Hollywood Reporter: “For now, [Stephen] Galloway says, AI represents less of a threat to the assistant workforce than the general retrenchment and consolidation affecting the industry. He points out that because of cost-cutting, there are fewer entry-level jobs, and assistant pay has largely remained the same over the past decade as the cost of living has significantly increased in Los Angeles. Hollywood is an industry built on an apprenticeship model, beginning with time spent as an assistant (or, in previous generations, in the mailroom). But, says Galloway, “the industry is really shrinking. When it shrinks, when things change, there is an atmosphere of panic, and people then don’t really have the bandwidth to be nurturing and caring. It’s survival first. That is damaging what was a continuous ladder of relationships.””
WSJ: “The era of treating engagement metrics as the revered measures of a platform’s success, with utter disregard for users’ well-being, is over. The tobacco industry survived its reckoning. Cigarettes became more difficult for minors to buy, marketing that targeted young people disappeared, and a generation grew up healthier for it. We’re at a similar fork in the road for social media. Technology moves fast. The fix can too.”
Donald Boudreaux: “In free markets, unlike in political elections, candidates – that is, suppliers – need not first win party support, and they may enter the contest to win public approval whenever they wish. Voting is daily and continuous, not once every few years. Further, voting in markets is done with one’s own, not other people’s, dollars, and is quickly followed for each voter by personal feedback that’s concentrated and reliable. Selection in markets allows the blooming of as many flowers as consumers wish, with no individuals forced to patronize firms they dislike. In contrast, even under the most ideal circumstances, selection by government denies satisfaction to voters with minority preferences, obliging everyone to deal only with the majority-preferred ‘winners.’”
WSJ: “In a warehouse…bigger than two football fields, digital cameras rotate around vitamin bottles, strollers and washing-machine pods as manicurists, hand models and former theater directors work to build what they hope is a digital catalog for retail’s AI future. Eko, the Brooklyn firm that operates the facility, calls it a “capture factory.” The goal: to improve the accuracy of online listings for millions of products at Walmart, Best Buy and other retailers and make them easily digestible by artificial intelligence. It is a decidedly manual process. Hundreds of Eko employees work to shoot products from every angle on movie-studio-style stages, shifting lighting or buffing out fingerprints on metal surfaces as needed…At the heart of this effort is a fast-moving battle over how consumers will find and buy everything from toilet paper to furniture through AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.”
