I am passionately on the other side of the AI in Hollywood debate

Let’s get this out of the way first: I feel for everyone who is about to lose their job because of AI, but technology always eliminates existing jobs and creates new jobs and we should never stop that from happening.

Improvements in efficiency are always better for humanity in the long run. It’s good that cars aren’t made by blacksmiths. But maybe blacksmithing isn’t a perfect analogy for creative work, so let’s look at something creative like photography. The old technology for creating photographs involved film manufacturers, photo lab workers, the photo chemical industry, retouchers, airbrushers, colorists, frame stores, and the people who make the sticky corners that used to hold photos onto album pages. If you think we have to put guard rails on AI to protect jobs, was it a good thing or a bad thing that we didn’t put guard rails on digital cameras to protect jobs? It was a huge industry, disappeared. All those jobs gone. But how many new jobs exist because of digital imaging technology, and how many people have benefitted from it? The efficiency and ubiquity of digital imaging created things like social media, AR, modern gaming, and of course modern phones. Digital imaging gave us the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter.

Is that analogous enough to the jobs involved in making movies? If not, just zoom on the one craft of photo retouching. There were people who studied that craft in art schools, who apprenticed for years to learn it. Any photograph you ever saw in an advertisement had been worked on by a well paid professional. Now you can go on fiverr and hire a teenager to do complex photo manipulations, not because they went to art school, but because they downloaded some software and watched some YouTubes. You can color-correct a photo by pushing a button on your phone. From the perspective of a professional airbrusher in 1980, that’s an unthinkable tragedy. Should we have stopped it from happening? Would there have been no cost to humanity if we had stopped it from happening?

Right now, a kid with a physical disability, who would never be able to hold a camera or paintbrush, can draw beautiful photo-realistic backgrounds for video games. Soon he’ll be able to do it with voice prompts. And those backgrounds will be judged by the quality of the ideas he put into them, rather than the physical skill and effort it took to draw them. That’s a miracle. Look how much human creative potential we’ve unleashed.

I think a big part of the problem is when we look at AI, we’re not seeing the final product. We’re seeing a building block of what will become dozens or hundreds of apps or tools or gizmos that we can’t yet visualize.

If in 1965, someone had introduced a photo-fixing robot, with an electric eye and an arm holding a paintbrush, and it actually worked pretty well, people would have said “We can’t let this genie out of the bottle.” Others would have said “This thing is just stealing techniques developed by humans. This thing will remove all the humanity from this craft.” Yet here we are in a world where we have photo-fixing robots on our phones and the humanity has not been removed from photography. In fact, more humans are doing more creative things with photography than in 1965. So part of the problem with our fear of AI is that we’re looking at that robot and not visualizing how it will become a tool for humans in the future. And it’s not for lack of vision. It’s just that you can’t know what people are going to create, or how they’re going to create it, even though you can always trust that they will.

Imagine trying to describe a game designer job to someone in 1965. They haven’t even seen videogames yet. Imagine trying to describe an influencer. If in 1965 you said there will someday be technology to shoot a film without professional filmmakers, develop it without labs, record music without engineers, marry the music to the film without editors, and distribute that film without theaters or television, you would have said that’s a dystopian future where unemployment is astronomical. But we’re in that future right now, where someone named Halsey can shoot a video on her iPhone, post it to a thing called Tumblr and then become a multi-million dollar business employing hundreds of people in concert tours and cosmetics. A person from 1965 wouldn’t understand half those words. They would only know that all those jobs they currently understand will be lost.

So I’m sure that if someone from the future came back and tried to describe to me what artists are doing with AI and language models in 60 years, I would not be able to understand it. But one thing I know for sure is that in 60 years artists will exist and they’ll be doing great things and life will be cooler for creative people and more people will be making money in entertainment than there are today.

When you say we need guardrails on AI, you’re imagining a world where art is made the exact same way it is today, but by machines instead of people. That’s not possible. As soon as a machine does anything, a person starts using that machine creatively. Creativity is human, and never won’t be human. The human propensity to create is the only guardrail we need against AI content. I can’t wait to see what humans create with AI.

So with honest sympathy for any lab worker who lost their job to digital cameras, for any airbrusher who lost their job to the Magic Wand button on my phone, for any blacksmith who lost their job to steel stamping machines, I have to say thank you for your sacrifice on behalf of everyone who now makes a living using the technology that displaced you.

Hopefully all of you who lost your jobs to technology learned to use the new tools too and thrived along with them. If not, I have to assume you landed on your feet because unemployment is no higher than it was whenever you and everyone in your industry hit that huge setback in your careers.

And to anyone in our industry who may lose your job to AI, thank you on behalf of millions of people who will be doing cool new things with the tools coming down the line. I’m not trying to be glib. I know it sucks. But I believe if we lose our jobs to technology, what society owes us is a soft landing, and vibrant new job market where we can apply our skills for good money. But no one should ever try to rig the world so that we can keep doing our old jobs at the expense of the next generation.