by Don Hall

Hollywood’s 15 years of labor peace was shattered Tuesday, as movie and television writers went on strike, bringing many productions to a halt and dealing a blow to an industry that has been rocked in recent years by the pandemic and sweeping technological shifts.

The unions representing the writers said in a statement, hours before their three-year contract expired at midnight Pacific time, that they had “voted unanimously to call a strike.”

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood companies, said in a statement that its offer included “generous increases in compensation for writers.” The organization added that it remained willing to keep negotiating.

The primary sticking points, according to the studios, involve union proposals that would require companies to staff television shows with a certain number of writers for a specified period of time “whether needed or not.”

SOURCE

One of the Writers Guild of America proposals online is “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material and (union written) material can’t be used to train AI.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers rejected this proposal and countered with an offer to meet annually “to discuss advancements in technology.”

Don’t make any mistake—I’m defiantly in the camp of the writers on this one (as I would be in any fight between those doing the work versus those raking in billions of dollars) but the fight against new technology is a losing one historically. Combine the encroachment of advancing AI with the glut of writers generated by, yes, online magazines (LiterateApe.com among them but without the click bait-y bullshit or capital investments) as well as a pendulum swing against unions in the past thirty years and things don’t look so good for the WGA.

AI generates clumsy content but we’re in the first stage of the internet disruption. The beauty of the internet has destroyed the commercial power of the music industry, the radio industry, the theater industry, the journalism industry, retail stores and malls. All prognostication that AI will never match the creative output of the human mind is naive.

The following was written (and unedited) by ChatGPT:

It is theoretically possible for AI to become dominant over humans if it were programmed or trained to do so. However, it's important to note that such a scenario currently only exists in science fiction and there are various ethical, legal, and technical barriers that make such a scenario extremely unlikely. It's therefore important to approach the development and use of AI with caution and to focus on ensuring that these technologies are used to enhance human well-being and not cause harm.

AI can generate creative writing to a certain extent. AI has been used in various creative endeavors such as art, music, and literature. While machines may not have the same level of creativity and imagination as humans, they can analyze large datasets of creative works to recognize patterns, tendencies, and styles. AI can generate new works based on these patterns and preferences but it still lacks the human touch and emotions. For instance, machines can write poetry or content for creative articles but they might not be able to truly express the same emotions in the writing that a human author can. Nonetheless, AI-generated creative works can still be valuable in various settings and have the potential to improve over time.

This is only unsettling if you are a writer who hopes to make a living writing. From interviews with the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) this leap into almost human-sounding writing from an artificial means is just the beginning and it advanced in months rather than years. As I’ve written before, human imagination is at the key but when a machine can access and synthesize from the whole of human writing, the illusion of creativity is probably enough. Recalling the opening scenes of Robert Altman’s The Player, most entertainment coming from those very writer’s rooms at jeopardy are simply combinations of other works (“It’s Pretty Woman meets Mission Impossible. It’s House of Dragons meets The Hunger Games with a diverse cast.”)

Joe Janes makes the case.

‌Really, the best way for us to make as much money as possible is to pay our employees as little as possible without covering healthcare or retirement and making them pay for things, like uniforms and supplies. Whether they live or not is not up to us. That’s their business. We’ll do the least amount that’s legally possible while we also funnel money into changing those laws so we can eventually pay even less.

The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring. No one at the beginning of pumping oil out of the ground to create fuel for stuff had much of an idea of the changes it would bring. Predicting longer-term or even medium-term results of radical technological changes is no more accurate than placing bets at a roulette table with another thousand numbers to spin. The best we can do is figure out what to do now and ignore both the proselytizers and the doomsayers.

Right now the WGA is on strike. They’re fighting against greed and technology which never bodes well for the workers at any time.

Worse, every amazing movie or television show created in the near future that defies AI with its inventiveness and creativity immediately adds those ideas to the machine learning. Think of it this way—Aaron Sorkin has at least 10,000 hours of practice as a successful writer of screenplays, probably a lot more. Artificial Intelligence has access to his thousands of hours plus the hours of Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Maya Angelou, Billy Wilder, Nora Ephron, Nicole Holofcener, Akira Kurosawa, and anyone who ever wrote a screenplay in history. Sorkin doesn’t have a chance.

I hope the WGA strikes a deal to allow them to continue to make a living doing the thing they are gifted to do. I’d also hope each and every one of their members starts to plan out how to adapt to this rapidly advancing technology because local newspapers, local television and radio stations, local retail outlets did not and they’re fucked.