JOAN IS AWFUL

In the last week, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) offended Hollywood actors so hard that it got them to call a strike alongside the Writer’s Guild of America. The offensive proposal in question sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode – because it literally is.

In “Joan is Awful,” an episode from the latest season of Netflix’s dystopian sci-fi show, the main character deals with the implications of a corporation using artificial intelligence to scan her likeness and use it in perpetuity without due compensation. According to SAG-AFTRA’s National Executive Director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, that was a very real idea on the table. The fact that real humans in suits are trying to do this, right now, seems to flip the maxim “first as tragedy, then as farce” on its back: it’s a trend of trying really hard to monetize apocalyptic things someone saw in a sci-fi film while totally missing the point.

(If you don’t believe me, compare Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse to 1999’s The Matrix.)
Artificial intelligence has crept into our lives at a pace so slow that we still think about it as a distant, even fantastic, concern – but it’s here, and it’s wreaking havoc.

First it was “The Algorithm™,” that opaque, virtual social media overlord that feeds the worst of us back to us until our dopamine faucets run dry. Then it was the articles about virtual law clerks and accountants assuring us that no matter how smart we were, no matter how much student debt we accumulated, our American Dream was limited and quickly eroding. Now it’s OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its ilk, those systems that aggregate content to give us fake celebrity voices, sex chatbots, and legal briefs citing cases that don’t exist. It might even be invisibly banal if it wasn’t everywhere, every minute of every day.

In film, a booming industry in New Jersey, AI’s effects are palpable. I consulted with a member of the Director’s Guild of America, who spoke on the condition of anonymity since their union already ratified its new labor contract with the AMPTP last month.

“It’s definitely displacing different groups of professionals within the industry, and that’s part of the reason why the striking is key,” they told me. “[AI has] developed the ability to write scripts, to write full, feature-length concepts that, prior to this, had to be done by a human being… it’s worth millions if you’re writing for a major network.”

How bad could it become? Said the source, “I think there are some beta versions being tested now where not only will it be able to write a script, but it will be able to create the visuals behind the script and edit it. And so you’ll eliminate three categories of jobs right there: the director of photography, the editor, and the actors, once you get their likeness… and it’s dangerous when there’s a bottom-line aspect being driven home throughout the entire conversation.”

A WEAPON AGAINST WORKERS

I’m actually shocked that SAG-AFTRA/WGA vs. AMPTP is the first mainstream labor dispute with robots as a central discussion point. Just last Friday, Teamsters rallied in San Francisco in support of legislation that would ban driverless trucks above a certain weight class. If they win that fight, it may only be due to their political power. Driverless trucks are already being tested on the roads — and it’s not inconceivable that in just a few short years, self-driving vehicles may have lower crash rates than those with humans behind the wheel. AI is disrupting huge swaths of the economy – and our society is not ready.

In a 2019 interview with The Verge, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about the rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Say what you will about her politics (many people have many things to say), but her response was food for thought:

“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be
excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”

Bullseye.

AI threatens everything in the supply chain except its owner. Said an unnamed TV executive to Deadline about the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike last week, “the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” The “endgame” of weaponizing technology to get workers kicked out of their homes shouldn’t be possible – yet here we are.

THE FIGHT, SO FAR

New Jersey leaders have offered legislation relating to artificial intelligence – and it’s apparent that our lawmakers have been so much more proactive than those in many other states, especially during this current 2022-23 session:

S1926 (Zwicker/Gill) and A4909 (Jaffer/Atkins/Stanley) would regulate AI to prevent
discrimination in hiring decisions.

S1402 (Gill) and A537 (Freiman/Lopez/McKnight) both deal with AI discrimination in loans and car insurance.

A168 (Carter/Karabinchak/Calabrese) would commission a study of AI’s effect on New Jersey’s labor force and economy.

S3876 (Singleton) would create the position of an Artificial Intelligence Officer under the State’s CTO solely responsible for regulating state agencies’ use of AI.

S3926 (Stack/Steinhardt) would extend the definition of identity theft to include using
deepfakes to defraud a victim.

