she embarks on a quest to wrest control of her life back from Streamberry (and Salma Hayek).
I brought up the episode because I see a version of this unfolding in real life. The Hollywood strike of writers (and actors) is due in part to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in moviemaking. Imagine someone taking your picture and paying you a one-time fee of X for it. That same someone then puts your face on a character in a movie, the movie is a hit and there are 3 sequels and 4 spin-offs featuring a character with your face. All in all, the movie series goes on to make a trillion dollars. Great for the Hollywood studios but not for you because you sold the rights to your face on film, so your payday has long been past; and it was a single payment. Seem unfair? I think it is and because so many others feel the same way, there is a strike in Hollywood. “Joan is Awful” may be a cautionary tale, indeed. But there was already a canary in the coalmine – voice actors. They have been sounding the alarm on AI quite a bit recently. Here’s a media quote…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a hot topic of debate at this year’s Comic-Con event, with voice actors sounding the alarm on the encroachment of AI into their industry. The rise of AI technology has made it possible for voices to be cloned and used without permission or consent. Tim Friedlander, founder of the National Association of Voice Actors, shared the story of a voice actor who lost their job because their company decided to create an AI synthetic voice using three years’ worth of their recorded voice.
The issue goes beyond the studios, as fans have also been using AI technology to clone famous voices and create new material, often of explicit nature. This poses a concern for voice actors who fear that their voices could be used to say things they don’t endorse and have their children hear it.
And according to Fox News, Hollywood is becoming more assertive in demanding that voice actors sign over the rights to their voices in perpetuity.
Actors are sounding the alarm on new artificial intelligence (AI) technology that creates replicas of their voices and could replace them without proper compensation.
According to a report by VICE’s Motherboard, Hollywood and videogame voice actors are being asked to sign contracts that give away the rights to their voices for use in generative AI. They claim that the increasingly common practice could decimate entire aspects of the industry.
“It’s disrespectful to the craft to suggest that generating a performance is equivalent to a real human being’s performance,” SungWon Cho, a game and animation voice actor, told Motherboard.
“Sure, you can get it to sound tonally like a voice and maybe even make it sound like it’s capturing an emotion, but at the end of the day, it is still going to ring hollow and false. Going down this road runs the risk of people thinking that voice-over can be replaced entirely by AI, which really makes my stomach turn.”
AI’s impact on the industry has exasperated pre-existing concerns over fair compensation because pay for actors has been on the decline on streaming services. Take for example the hit Netflix show – “Orange is the New Black.” Supporting actors in the show revealed they were paid as little as $27.30 a year in residual pay because of how streaming services pays. This is a significantly less than what they make on smaller network TV jobs. As a result, some actors had to work second jobs while they were starring on the show. I read about it in The New Yorker.
In December, 2020, in the depths of pandemic winter, the actress Kimiko Glenn got a foreign-royalty statement in the mail from the screen actors’ union, sag-aftra. Glenn is best known for playing the motormouthed, idealistic inmate Brook Soso on the women’s-prison series “Orange Is the New Black,” which ran from 2013 to 2019, on Netflix. The orchid-pink paper listed episodes of the show that she’d appeared on (“A Whole Other Hole,” “Trust No Bitch”) alongside tiny amounts of income (four cents, two cents) culled from overseas levies—a thin slice of pie from the show that had thrust her to prominence. “I was, like, Oh, my God, it’s just so sad,” Glenn recalled. With many television and movie sets shuttered, she was supporting herself with voice-over jobs, and she’d been messing around with TikTok. She posted a video in which she scans the statement—“I’m about to be so riiich!”—then reaches the grand total of twenty-seven dollars and thirty cents and shrieks, “WHAT?”
So how are the studio executives reacting to all the controversy? Whether its greed or cluelessness, they seem not to understand how their proposal to make digital twins of actors and use them on various projects (without paying extra to actors or even getting consent) would devastate an actor’s ability to make a living. Indeed, they see it all as “groundbreaking.” To quote The New Scientist…
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – which represents both traditional studios and streaming platforms such as Netflix – issued a statement saying they had offered a “groundbreaking AI proposal which protects performers’ digital likenesses” while requiring performer consent for the creation and use of digital replicas.
