‘Nobody has lost their job because of what we do,’ says CEO of film industry AI tool

“Honestly, and I really can say this with a straight face, we create jobs. Because there’s so much shit to do to actually put these use cases into production, that a lot of our customers can’t fill those jobs fast enough,” May Habib, CEO at enterprise-targeted AI tool Writer, told me onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week — just days after the company raised $100 million at an undisclosed valuation. 

The use of AI in the writing process was front and center in the writer’s strike; on Sunday evening, the Writers Guild and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reached a tentative agreement. Yet, Ofir Krakowski, co-founder and CEO at deepdub.ai, claims that his product hasn’t caused a single job loss. His take is that the studios are using his tools to make content more accessible: 

As of today, nobody has lost his job because of what we do. Actually, most of our customers are looking to monetize on content that was not economically viable to monetize on. So we are enabling them to do more work.

We also discussed how AIs are terrible at understanding and writing jokes, how an AI can understand a language to do idiomatically accurate and culturally sensitive translations, and how Writer’s tools can flag when the AI is “hallucinating” — which is a nice way to say “making shit up.”

The whole interview was interesting and lively. Check it out: