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  • 🇺🇸 Ready, Set, Strike!

🇺🇸 Ready, Set, Strike!

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July 21, 2023

The Flag

Good morning, and happy Friday. Opportunities abound for everyone! As employers continue their frenzied hiring, people with disabilities are increasingly finding work across the country. Here’s how they’re benefiting from the job boom!

Plus, do you have craving for a hot pink, Barbie-themed burger?

Also, have you checked “life insurance” off the bucket list? If not, today’s sponsor will grant your Wysh…

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ENTERTAINMENT

Ready, Set, Strike!

Last week, approximately 65,000 Hollywood actors took to holding picket signs, causing a disruption in productions, as they demand wage increases in response to inflation and the swiftly changing entertainment sector.

From The Flag: According to actors, the income they traditionally depend on, primarily coming through residuals from movie and television roles, has drastically declined in the age of streaming. Here’s what both sides are saying.

RIGHT-LEANING SENTIMENT

Will Actors Be Paid Tomorrow for Today’s Work?

  • The industry has been its own worst enemy, pushing “woke” and unoriginal content, and should focus more on the quality of its craft.

  • Hollywood’s creatives are seeing the writing on the walls as AI becomes more prevalent, and concerns rise that they’ll be replaced.

  • One actor believes the solution is to get A-list actors to leverage their star power and threaten to stop working with large studios.

Woke Hollywood cuts the nation a break — and cancels itself ‍Dan McLaughlin, New York Post: “Hollywood has been its own worst enemy. Moviegoers like superhero movies, name-brand franchises and Pixar cartoons? Inundate them with so many sequels, of such declining quality, that viewers tune out. #MeToo scandals reveal the industry is overrun with sexual predators protected by an insular liberal elite? Overcompensate by turning casting and programming decisions into a festival of “representation”-focused identity politics and ham-fisted leftist agitprop. … If your creative class is churning out content this devoid of creativity and alienating half the audience in the process, you may as well replace them with machines. At least, that seems to be the thinking of Hollywood bigwigs, who have pushed the writers and actors to accept a greater role for artificial intelligence. … The writers are complaining about competing with AI and sharing screen credits. … For the actors, AI is a creepier threat: loss of artistic and financial control over their own images and creative futures.”

Hollywood Revolts against the AI Invasion ‍Jim Geraghty, National Review: “Actors contend that the residual payments aren’t keeping up with the money the studios are making from their global audiences. But the shift to streaming has altered the most common production schedules, in a town where almost every creative job is temporary. In the era of streaming services, the traditional schedule of a 22-episode television season has been replaced with lots of shows that run six-, eight-, or ten-episode seasons. That adds up to a lot more shorter-term gigs and fewer year-round gigs. …perhaps the more intriguing aspect of these ongoing disputes is the fear throughout Hollywood’s creative class that artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, could do their jobs cheaper and easier, if not better. For the actors, you can understand their wariness as we see not just de-aged versions of actors on the screen, but long-deceased actors come back to life through computer graphics…”

One more opinion piece from the Right: Former 'General Hospital' star reveals what would end actors strike, Kristen Altus, FOX Business

LEFT-LEANING SENTIMENT

Actors Are Striking For Their Craft and Livelihood

  • This strike is relevant to those outside of the entertainment industry because it’s about concurrent battles against suffocating inequality and a future controlled by AI.

  • AI’s threat to writers is relatively easy to see, but it also poses a considerable existential threat to actors.

  • This is the first time in 60 years both writers and actors are striking simultaneously, and there appears to be no end in sight.

The Hollywood strike can and must win – for all of us, not just writers and actors ‍Hamilton Nolan, The Guardian: “The first battle is between humanity and artificial intelligence. …AI has advanced so fast that everyone has grasped that it has the potential to be to white-collar and creative work what industrial automation was to factory work. … And who is going to build the guardrails that prevent the worst abuses of AI? … And that brings us to the second underlying battle here: the class war itself. When you scrape away the relatively small surface layer of glitz and glamor and wealthy stars, entertainment is just another industry, full of regular people doing regular work. The vast majority of those who write scripts or act in shows…are not rich and famous. The CEOs that the entertainment unions are negotiating with make hundreds of millions of dollars, while most Sag-Aftra members don’t make the $26,000 a year necessary to qualify for the union’s health insurance plan.”

AI is a concern for writers. But actors could have even more to fear Chris Isidore, CNN: “Computer-generated imagery, or CGI, to create virtual actors and extras is somewhat old hat in Hollywood. …AI allows much easier, and cheaper, use of CGI to generate performances by actors who aren’t there. Thus SAG-AFTRA says the studios want to use AI to eliminate acting jobs. Using AI to create performances that never took place is not just hypothetical. It is already happening. But AI-generated deepfakes, such as a series of convincing but totally fabricated videos of a Tom Cruise doppelganger, are mostly found on social media, not in movies or shows from the studios. But the same technology could easily be used to replace the actors in background roles in studio and streaming productions — the ones listed in the credits with titles like ‘second police officer’ or ‘waiter in the restaurant.’ These roles generate a huge number of the jobs that SAG-AFTRA members depend on to pay their bills.”

One more opinion piece from the Right: Hollywood’s historic double strike, explained Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

FLAG THIS

Support is Behind the Creatives

When polling entertainment industry professional, a majority (57%) approve of the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) handling of the strike, versus just 9% who approve of the way studios have.

There’s also a perception among those in the industry that studios wanted the strike to happen because it would potentially help them to cut costs. Around 43% of respondents believed this is somewhat or very likely (Variety).

Do you support the writers' and actors' strike in Hollywood?

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WATERCOOLER

Battle of Bull Run, Cat Reflexes, Newton’s Productive Lockdown

An engraving of the battle by William Ridgway based on a drawing by Felix Octavius Carr Darley

On This Day in 1861: In the first major land battle of the Civil War, a large Union force under General Irvin McDowell is routed by a Confederate army under General Pierre G.T. Beauregard.

Today I learned that during the 18 months of the Great Plague (1665-1666), Isaac Newton conceived calculus, set foundations for his theory of light and color, developed the theory of gravity, and worked on laws of planetary motion.

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