I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

https://www.wired.com/story/i-work-in-hollywood-everyone-who-used-to-make-tv-now-training-ai/

by joozio • 2 months ago

107 87 2 months ago

with the recent google captcha requiring phones and some people facing this issue and multitude of other issues with archive.is

here is an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260511122830/https://serjaimel...

(Side-note: I have created htmlpipe which archives archive.is pages on archive.org so I am more than happy to answer if someone has any questions about it and I have an submission of a blog regarding it too if someone is interested but yeah, enjoy the article now!)

trollbridge2• 2 months ago

yes please!

mkzet• 2 months ago

I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.

toyg• 2 months ago

half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on

I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin women and dehydrated steroid-pumped men), mostly because they are abused to the point of absurdity.

DonHopkins2• 2 months ago

The Americans, a great television series about Russian spies, really leaned into the wigs:

'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wi...

Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties.
Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna.
Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favou...

herpdyderp• 2 months ago

I, however, do look forward to a time when we can prompt our own TV shows. That second season that ruined your favorite show? Fix it. The second season that never happened? Create it. Of course AI needs to get better still for that to be bearable for many of us, but I'm still excited at the idea!

voidpointer2• 2 months ago

Isn't the scenario you are describing the ultimate collapse of art and culture as we know it? If everyone sits at home and creates the content that they want, what do we talk about? How do we engage in shared culture if there is nothing to experience together?

trollbridge2• 2 months ago

I want to watch things that expand my imagination, rather than being limited by it.

maplethorpe• 2 months ago

This + NFT integration will be the real game changer. Like it's Breaking Bad, except Walter White is decked out like one of your Slonks. Or it's Indiana Jones stealing a Bored Ape instead of the idol. Possibilities are endless.

kylecazar• 2 months ago

I share your feelings, but the title is confusing... this is actually about people using gig AI training platforms for extra income (instead of bussing tables like they used to). Not building AI for cinema.

vasco• 2 months ago

There's so many indie movies without much cgi, or good old movies that you'll never live long enough to watch. Writing off a whole art form is a bit weird.

hnthrowaway0315• 2 months ago

I think OP was saying that he/she only watches movies made before 2010.

Coincidentally, I'm doing the same thing with movies, TV shows and games, and 2010 still feels too modern for me. I try to make it before 2005.

torben-friis2• 2 months ago

I mostly skip triple A hollywood movies, but the bulk of movies being made nowadays don't make use of any of that, mostly because it makes no sense in their genres.

Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc.

Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China starting to develop a world-friendly industry...

throwforfeds• 2 months ago

American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.

bsenftner• 2 months ago

Maybe this is relevant? I worked in animation and VFX for an Academy Award winning VFX studio and several well known animation / game studios, starting around '90. I formally left the industry around '04 to work on my own tech startup. When I left, there was a lot of R&D work surrounding the huge amounts of data that an animation studio generates and works with; I was one of those people creating early deep learning systems for production forecasting.

Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media.

That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.

NickC25• 2 months ago

You can stop watching big budget productions, but you shouldn't skip out on your local independent cinema scene. If you're in or around a large metro area, there will be local(ish) folks out there making interesting stuff. Might not be super fancy CGI or incredible sound design, but it will be humans telling human stories, which is the heart of cinema.

ffsoftboiled• 2 months ago

Mirrors my own experience doing this type of work (only made it two weeks before I gave up) and my partners. Excellent piece.

amazingamazing• 2 months ago

It is interesting to see how all of these folks are out of main work and doing gig work instead, with productions being moved to Canada and other places abroad. I wonder why. All of the strikes?

ido• 2 months ago

Cost

spwa4• 2 months ago

The writer's guild and other striking organizations put it to:

1) general decline in wages

2) only short-term work being available

3) streaming platforms never pay the way Hollywood/Broadcast TV did: bad pay, but with a share of show profits for decades afterwards. Now just bad pay

So it was generally about getting their pay increased. Instead, the strike lead to a big decrease in pay that Netflix and Skydance (Paramount) are blamed for.

doitLP• 2 months ago

Not just writers…there’s unions for every piece of the pie and they all have members and pensions and have to justify their existence.

