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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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I'm generally an AI/ML booster, but I could understand not wanting to give the major studios an inch, here. There's already a pretty bad tendency to fuck around with the numbers to make even major films have nearly no residuals, when not passing out glorified contracts of adhesion. It doesn't exactly take a lot of creative thought to consider what sort of foolishness a sufficiently motivated bunch of Dark Triad lawyers and beancounters could do, and it takes a lot of thought to bar off every exceptionally-bad option. In that sort of low-trust environment, it's more reasonable to target bans even if you don't think in the absence of a ban that the counterparty would be able to hit you too hard.

Of course, on the flip side, while I'm impressed by as a mostly-voluntary (they're still effectively semi-closed shop) union, I'm not exactly impressed by them as a guild. Them wanting to avoid being automated away (or, worse: being paid peanuts for something that gets laundered through AI for the actual sales item is a trivial tactic) doesn't really change whether someone else will be willing to work with the studios at risk of getting automated later, and having comparable quality, or whether I should care as a buyer.