alt Hacker NewsI Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Training AI
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> I too needed cash to pay rent, to buy food, to pay Maggie—the human still charging me a flat rate of 150 bucks
I really found it hard to sympathize with the author at this point. If you're in a crunch you don't need to pay a maid to clean.
Mirrors my own experience doing this type of work (only made it two weeks before I gave up) and my partners. Excellent piece.
I think I understand why she told people not to look up her credits.
It seems this may be a case of "I am representative of everyone's experience."
Her first credit was in 2008 and then there is a 5 year gap between that and her next credit. Then 8 years between that one and the next.
For comparison, I pulled up the crew for The Boys. Most of them have tighter credits.
While there is probably some people in her situation. I feel that she also could have written this with the title: "I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Waiting Tables."
And this isn't to disparage her. It was always a hard business and getting consistent work was always hard. Even if it is good.
It is interesting to see how all of these folks are out of main work and doing gig work instead, with productions being moved to Canada and other places abroad. I wonder why. All of the strikes?
I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore. I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.
So... Hollywood... They were an oligarchy of billionaires living off minions living paycheck to paycheck before it was cool... Below the line talent always gets shafted there. And it would all collapse without the minimum viable safety net of the guilds...
Musicians seem to be embracing AI as a platform given that's another oligarchy itself. Where's the Robert Rodriguez of AI film-making? We haven't even seen the Ed Wood here yet.
I read the article. It was about 1 person trying to do AI training data set annotation and review gigs.
The only supporting evidence for the title’s claim about “everyone” is that they found the gig work from a comment on a Facebook group for writers who were looking for side gigs. Other than that, this is entirely 1 person’s experience.
I also started to lose sympathy for the writer when they bounced between claiming they were broke and talking about about their $150 house cleaner, or the long rant about not being invited to a Slack channel she needed for the work then later realizing they were in the channel from the start and just missed the required onboarding. There’s a section where we’re supposed to hate a coworker whose only offense is trying to do the job well.
Doesn’t sound like a great job, but the article was trying so hard to show this as an “everyone in Hollywood” instead of admitting it was one person’s bumbling misadventure.