There’s the ever-increasing restrictions and cost of shooting in California and the huge incentives other localities offer to film and even commercial (advert) projects. My friend just flew the whole production to Louisiana to shoot a 30 second commercial because of the incentives.

There’s the fact that even if a new show or movie is good, it is competing not only with other new stuff but also with the entire back catalogue of everything ever made that is instantly available for viewers.

There’s streaming rights, that never paid as much as traditional TV even though it had broader reach.

There’s competition with phone / social platforms that continue to optimize their content and algorithms with shorter feedback loops and more additive content, against trad production which takes a ton of money and time and upfront cost.

vrganj• 2 months ago

The very AI they have been reduced to training.

What a wonderful dystopia we're building.

fullshark• 2 months ago

A lot of money was thrown around the last 10 years trying to pump up entertainment companies in a bid to either take over the industry in a winner take all streaming world or get acquired. Now that the consolidation has finished, it's about cutting back. How Paramount has managed Star Trek, and where it is now is informative in my opinion here.

orsorna• 2 months ago

I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks

I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.

glimshe• 2 months ago

"first world problems", as people say. And the tone also felt dismissive of the work done by the cleaner... If it's such a big amount, he could consider entering her line of business.

sligbad• 2 months ago

If this is your takeaway, it's what you were looking to believe anyway...

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

That was my first clue that the author was squeezing this for a story. The snide joke about taking their kid on vacation so they could ignore each other felt really cold, too. The section where she tried to dunk on a coworker for trying to do the job well was also consistent with someone just squeezing this whole thing for a writing piece instead of trying to do the job.

Nowhere in the article did she support the “everyone in Hollywood” claim, other than saying she found it in a Facebook group for writers.

stringfood• 2 months ago

The author also suffers from ethos fry, where his failed career as a writer and entry level job experience nullifies his ability to come to a useful conclusion on AI and current affairs. How can someone who has shown little ability to time or predict the future or control his destiny be trusted when it comes to analyzing the emergence of new technologies? But I think that logic might be an Ad Hominem attack

fidotron• 2 months ago

This really depends. The author may know the maid well and appreciate that the maid needs the money, or that the trouble of finding a good one if/when the economic situation improves for them is worse than the temporary problems.

dist-epoch• 2 months ago

That's exactly how I feel when gamers complain that a GPU that used to cost $1000 now costs $2000.

IshKebab• 2 months ago

I mean doubling in price is pretty significant though? I used to happily (well, grudgingly) spend $500 on a GPU. $1k is crazy though.

ecshafer• 2 months ago

Someone whose hobby is Gaming, saves up diligently to pay $1k for a GPU, now has the rug pulled from under them and its $2k. Amortizing a $1k GPU over 4 years isn't too bad, $250 a year, $20 and change a month vs $500 a year / $40 a month is pretty big.

LogicFailsMe• 2 months ago

So... Hollywood... They were an oligarchy of billionaires living off minions living paycheck to paycheck before it was cool... Below the line talent always gets shafted there. And it would all collapse without the minimum viable safety net of the guilds...

Musicians seem to be embracing AI as a platform given that's another oligarchy itself. Where's the Robert Rodriguez of AI film-making? We haven't even seen the Ed Wood here yet.

Edit: and here we go with the enablers of the overlord status quo again. I'd love to know why people think Hollywood's effective caste system is worth preserving. You don't like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel? Cool, the smarter Harvey Weinsteins of Hollywood are much worse and they're the ones that didn't get caught to this day.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs.

The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience.

I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner, or the long rant about not being invited to a Slack channel she needed for the work then later realizing they were in the channel from the start and just missed the required onboarding. There’s a section where we’re supposed to hate a coworker whose only offense is trying to do the job well.