The Assembly Judiciary Committee also approved a package from Majority Leader Louis Greenwald that would criminalize deepfakes in campaign ads, create a Deepfake Unit in the Attorney General’s office, and tack on charges for using deepfakes in other offenses.

I’m sure I’m missing one or two.

The point is they’re going in the right direction with a steady drum beat. These measures are practical solutions to problems that exist in present society. But as for what’s coming down the pipeline, there should be no doubt about it: innumerable jobs are at risk. A new OECD report estimates that 27% of jobs worldwide are at high risk of automation, and the McKinsey Global Institute finds that “half of today’s work activities could be automated by 2055.” Fortunately, past proposals give us many clues about how to protect human labor in a digital economy.

A ROADMAP

The first and most familiar proposal for readers of political publications: universal basic income, or giving people a modest, dignified amount of money each month to help meet their minimum needs. UBI is surprisingly well-liked across the board; Milton Friedman touted it as the “negative income tax,” and President Nixon’s version passed the House, President Trump relished the opportunity to sign his name on those $1,200 CARES Act checks, President Biden sent more payments out under the American Rescue Plan and AOC wanted the checks to be bigger. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says it “may seem like a pipe dream, but from my vantage point some form of it seems inevitable.” A good chunk of the American public seems to think so, too; UBI was the single issue that catapulted Andrew Yang to prominence. Assuming that AI will continue on its path of cannibalizing more human work in the coming years and not less, we should the very near future of work should be a policy focus.

Second, we should consider legislation including and improving upon the White House’s recent “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” Companies should have to declare when their services utilize artificial intelligence, when that AI collects data, and what that data is used for. Some have even considered including personal data under private property rights – an increasingly necessary protection in a world which profits off of our attention daily. It’s something worth studying.

Third, consider taxing the robots!

In the summer 2020 issue of The Contemporary Tax Journal, Robert J. Kovacev lays this issue out pretty bluntly: “in the United States in particular, the tax code favors capital over labor income. Employers and employees must pay payroll taxes that are, in effect, excise taxes for the privilege of employing human workers. No such taxes apply to capital investments in AI, robotics, or automation.”

Even Bill Gates and Bernie Sanders, the two least likely allies on earth, agree here.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates commented in a 2017 QZ interview. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

“If workers are going to be replaced by robots, as will be the case in many industries,” Senator Sanders writes in his latest book, “we’re going to need to adapt tax and regulatory policies to assure that the change does not simply become an excuse for race-to-the-bottom profiteering by multinational corporations.”

South Korea has implemented a type of “robot tax” by cutting automation tax incentives by a modest 2%. It’s also not inconceivable that taking a value-added tax (VAT) approach from the European Union and applying it to artificial intelligence would provide huge gains across the board for human society while still encouraging innovation. After all, if businesses argue that AI is responsible for increased productivity and want to reap the rewards, it logically follows that that part of the value chain should be considered for taxation.

Fully aware that some of these solutions might sound far out (I have not yet run #taxtherobots by any other comms experts), I would kindly remind the reader that Hollywood tried to do an actual episode of Black Mirror last week.

IT’S ALL AROUND US – AS WE SPEAK

As a digital marketer, I encounter artificial intelligence daily. Photographers use it for subject detection in Photoshop and Lightroom, which have replaced those who worked to develop film; artists use text-based prompts to create generative work in Midjourney and Dall-E, which have displaced visual art skills in favor of verbal ones; ad agencies use ChatGPT to displace commercial copywriters. I had a client pass a blog draft along to me last month for editing that they had messed around with in GPT; I had to tell them that there’s nothing worse for SEO than relying on a cookie cutter when you want to be unique (that part is true, for now).

In Hollywood, generative AI has taken center stage in some union agreements and getting criticized for undermining journalism. Entire sectors of the economy are at risk. Some may argue that AI is simply a tool – all the better reason for smart minds to come together and regulate it.

Dave Pilmenstein is the owner of Activate Media, an award-winning digital marketing firm, and is proud to write without consulting HAL 9000.