Is the Writers’ Strike Really About AI?
The big news today is that the Writers’ Guild of America is officially on strike. Their list of demands of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP, includes various forms of “more money,” but that’s not all they want. Other proposals include mandating more writers for television shows (a minimum of six to twelve, based on how many episodes the show produces), a minimum number of weeks of guaranteed employment each season, and perhaps most interestingly, control over a studio’s use of AI. The AI demands include that it can’t be used to “write or rewrite literary material” or “as source material.”
The AI-related demands suggest that the writers see trouble ahead as artificial intelligence gains more prominence in American culture and business – a cursory scan of your feed on your preferred social media platform will yield a host of jokes about writers being replaced by AI or perhaps having been replaced already. (It would be nice if they considered that there’s a reason they’re currently perceived as replaceable by something not even human, but the fear is there nonetheless.) In many ways, this strike is a bad idea, as Jed explains here. But maybe this isn’t so much greed as an act of desperation by an industry that fears becoming obsolete. (Or both; it can always be both.)
To be fair, the WGA does cite the minimum staffing and guaranteed weeks as their “primary sticking points.” And the AI demands constitute a small number of their proposals – they’re grouped into one point and buried near the end of the document. Are they really a minor point, or are they being hidden? Is this a negotiating tactic, drawing attention to the money, guaranteed work, and staffing conditions to get the AMPTP to nod along to the AI stipulations? Admittedly, I’m not privy to any inside info, and I’m not an expert, but considering the poor timing of this strike, which follows another poorly timed strike that got the writers a pittance at best, I’m curious if this is the method to their madness.
Look how the negotiation is going. The AMPTP is offering some concessions, but they’re dismissing a lot of the WGA’s proposals with no counteroffer. They also say they would be willing to give them considerably more money if not for “the magnitude of other proposals still on the table.” These are both negotiating tactics; the WGA is asking for way more than they’ll get, and the AMPTP is suggesting they’d get better deals on some of their points if they dropped others. The WGA likely knew that was going to happen; I wonder if they’ll drop some of these but keep the AI demands. That is one point where the AMPTP made a counteroffer.
That counteroffer is a brush aside, however. The AMPTP is offering to hold “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.” That’s nothing; you can say and do anything in a meeting, including simply telling people the way it is rather than conducting a fruitful discussion. Could the AMPTP know that this is what the writers really want, and would they rather pay them more money in the short term while exploring whether they can do away with a group of people they’d rather not pay at all? I think it’s possible; name one company that isn’t trying to eliminate as many paycheck-demanding employees as possible.
If that’s true, it’s a classic corporate misunderstanding of how their product is made. We can make all the jokes we want about the writing quality in Hollywood of late, but the truth is that art is more than a code some machine can replicate. But the boardroom suits don’t understand that because they’re not artists or people who care much about art; they’re numbers crunchers who speak in spreadsheets rather than soul. They’d love to assign writing duties to a computer they could program with all their focus-group-researched “notes” that they’re convinced are more important than characters or stories. And if a script can be reduced to an algorithm, why pay a writer for one?
On this point, I hope the writers get what they want. I don’t care about their bank accounts or how many weeks of work they’re promised. But ensuring workers are not replaced by AI is important for everyone, not just Hollywood writers. Like McDonald’s workers before them, the writers are responsible for some of this themselves; look at the soulless product that feels like it’s been written by a computer that’s littered, for example, Marvel films over the last couple of years. But it’s still in everyone’s best interest to make it more difficult to remove the human factor from an entire industry.