Doesn’t sound like a great job, but the article was trying so hard to show this as an “everyone in Hollywood” instead of admitting it was one person’s bumbling misadventure.

delichon• 2 months ago

claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner

I once spent an hour listening to a drunk woman telling me how broke she was. The gist was that she wanted to build a 50 horse stable but could only afford one big enough for a dozen horses. She owned about half of Anaheim. She told this to me as she sat across my desk at her condo, which was my post as a near minimum wage security guard. My money angst was probably less than hers.

rsynnott3• 2 months ago

Well, presumably you didn't have a debilitating horse addiction.

randycupertino3• 2 months ago

Horse expenses are bonkers. I wish all my enemies get into horse stuff as a hobby. I used to work for a boss who made $5 million a year and he would get into SCREAMING fights with his wife in the office over the phone about how they couldn't afford to fly the horses to Europe for her to compete in horse dressage competitions. I'd be working away three doors down and in the hallway he'd be hollering from his office, "LINDAAAA!!!!! WE CAN'T AFFORD IT!!!!!"

He was making $5 million a year and he was MISERABLE. Those stupid horse expenses completely drained his life and finances to the detriment of everything else, he was one of the most unhappy people I've ever encountered in life.

alecco• 2 months ago

Today's Wired is a shadow of its former self. I don't know what happened. But it's sad.

NietTim• 2 months ago

This article honestly read like some random blog post from the author.

pj_mukh• 2 months ago

I mean this is the K-shaped economy. A swath of workers + capital owners with infinite leverage, and another swath of workers still simply exchanging 1 hour of labor, for an hour of results with very little rent to be extracted. The lucky ones have union protection (with its own problems), but the rest are just this lady writ large.

senordevnyc2• 2 months ago

Hasn’t it always been this way though? Hollywood has long been the canonical example of how a tiny fraction get rich and famous, and everyone else is waiting tables while they hope for the big break that never comes.

And further, isn’t the evidence that low income workers have seen their real wages rise over the last few years?

mmooss5• 2 months ago

$150 house cleaner

To clarify, in the OP that's $150 flat rate per cleaning, not per hour. If you've tried to hire a housecleaner recently, that seems a bit below average (depending on the apartment). It's not an extravagance - you'd have to spend more time doing it yourself, which takes you away from buidling up your paying work and future.

Prices are going up everywhere, and the contemporary business theory is to maximize extraction from the customer, not to compete (on price, for example). Uber-wealthy capitalists do it; I'm happy for the housecleaners doing it. Not only do I not mind them getting the money, but they have to pay all their rising bills just like everyone else.

pickleglitch2• 2 months ago

$150/cleaning is a perfectly reasonable rate for a housekeeper, but the fact remains, broke people can't afford that. Broke people can't afford servants. Broke people either do it themselves or live in a dirty house.

mvdtnz• 2 months ago

If you are paying a cleaner any amount of money to clean your personal space then you're not strapped for cash.

Aurornis4• 2 months ago

It's not an extravagance - you'd have to spend more time doing it yourself, which takes you away from buidling up your paying work and future.

In the context of someone complaining about their $14 bank account balance and their job paying $32 per hour that isn't giving them enough work, spending $600 per month on a housecleaner is an extravagance.

avidruntime• 2 months ago

I work in the television industry, so does my spouse. We both have gotten offers by recruiters from services like this. While this author's experience is hard to relate to in many ways, their description of the economic situation is not far off. There is enormous pain right now in the television industry, particularly for the below the line workers. This stems from a myriad of factors in confluence. A very incomplete list: (1) the ongoing mergers of media companies and the downstream effects this has on decision makers on the buyer/network side of things, (2) the destabilization of television economics due to the long term effects of internet video (streamers and independent content creators alike), (3) a cultural mood shift within the consumer consensus of quality and the downstream effects on a consumer's willingness to participate as a consumer at all. Thats a lot of huge pieces on the board moving in ways that were hard to imagine in the not so distant past.

