Vince Gilligan, the creator of AMC’s Breaking Bad, has made it clear how he feels about artificial intelligence technology, calling it “horseshit” and a “plagiarism machine.”
Gilligan spoke about AI in an interview with Variety.
“I think it’s a lot of horseshit. It’s a giant plagiarism machine, in its current form. I think ChatGPT knows what it’s writing like a toaster knows that it’s making toast. There’s no intelligence — it’s a marvel of marketing,” he said.
Gilligan said AI will likely become more sophisticated and even sentient down the road.
But for now, “it’s a bunch of billionaires trying to become trillionaires by selling this thing as some kind of momentous sea change. It certainly will have its uses in writing legal briefs and stuff like that, but I don’t think it’s going to take over for writers of fiction. ”
He also referenced a recent advertisement that used an AI-generated likeness of Tom Hanks to sell dental plans.
“Luckily it looked like hell, but at some point it probably will get to the point of looking perfect or close to it. I don’t think people should be acting after they’re dead.”
The Writers Guild of America recently reached a new contract with the major Hollywood studios and streamers that includes protections against AI taking over writers’ jobs.
But some industry insiders, including Hollywood veteran Barry Diller, believe the agreement doesn’t go far enough to protect copyright holders from seeing their work being harvested by AI bots.
As Breitbart News reported, a growing number of prominent writers are suing Facebook parent Meta as well as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, alleging in that their artificial intelligence platforms engaged in copyright violations with tens of thousands of books.
Among the writers spearheading the various suits are novelist Michael Chabon, playwright David Henry Hwang, and actress-comedian Sarah Silverman.
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