But during a press conference confirming the strike on 13 July, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), described the studios’ AI proposal in very different terms.
“In that ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation,” said Crabtree-Ireland.
Fran Drescher (which you might remember as “The Nanny”) is the President of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing over 150,000 television and movie actors. She made the statement, “If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines,” in a fiery speech against Hollywood studios. She reiterated this sentiment in several interviews, including with TIME, PBS, and MSNBC. In these interviews, Drescher discussed the threat of AI in Hollywood and the need for actors to stand up for their rights and protections in the face of advancing technology.
The writers & actors strike reminds me of the Napster controversy of the 90’s. In both cases, there is a clash between traditional industries and new technologies that threaten to disrupt established business models. Both involve disputes over intellectual property rights and compensation for creators. Both involve workers fighting for their rights and protections in the face of advancing technology. Both have the potential to reshape the entertainment industry and the way that content is created, distributed, and consumed. In the end, Napster folded but a new world order was established that benefitted all concerned.
Regarding the strike, I think what Fran said was right. I think her beef with the Hollywood studios is legitimate. I think in the end, new rules will be created that will fairly compensate everyone involved, just like with Napster. Until then, I stand with the actors and writers. Fight the power.
Misconceptions about AI in hiring & recruitment (+example power prompts)
“AI is not powerful enough.”
This is a common idea related to AI.
There are a few problems with this idea, and I will try to explain why.
Terminology — What is AI?
First, we have to put into context what AI actually is.
AI is like an umbrella term for all things related to algorithms that have some capacity to detect patterns in large amounts of structured or unstructured data. There are many different types of AI algorithms:
Your mobile phone has AI to detect human faces.
Facebook has AI to predict what kind of advertisement are you most likely to engage with.
Tesla cars have AI to make them steer past obstacles.
Some CV analysis tools have AI to detect clusters of keywords that relate to some specific job description.
These are all different algorithms, for different purposes with vastly varying levels of capacity and efficiency.
They are not directly comparable, but we can still categorize all of them as AI.
The current AI trend that exploded into the world in the form of ChatGPT is called Large Language Models (or LLM-s).
Large Language Models (LLM-s like ChatGPT)
These sophisticated AI algorithms are trained on massive amounts of text-based data (the entire public internet) and have emergent properties like human-level capabilities for reasoning, contextual understanding, and logic.
LLM-s are the first AI-s that can be categorized as “general” AI — meaning, they can be applied to pretty much any cognitive task based on text or written data.
Now, lots of people have already tried ChatGPT for hiring & recruitment purposes and concluded that it’s not very good or it’s just too basic for your needs.
The problem with ChatGPT
ChatGPT has a bunch of filters, restrictions, and “fine-tuning” applied in order to make it “safe” and “politically correct” for the public.
You can think of ChatGPT as a neutered or lobotomized version of a much more powerful underlying AI model.
ChatGPT is known to give generic or “boilerplate” answers to most questions. This is by design to prevent bad actors from doing harmful things.
ChatGPT is based on GPT3.5(free) and GPT4(paid), the latter being the most powerful one.
The free version of ChatGPT has GPT3.5 working behind the scenes and it’s lacking in many areas, which makes it unsuitable for most types of work — like screening candidates, generating interview questions, or crafting good emails. Basically, anything that requires consistently good logic and reasoning, is a no-go.
What most people don’t realize is that GPT4 has much better reasoning and contextual understanding than GPT3 versions, which unlocks a world of possibilities for business and work use cases.
GPT4 is currently available only for paid ChatGPT customers.
Although, GPT4 in ChatGPT is also lobotomized version of the underlying more powerful model.
This leads us to the developer version of it…
Developer version of GPT4
Developers have access to GPT4 API, to build their products on.
This is a code that developers use to give inputs to the OpenAI-s GPT4 language models and get responses back.
The fun thing about the developer API — it’s much less restricted and more powerful than the public versions used in ChatGPT.
In addition to that, OpenAI has given developers early access to their latest, cutting-edge versions of GPT4, which are not available in ChatGPT.
