A.I.'s Comic(-Con) Relief

I want to thank the Writers Guild of America (WGA) writers for enabling my epic couch surfing sessions on the waves of my favorite streamed television series. Also on the eve of San Diego’s Comic-Con International 2023 and as a San Diego resident, I can’t resist reflecting on A.I. association with the Writers Guild of America strike.

Comic-Con is San Diego’s largest annual convention. In 2022, it had an estimated economic impact of $144 million. It sells out in minutes and despite all its buzz, there is a pall hanging over this year’s event in the absence of key studios, actors and writers, including Marvel, Netflix and Sony. One of the issues behind their absence is the WGA writer’s strike and a potential Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strike given their negotiations with the studios over new contracts fail

History has not been kind to those resisting new broadly beneficial technology. During times of massive upheaval we generally see beneficial innovation and with it resistance by key parties. Recall the post oil embargo late seventies and early eighties when Americans staged public protest against Japanese automakers by destroying their cars with sledge hammers and axes to fight the flood of inexpensive fuel efficient Japanese cars coming into the U.S. market.

Despite the protests, the American public purchased Japanese autos at record rates while American auto companies continued to build large fuel inefficient vehicles. Today, Toyota is #2 in United States automobiles sales.

We will see similar effects with A.I. and while I think history will be kinder to WGA as they are simply asking for provisions to prevent writers being replaced by A.I. in future contracts via their current strike, we should expect stronger resistance from others in attempts to collectively protect their rights against the incursion of new technologies like A.I.

Ultimately it is better to embrace the incoming incursion as a means to quickly turn it to your advantage. If U.S. automakers had done as the Japanese and learned and duplicated some of what was making the Japanese successful sooner, they may have heeded off the incursion. I think part of embracing A.I. will require acknowledging its effectiveness sooner as the North Carolina Highway Patrol is doing on a particularly accident-prone stretch of Interstate Highway 40 in Hickory, NC to use A.I. to identify if truckers are distracted by their mobile phones:

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/nc-highway-patrol-uses-ai-equipment-crack-down-truck-drivers/3INJA2LPAJFMTJ3KNVIFI2ZKU4/ .

Today, you can use tools like copygenius.io to detect A.I. content and plagiarism in written work as A.I. still has a long way to go in matching human writing skills. Yet, A.I. will continue to improve and get closer to human output in the same way math’s Law of Large Numbers could predict A.I. 's eventual convergence with human skill level.

With A.I.’s continued advancement, we should expect to see in the short term human origin art and writing to hold and in some cases increase in value, but in the long run it will be those of us who are able to quickly embrace and grasp the value of A.I. and turn into an advantage who will win.