AI in Hollywood: Creative Catalyst or the End of Original Storytelling?
Hollywood writers have gone on strike, demanding rules to ensure that AI tools like ChatGPT will help them, but not replace them. This conflict is set to play out in industries far beyond Hollywood
Hollywood writers are on strike against the major studios, with AI's role in the industry at the heart of the dispute. Questions include: “What place will AI tools like ChatGPT occupy, and what will be the future role of human writers in the era of AI?"
The writers are demanding rules to make sure that AI will be used only as tools, supporting rather than rivaling human creativity. They want assurances that AI tools won’t compete with them for credit or for money. In response, the studios have refused to commit to anything beyond further talks about the role of technology in the industry
The issues playing out in Hollywood — what is the role of human intellect, human judgment, human creativity and human empathy? — are coming soon to nearly every other industry.
Hollywood Writers Want AI Tools, But Not AI Co-workers, or AI Bosses
Hollywood writers recently went on strike against the major studios after negotiations broke down two weeks ago. Every three years, the writers, through their union, the Writers Guild of America (the “WGA”) sit down with the Hollywood studios to renegotiate their basic contract, known as the “Minimum Basic Agreement” or “MBA.”
Before the current strike, the last writers’ strike was fifteen years ago, in 2007-2008. Among the issues in the 2007-2008 Strike was whether and how much writers would get paid for DVDs and also for, what was then called “new media” and what we now call “streaming.”
This time around, there are, as always, multiple issues regarding pay rates and residuals, but in addition, a new set of issues have come up concerning Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT.
The issues are complex, but essentially the writers want assurances that AI tools will remain just that — tools. Their concern is, not to put too fine a point on it, the concern of white-collar workers, aka knowledge workers, in pretty much every industry — will I lose my job to an AI? Will my new boss be an AI?
The writers want contractual assurances from the studios that, for example, if a studio were to use ChatGPT to create a first draft of a script and then ask a writer to revise it, the human writer would get the credit, and the money, as the principal author.
The WGA summary states that the writers have proposed contractual rules to ensure that human writers will remain in control:
Regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBAcovered projects: AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI.
WGA Negotiations — Status as of May 1, 2023
In response, the studios have proposed further discussions about whether to have a conversation about exploring whether to form a committee to supervise a taskforce to do a study:
AI raises hard, important creative and legal questions for everyone. . . So it's something that requires a lot more discussion, which we've committed to doing.
Kate Kilkenny (@katiekilkenny7) , Writers Strike: Studios Break Silence on AI, TV Staff Sizes, How Talks Broke Down (Hollywood Reporter)
Specifically, the studios have proposed “annual meetings to discuss advances in technology.”
The writers, unmoved, have dropped their pens and picked up their picket signs.
The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Is a Preview of Things to Come Across the Entire Economy
White-collar workers everywhere are asking the same question: what does AI mean for me?
The Hollywood writers’ strike offers a unique view into the dynamics between employers and employees around this question because this is a union negotiation — something that is uncommon in the white-collar world where unions are relatively rare. That means that more of the discussion is happening in public.
Including the current strike, the WGA has gone on strike six times over the past sixty years, or roughly once per decade. The current strike raises some familiar issues, and some unprecedented. The familiar issues are fights about money, and, specifically, how to split the pie when it comes to new technology. This has played out many times over the decades, with pay-per-view, and video cassettes, and DVDs, and then internet streaming. Each time, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, they reached a compromise.
But the unprecedented issue — raised by AI tools — is what exactly is the fundamental role of the human writer in the creative process? The writers — like their colleagues in other industries, the doctors, the professors, the marketers, the programmers, the teachers, and yes, the lawyers — want assurance that new AI tools will make their lives better, not worse. That these tools will help them, rather than replace them.
The studios, along with many employers in many other industries, can’t or won’t give them these assurances. They’ll agree to keep talking about it, and so far, that’s as far as they’ll go.
Similar conversations are sure to play out at software companies, hospitals, schools, and law firms.
What’s Next? A Wary Compromise and a Bumpy Road Ahead
When it comes to fights over money, the writers and the studios have worked it out before, and my guess is, they’ll work it out again. At least, this has been the pattern to date, because both sides knew that they needed each other.
But the unnerving question is, do they still? Do the studios need human writers? (and, for that matter, human actors, human musicians, human directors?) My guess is, almost certainly, yes, for the foreseeable future. But at the same time, it seems impossible to doubt that the job of writer (or actor, or director, or, for that matter, teacher, or lawyer or doctor) will be transformed in the next few years. Whatever AI’s capabilities now, those capabilities are fast improving.
Disruption seems inevitable, and yet the exact form that will take seems impossible to predict. Power structures will almost certainly be upended, but how, and in what way?
Indeed one question may be, not, “do the studios need the writers?” but, “do the writers need the studios?” And a version of that question is likely to play out across every industry.
Watch this space.
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