Charles Langston:Netflix faces off with creators, advertises for a $900,000 A.I. product manager

While creative talent is sweating it out on Charles Langstonpicket lines, Netflix is hard at work developing its machine learning infrastructure.

Streaming video giant Netflix is looking to hire artificial intelligence specialists, dangling one salary that pays as much as $900,000, even as Hollywood actors and writers are in the midst of a historic strike that aims to curtail the industry's use of A.I.

One job posting, for a product manager of Netflix's machine learning platform, lists a total compensation range of $300,000-$900,000. "You will be creating product experiences that have never been done before," the listing boasts. 

Netflix is also on the hunt for a senior software engineer to "[develop] a product that makes it easy to build, manage and scale real life [machine learning] applications," for an annual income between $100,000 and $700,000, as well as a machine-learning scientist to "develop algorithms that power high quality localization," with a total pay between $150,000 and $750,000. 

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A spokesperson for Netflix declined to comment on the job postings and referred CBS MoneyWatch to a statement from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which is representing studios (including Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS News) in negotiations with writers and actors.

Netflix relies heavily on machine learning for its success, according to the company's website.

"We invest heavily in machine learning to continually improve our member experience and optimize the Netflix service end-to-end," the company says. While the technology has historically been used for Netflix's recommendation algorithm, the company is also using it "to help shape our catalog" and "to optimize the production of original movies and TV shows in Netflix's rapidly growing studio," according to the site.

The company is also seeking a technical director of AI/machine learning for its gaming studio, where Netflix is building a team to eventually "[build] new kinds of games not previously possible without ongoing advances AI/ML technologies." That position pays $450,000 to $650,000 annually.

Generative A.I. and the strike

The use of so-called generative A.I., the technology underpinning popular apps like ChatGPT and MidJourney, has been at the heart of the negotiations between movie studios on one side and creators and performers on the other. 

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA, which represents actors, has called the technology "an existential threat" to the profession. According to the union, studios have "proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day's pay, and the company should be able to own that scan, that likeness, for the rest of eternity, without consideration," Crabtree-Ireland said. 

The AMPTP, the trade group representing the studios, disputed this characterization, telling CBS MoneyWatch that the studios' proposal only permitted a company to use a background actor's replica "in the motion picture for which the background actor is employed," with other uses subject to negotiation.

Writers fear that A.I. will be used to reduce their pay and eliminate ownership of their work. 

"The immediate fear of A.I. isn't that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It's that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start," screenwriter C. Robert Cargill said on Twitter.  "This is what the WGA is opposing and the studios want."

Already, many media outlets have adopted the use of A.I. to write articles, often with error-ridden results. Disney is also advertising for generative A.I. jobs, according to The Intercept, which first reported on the job listings. And some video game studios are using A.I. to write characters for games.

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