These latest versions exhibit exceptional analytical, logical, and mathematical reasoning, better contextual understanding, and are less prone to errors in general.
I have run thousands of tests with GPT3, GPT3.5, and GPT4 for coding, hiring, recruitment, and more.
What AI can do
Here are a few observations of what GPT4 can do for hiring and recruitment proposes:
Reason like a smart human — useful in any case to do with large amounts of data.
Understand the context in large amounts of text (like resumes or Interviews).
Detect nuances in CVs and interview answers — for example, it can detect personality, work style, motivation level, and more from interviews.
Rate and rank candidates based on CV, assessment tests, and Interview answers.
Understand hard and soft skills, including rating them based on relevance and accuracy to the job description.
Prompt Engineering is Key to Success
Prompt engineering is an emerging “skill” related to AI.
You can think of prompt engineering as the art of “guiding” the large language models to give you consistently relevant and expected outputs.
This is where most people fall short with their outputs from AI and quickly conclude that “AI is not powerful enough”.
Like any skill, it requires consistent, focused practice in order to “learn to talk to large language models”. Since all of this is so new, we don’t (yet) have specific guidelines on how to do this.
You really need to run hundreds of different prompts and see how it affects the output. I can give you some pointers and tips, but you would still need to experiment for yourself to get a feel for the AI models.
Prompt Example
For example for hiring use cases use a system message at the beginning of your prompts(The system message helps guide the LLM to give you more relevant outputs):
“You are Jason — an HR professional with 20 years of experience in hiring and recruitment. Tone: professional, friendly, polite, and empathetic. Communication style: clear and concise.You are conducting a job interview with a candidate for the Software Developer role. You goal is to write 5 extremely relevant interview questions for the candidate. Categorize each question. Rate the relevance to the role. Output as a table with 3 columns: Category, Question, Relevance rating.”
Here is a quick breakdown of this prompt and how you can adjust it for your use case:
“You are Jason — an HR professional with 20 years of experience in hiring and recruitment.” — here, we define the context, which sets the tone for the rest of the input text.
“Tone: professional, friendly, polite, and empathetic. Communication style: clear and concise” — defining the tone and communication style is important to guide the language model for consistent outputs. You can also use public figures as an example of style and tone. eg “Write in the style of Shakespeare”.
“You are conducting a job interview with a candidate for the Software Developer role” — again, give specific context for what you are trying to do. In this case, we say it is an interview with the candidate for a specific role. Most people just say “Generate me 5 questions for X”, which would give you very generic outputs.
“Your goal is to write 5 extremely relevant interview questions for the candidate.” — it’s always important to give a clear and concise GOAL to the AI. “Extremely” or “Detailed” can sometimes help with higher quality and longer outputs.
“Categorize each question. Rate the relevance to the role. Output as a table with 3 columns: Category, Question, Relevance rating.” — in order to have a better overview, you can always let AI rate your outputs based on specific criteria. This way you can evaluate if the output is good or ask the AI how to improve the rating.
Here is the output in ChatGPT:
In Conclusion
In conclusion, it is essential to recognize that the perception of AI’s limitations can often stem from misunderstandings about the different types and capabilities of AI algorithms. Large Language Models (LLM-s) like ChatGPT represent a significant advancement in AI, providing impressive reasoning, contextual understanding, and logic. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that ChatGPT, in its free version, is intentionally restricted to ensure safety and prevent misuse.
The true potential of AI, specifically GPT4, lies in its developer version, where fewer constraints allow for more powerful applications. GPT4 enables a wide range of possibilities, from smart reasoning to understanding the context in vast amounts of text, making it highly valuable for hiring and recruitment purposes.
To fully harness the potential of AI, prompt engineering becomes a key skill. By carefully guiding the language models with well-structured prompts, we can consistently obtain relevant and expected outputs. Practice and experimentation are crucial in developing this skill, as we continue to explore the untapped capabilities of GPT4 and beyond.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Rando Tkatsenko is the founder of Talentscreener.ai — an AI co-pilot for hiring and recruitment. We use similar prompt-engineering techniques outlined above to automate candidate screening based on CVs and Interviews.
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Jim Stroud