The WGA AI demands are at the heart of the 2023 writers’ strike, but they impact all of us. Since the members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike on May 2, their proposals and picket line activity have swept headlines and social media. The most famous part of their proposals for Hollywood’s biggest studios focus on regulating the use of AI in film. 

Why do the WGA AI demands matter? What exactly do these demands mean? The WGA members may be fighting for their industry specifically, but they’re calling attention to a much bigger problem that impacts everyone. 

The WGA AI Demands Explained

The Writers Guild of America went on strike for a variety of specific reasons. Before the strike even began, the union’s leadership tried to work with the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The AMPTP is the representative organization for the main TV and film production studios in the US. The members of AMPTP are screenwriters’ primary pool of employers. 

At the heart of the writers strike is a fight for fair pay, one which the AMPTP has continually pushed back against. Over the past 15 years since the last writers’ strike in 2007, fair pay and fair contracts for writers have slowly ebbed away in Hollywood. Streaming has hit writers particularly hard since it removed residuals, small but ongoing payments writers receive when their content is re-aired on TV. 

The WGA AI demands are part of the union’s larger demand for fair pay and contracts as well as long term career protections. Among the WGA’s list of proposals is a section specifically addressing AI. The WGA is demanding that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material” and “can’t be used as source material”. 

This means that film, TV, and streaming studios cannot use AI to write or edit scripts for their content, prohibiting studios from replacing real writers with AI. The WGA also included a requirement that their material can’t be used to train AI. This is a particularly important demand. It allows writers to rest assured that creating their best content won’t inadvertently work against them by training their replacement. 

The WGA is basically calling for the members of AMPTP to promise they won’t use AI to eliminate the entire screenwriting profession. AI may not be capable of replacing them yet, but going on strike now will hopefully ensure that that never happens. That may seem like a fair thing to ask for, but the AMPTP and studio representatives have thus far refused to agree to it. 

One writer, Jorge Rivera, commented on AI in a recent interview, “[The] studios are pushing really hard on that issue and don’t even want to talk about it because they’re pushing hard for that to work.” 

To studio executives who are already trying to minimize the amount of money they pay their creatives, AI might look like the golden goose. Their reluctance to guarantee fair pay and contracts for real writers probably seems concerning. However, AMPTP’s hopes for AI might be more optimistic than realistic. 

What AI Could Do In Film and TV

Are the WGA AI demands reasonable or paranoid? AI might be able to spit out impressively convincing written content, but could it actually replace screenwriters? The confusion over this issue highlights a misunderstanding about both the complexities of screenwriting and how generative AI actually works. 

What’s Up With “Generative AI”?

AI models like ChatGPT and DALL-E have boomed in popularity over the past couple of years. Generative AI is seemingly an ultra-talented, free-for-all robot that can write essays, mash together photos, produce music, solve math problems, and write functional malware all within mere minutes. These algorithms don’t actually create the content they pump out, though. 

Generative AI is trained through machine learning. Developers have the algorithm process thousands of samples of certain types of content until the AI can recognize and replicate it. When the AI goes live, it essentially recycles hybrid content pulled from all those samples it was trained with. 

As a result, AI doesn’t actually understand what it’s generating. It’s also inaccurate to say the AI is writing or creating anything. It’s more like the AI is compiling a playlist on Spotify, not publishing an original album. Since the algorithm can only recycle content it has already seen, nothing generative AI delivers is actually original. 

This is why the WGA AI demands include a stipulation that screenwriters’ contracted work can’t be used to train AI models. If their content was going into these algorithms’ training data, their unique writing style and skills could be used countless times without any compensation or credit. 

The Uses and Limits of AI in Hollywood

In 2016, IBM made headlines when its Watson AI was used to create a movie trailer for 2016’s Morgan starring Kate Mara and Anya Taylor-Joy. Developers showed the algorithm trailers for over a hundred horror and thriller movies to train it. Then Watson analyzed the footage for Morgan and selected the 10 most algorithmically-favorable scenes to use in a trailer. 

An actual editor did the work of putting together those scenes to make the trailer. It cut down the editing process to a mere 24 hours, rather than weeks. 

Despite the buzz about the Morgan trailer, AI has yet to become a mainstay in film editing. It’s a helpful tool for speeding up or automating certain tasks, but lacks the emotional and industry knowledge a real editor needs. 

The same applies to writing, including screenwriting as well as everything from journalism to novels. AI is perfectly capable of autonomously editing written content or pitching ideas. It can draft an email or an essay with an adequately detailed prompt.

Where the AI falls short is emotion and human experience. AI fundamentally has no emotions, no soul, no concept of the human experience or what it is to be alive. An AI can’t draw off a touching personal journey or life-changing moment. All it does is replicate and recycle. 

The Importance of Industry Knowledge

Plus, as WGA West board member Adam Conover explains, AI lacks real-world industry knowledge that’s crucial in screenwriting. Filmmaking is a very complicated process where every stage is interconnected. The way a script is written can help or hinder the film production. This is part of why it’s important for writers to get time on set, another aspect of their jobs that studio execs are trying to eliminate. 

Experienced screenwriters understand mechanics of the film industry that help them create better scripts. For instance, they might know a certain prop or action simply isn’t feasible to film a certain way. They might even think to write a joke to fit a certain actor or actress’s comedic timing. AI lacks all of this industry context. As a result, it will generate less functional, thoughtful scripts than a real writer could create. 

Why Everyone Should Care About the WGA Strike

Why should people who aren’t writers or filmmakers care about the WGA AI demands? AI threatens the quality of the movies and TV we could all be watching in the future, for one thing. 

We watch movies and TV to connect emotionally with the content. That connection could be as simple as feeling joy when a cool action scene takes place. Writers are the people who create the blueprints for the emotional pulse of every movie and TV episode. Since writers are real people, every line and moment is intentional and thought out.

The very soul of creative content would be lost if AI was writing the scripts. What we would get instead is watered down content algorithmically designed to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator audience. Nothing would be original anymore. Studios would be much more risk-averse, as well, meaning more franchise content and less new content. 

Additionally, AI threatens millions of jobs. OpenAI estimates that at least 80% of all jobs could be impacted by AI in some way. Nearly 20% of all jobs could be automated 50% or more using AI. The jobs most under threat aren’t just creative roles like writing. They also include software developers, product designers, financial analysts, web designers, PR specialists, accountants, and even animal scientists. 

People who lose these high paying jobs to generative AI may not have many options for alternative careers, either. Robots are automating many manual tasks, eliminating jobs in fields like manufacturing. 

When AI applications target 100% automation of any job, the goal is never to provide a better career for real people. The goal is to cut costs wherever possible. The WGA AI demands are calling attention to this and raising the alarm about job loss to AI. They likely won’t be the last union to do so, either. 

The WGA AI Demands Are Only the Start

The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike is an exciting and pivotal moment in Hollywood and society at large. It’s about more than paying writers the fair share of film profits they’ve earned. The WGA AI demands are shining a spotlight on a concerning trend in the workplace. Without responsible regulations, AI could be used to eliminate millions of jobs, far beyond just the film industry.