What do people think about the Hollywood strikes?
Many people think they could result in the downfall of TV and cinema, but I think it would be a good thing in the long term. It'll get rid of the lazy crappy companies who don't innovate, churning out the same boring politically motivated bollocks and promote smaller innovative content creators who make interesting and entertaining material.
The outcome of the first set of strikes in 2007-2008 was reality TV. The barely-scripted format with drama and overacting from non-professionals who are coaxed into creating scenes required little to no union staff involvement, proved cheap to pump out and disappointingly successful with the general public. I hate to see what will come out this time, but probably more low cost reality shows are likely. Short term the streaming networks will just increase their back catalogue and buy content in from other distributors, which will probably lead their revenue to stagnate as subscribers leave.
I understand why writers and actors are afraid of GPT/chatbots and AI image generation. However, this is going to happen regardless of their strike. I doubt serious writers will be replaced any time by AI, because it takes genuine talent and generalised intelligence to come up with an original and gripping story. AI is very good at regurgitating ideas and tends to create short stories accurately with little adventure or surprise in them. In other words, it would probably be pretty good at writing modern episodes of the Simpsons, but it is not going to create new dramas with millions of viewers tuning in to watch. Comedy is also likely a safe area for now; AI sucks at comedy, because it requires a proper human understanding of why a joke is funny (and also context-dependent, like political or current affairs comedy).
For actors, there's the star factor... I don't think fake actors generated by AI would cut it. I can see a risk for extras, there is one studio already that is famous for getting their extras on set for a day but the contract assigns all rights to their image for the remainder of the shoot and CGI is used to add them into scenes as needed. So suddenly you go from having someone being paid a reasonable amount for a month's worth of shooting, getting only one or two day's pay. That's quite bad for those guys. But the major A- and B-list stars are safe for some time, no one wants to see AI
Tim Cruze, they want to see human Tom Cruise because they know he's a real guy and they see him on the red carpet and on chat shows and all sorts. CGI could, with enough effort, already replace a lot of these actors, but it hasn't. That's because these actors are as much actors as they are marketing for the film.