LOS ANGELES — Getting paid $900,000 a year to manage artificial intelligence projects for Netflix would’ve been an eye-popping sum even before two of Hollywood’s major unions went on strike.
But now that the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA are both picketing outside Netflix’s headquarters in protest of low streaming pay and ascendant automation, such a job listing seems acutely emblematic of where the entertainment industry currently stands — and where it’s going.
The “Product Manager — Machine Learning Platform” role, first reported on by the Intercept, offers a pay range of $300,000 to $900,000 for work focused on setting priorities and managing projects related to the streaming giant’s AI software.
And Netflix isn’t alone. Disney Branded Television is hiring for a senior vice president “on the leading edge of technology developments, like artificial intelligence.” Sony is pursuing hires related to AI ethics. And Amazon Prime Video and CBS both are looking to fill AI-related roles of their own, as the Hollywood Reporter recently reported.
With the technology improving and the venture capital flowing, stakeholders across the entertainment world are looking to add artificial intelligence to the production pipeline in a bid to lower costs and increase efficiency. Startups have emerged that promise to change actors’ dialogue, make stunt work safer, “reanimate” dead actors and more.
Tinseltown, it seems, is in the midst of an AI boom — even as its creative class agitates for limits on how that technology gets deployed.
“It certainly appears like these are high-level strategic positions based on the kind of compensation that’s being offered for them,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, said of the job listings. “In terms of a broader AI strategy or a focus on the use of generative AI, that’s not something that we’ve seen prior to now.”
These roles probably aren’t geared toward breaking the strike but rather “to set up a post-strike dynamic around AI,” Crabtree-Ireland added. “This is them looking to the future and attempting to be strategic.”
Some of the recent job listings are for fairly traditional tech-world roles, such as software engineers (who write code) and product managers (who guide projects to completion). And many of them don’t appear to directly touch the content development pipeline that has striking writers and actors so worried.
Nevertheless, the breadth of open roles — and the top-shelf salaries they tout — indicates an increasing embrace of this technology by the film and television world.