Video game actors strike over AI

[jlw]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/29/video-game-actors-strike-over-ai.html

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[Amstrad]

I’m a little confused. I thought that the issue was that none of the union members were being given protections against AI, but it appears the real issue is that the protections in place apply only to people who are considered to be “performers” and the studios are being shitty and not counting mocap actors as performers.

This isn’t really being reported clearly anywhere I heard this news previously.

[urbandetail]

I’m at a teachers’ professional development conference this week. Nearly everyone has openly embraced ChatGPT — they use it to write lesson plans, edit text, even make free “textbooks.” It’s horrifying.

I am so frustrated. Writing and developing curriculum is something I love doing, and it’s a big part of why I do the job.

[subextraordinaire]

The wife of my husband’s bestie is a grade school teacher and she’s told me that she uses AI to grade her students’ work. That kind of bothered me. When I was teaching I could never use AI to grade my students’ essays because I always liked to see if there was improvement from one essay to the next.

However, I can see the appeal of using AI for grading because it takes such a long time to read and give feedback with a typical five paragraph essay that my AP students would find in their AP test. I was an underemployed/underpaid full-time teacher, and it took a week to grade 40 essays. I also felt enormous responsibility to make sure that they understood why they received 3 vs a 4 or 5 on an essay, and what they could do to improve.

[orenwolf]

Yeah, agreed. I am not going to begrudge any underpaid champion of education and literacy doing whatever they need to to do their jobs. More power to them all.

The one place that LLMs like ChatGCP can potentially provide a net benefit that is unabiguously positive is automating mundane tasks. Humans already suck at these, and even my team at my Day Job™ have gotten pretty good at asking Copilot (github’s LLM) to build them a terraform module scaffolding or explain what flags to use on an obscure linux command they infrequently use or suggest optimized syntaxes, etc.

I would imagine there are opportunities for teachers that are along the same vein - take care of some of the mundane, repetitive work and allow them instead to focus on the skilled, creative aspects of their jobs - including paying attention to how students are performing, etc etc.

If anything positive is going to come from these LLMs, it should at minimum be helping awesome people focus on the parts of their jobs that make them awesome, and less on the parts that drag them down.