In a new job ad, Netflix is calling for someone with A.I. chops—and they’re willing to shell out just shy of $1 million a year for the right person. The product manager for Netflix’s Machine Learning Platform (MLP) will earn anywhere from $300,000 to $900,000 for “defining the strategic vision” for MLP, getting feedback from A.I. practitioners, and presenting strategies to stakeholders.
It’s part of a new wave of A.I. jobs that can be extremely lucrative thanks to investors funneling money into projects like ChatGPT, willing to risk its potential for bugginess or catastrophic effects. This level of funding has created six-figure roles like prompt engineers who can be compensated as much as $335,000 a year for monitoring and assisting ChatGPT-like products. But these golden nugget positions can come at the cost of other workers; ChatGPT has already made some roles obsolete, and a new report shows that A.I.-related innovations have already cost nearly 4,000 people their jobs in May.
Generative A.I. has sparked a lot of anxiety in the entertainment world, where a job like Netflix’s MLP product manager is especially striking given that the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes regarding fair pay and A.I. regulations rage on (Netflix declined to Fortune’s request for comment). The two unions first walked out together decades ago in the 1960s over pay issues. Sixty years later, actors and writers walked out over contract disputes. Their concerns over better pay might strike a chord with older stars and starlets, but newer issues of streaming residuals and the intrusion of A.I. might seem Orwellian to Old Hollywood.
Netflix’s salary for its A.I. product manager role is a Goliath compared to the majority (87%) of SAG-AFTRA members who earn less than $26,000 a year, Netflix’s salary for one role is a Goliath compared to the majority (87%) of SAG-AFTRA members who earn less than $26,000 a year, as the Intercept points out. Background actors often take home only around $200 daily, according to the SAG-AFTRA contract.
Much like in the white-collar tech world, actors and writers alike express fears about how unmonitored A.I. might forever change their jobs, salaries, or sector entirely. One point of contention for actors is that their digital likeness could be used and controlled perpetually by the studios, leading to a lack of autonomy and potentially fewer gigs down the line. Writers have voiced concerns about how tools like ChatGPT might take over the screenwriting world and how their jobs might be whittled down to editing automated scripts for less money.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents all of the Hollywood studios, sent a statement to the press in May that writers’ desire to use A.I. during the creative process without changing credits was “complicated given A.I. material can’t be copyrighted,” but that they’re “committed” to having more discussions about it.
The Netflix role also shows how deep studios’ pockets run when they want to pay up. While writers are picketing in part because of small residuals that make earning a living in coastal areas extremely difficult, media mogul pay has reached billions of dollars. Netflix itself recently shared the million-dollar bonuses its execs received. “While investors have long taken issue with Netflix’s executive pay, the compensation structure is more egregious against the backdrop of the strike,” WGA West president Meredith Stiehm wrote in response to said news.
It’s not all that different outside city of stars, as the pandemic helped widen the gap between workers’ and CEOs’ compensation. While the surge in salary for executives has ebbed a bit recently, the median CEO makes nearly $15 million a year, according to data from The Associated Press and Equilar. The median pay for employees at these companies was in the high $70,000 range, the outlet points out, meaning that they would need to work 186 years to catch up to what the executive made in just one year.
Stars might not be just like us, but their bosses seem to be not all that different.