My point in outlining this is to scratch the surface and paint a picture on the systemic damage to this ecosystem and as a result you have people who have been working in a collaborative video workforce who no longer are able to find work. I've seen probably 75% of my colleagues and peers move on to other pastures, parlaying their skills into other careers, often starting in fields where your entry level positions are typically held by people 10, maybe 20 years younger. And of course, some have it easier than others. The AI training gigs come at an extremely opportune time (for them) and typically offer very tantalizing wages (in the form of an AI generated message from a LinkedIn recruiter who only replies with a link to the company's registration page). And if you're months without work and you use some of that unwanted free time to think introspectively about the offer, its easy to walk away with a sense that, eventually, the right talent will meet the right training method and produce the software package that actually kills your employable skillset. Its a horrible feeling. Its a scary feeling. Its a feeling of being on the wrong side of a window that is in the process of closing.

So while you may find it easy to lose sympathy for this particular writer, I would implore you not to lose sympathy for the broader class within and to not lose sight of where this article sits in context to the bigger story. Without a shadow of a doubt, her experience is the norm within the industry right now. I think it is worthy of recognition because what is happening will come for many other fields/areas of expertise in the future. What you describe as one person's bumbling misadventure rhymes quite a bit with other people's struggle to make ends meet in a rapidly evolving/devolving market.

jfengel• 2 months ago

The TV industry has always been a beast to work in. Is it worse now? Or just a different kind of bad?

insane_dreamer2• 2 months ago

seems you missed/misread this paragraph:

AI training wasn’t on my radar until a comment in an unofficial Writers Guild of America Facebook group caught my attention. The page was filled with posts from unemployed writers struggling with debt and panicking about their income, begging for tips and ideas and survival strategies: “I am stressed and anxiety-ridden … simply trying to breathe” … “ISO food bank/pantry info” … “Hey, so what kind of part-time jobs are you all getting?” I’ve been working for this AI training company called Mercor, one woman typed in the comments. They’re paying 150 an hour for writers. It’s easy money.

See also a comment below from someone who, unlike you (or I), actually works in the Hollywood industry.

bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner

this isn't what the article says at all -- she was not both broke and hiring a house cleaner

if you don't like the article, just say so, but don't skim read and then misrepresent what the author said

one person’s bumbling misadventure

you missed a lot of what was written

bena• 2 months ago

I think I understand why she told people not to look up her credits.

It seems this may be a case of "I am representative of everyone's experience."

Her first credit was in 2008 and then there is a 5 year gap between that and her next credit. Then 8 years between that one and the next.

For comparison, I pulled up the crew for The Boys. Most of them have tighter credits.

While there is probably some people in her situation. I feel that she also could have written this with the title: "I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Waiting Tables."

And this isn't to disparage her. It was always a hard business and getting consistent work was always hard. Even if it is good.

maxglute2• 2 months ago

IMO AI already doing better creative writing than most hollywood shows, I see myself enjoying premium mediocre slop.

godzillabrennus• 2 months ago

IMO, AI is still not there, but getting better quickly, and I'm excited about how it is going to unlock so much creative talent held back by an expensive system that requires a lot of labor to create content. I know someone who has been trying to raise money for a while to create a movie he wrote a script for. He's registered it with SAG-AFTRA. He's put on dinners. He's worked tirelessly to pull it together. He is an unknown quantity with a couple of roles in movies but no track record of making movies. I keep watching the progress, counting down the days until I can feed his script into a tool and show him a version of his vision come to life. I don't doubt he'd still rather do it with human talent the old school way, but, like tens of millions of other people on earth who have a creative vision and aren't named Bezos, Musk, or Gates, he may never succeed in raising, and I think some version of those visions becoming a reality is better than none. It's also like watching people who understand the problems in an industry work on tech tools by vibe coding solutions.

maxglute2• 2 months ago

It's not there for medium or long form content, but I'm enjoying the hell out of kungfu cats, north korean gta, swole harry potter slop. Maybe my attention span too cooked, but I would enjoy a future of one-shot passion projects from 1000s of amateur creators. I'd also rather deal with Asian microshows where you get 100x5m episodes dropped everyday. Frankly hollywood lost moving from 20 episode per year seasons to 8 episodes every other year. Life's too short for current model, for content creators and consumers.

terseus• 2 months ago

I understand that it is not easy to relate to the author who pays (or was paying) $150 for a house cleaner, I understand that this is a 1-person history and may be highly biased, I understand the author is motivated to create a story from it.

However, if you think that any of the conditions described in the article are acceptable or that this is a fair price to pay for having AI, I think you are a horrible human being and I hope you'll be expelled from civilized society.

senordevnyc2• 2 months ago

We’re horrible humans who should be expelled from society if we think it’s fine for people to get paid $52/hr for a boring remote job at a shitty bureaucratic company? Ok.

Ekaros• 2 months ago

Isn't that like almost 100k a year? Sounds like amount of money you should suffer a quite a bit for...

gwbas1c2• 2 months ago

You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC. I would suggest you don’t.

I see two problems here:

1: The streaming platforms are filling themselves with slop shows. Maybe not "AI slop," but slop in general. When I browse, I keep seeing lots of shows that I have no desire to watch, and wonder who actually watches them. Every time I open a streaming platform, they keep wanting me to watch a new series that I have no time to watch.

2: It seems there is an over-abundance of screenwriters.

jermaustin1• 2 months ago

I agree with you (mostly), but I suggest you should spend an hour a week watching something new - do it while folding laundry or working out. Something you might never have chosen. There are gems out there waiting for discovery.

Now onto my response:

TV has always been this way, the only difference is there aren't time slots now, so they can develop a bunch of crap shows (that used to just get left for dead after pilot season), let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live).

When it was ad-supported with 4 prime-time hours across 10-ish channels (between OTA, cable, and premium), every show had to count. Streaming removes that constraint, which has actually been beneficial to producers and consumers of content. More shows means more jobs for writers, actors, directors, crew, etc., even if those shows they are working on are completely forgettable.

But with every gold rush, comes over-abundance of people panning for gold. So yes, there is an over-abundance of screenwriters. There is an over-abundance of choice on the platforms. There is an over-abundance of platforms to chose from. There is an over-abundance of over-consumption of content on these platforms.

__d• 2 months ago

let them run for a season/series and gauge popularity vs cost, and cut the under performers (why I don't watch a show until a couple seasons are live).

And so you don’t contribute to the selection of shows.

It’s a dilemma. I started streaming stuff I like the sound of despite the risk of being rug-pulled, because otherwise there’s no signal that they should fund series 2.

gwbas1c2• 2 months ago

I suggest you should spend an hour a week watching something new

On average I do that, although I generally don't like to start a "series" unless I know there's a good chance I'll finish it.

ForHackernews2• 2 months ago

Then our managers announced that a “golden batch” of tasks would be released to the most talented, the most special, the royalty of annotators—the folks, we were told, who consistently scored a perfect 5 with an average handling time well below the recommended amount.

Shades of Glengarry Glen Ross

"These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads, and to you, they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers."

insane_dreamer2• 2 months ago

If you worked hard to get a degree from a prestigious college, and worked hard to get to the place where your skills were valued and used to generate value (script-writing in this case), and suddenly AI is taking lots of jobs so you're doing AI-review gig work, you'd be angry too.

It's the equivalent of losing your job and having to run DoorDash to pay the bills.

All the while you're being lied to with promises that this will somehow set you free to "work on your own terms".

That's fine if you are gainfully employed and want to earn some extra cash, but not if that's all you have.

This is just the next step in the gig economy, which strips away rights and security from employees and hands profits to employers.

I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

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