Screenwriters strike: Hollywood’s AI battle
Hollywood writers aren’t just fighting for better pay, said Simmone Shah in Time. They’re taking a stand against AI. Last week, the 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America who write for film and television went on strike, making the WGA one of the first creative labor unions to do battle over how artificial intelligence will redefine work and workers’ pay. The writers are also fighting for fair pay in the age of streaming, but they want assurances that ChatGPT and other emerging AI programs won’t take their jobs or shrink compensation. AI “stands to drastically change Hollywood.” It’s easy to imagine it being used to generate premises or rough out screenplays that would be refined by human writers. So far, negotiations have stalled: The trade group representing the studios, broadcast companies, and streaming services has merely proposed holding annual meetings with union reps to discuss AI’s impact.
The studios’ goal is to maximize profits— “and they’re doing a great job of it,” said
Michael Jamin in The Guardian. Over the past decade, studio profits have increased by 39 percent while median weekly pay for writer-producers has fallen 4 percent, or by 23 percent counting inflation. The changes on both sides can largely be attributed to the industry’s shift from broadcast to streaming. Streaming series are often shorter, reducing the length of a writer’s typical gig. Writing staffs have shrunk, too, as studios now favor “mini rooms”— writers’ rooms that employ two or three people instead of seven or eight. In the long term, continuing the squeeze on writers will be bad for Hollywood, and bad for viewers. “The talent pool will dry up, which will hurt the quality of shows produced.”
Among studio bigwigs, the idea that screenwriters are dispensable is almost as old as Hollywood itself, said Alissa Wilkinson in Vox. AI makes that dismissive attitude downright threatening. “Right now, AI tools are still pretty rudimentary,” and “I don’t expect the tools to ever turn out something as good as what a real human writer can achieve.” That almost doesn’t matter, though, because “cheap imitations of good things are what power the entertainment industry.” If this strike stretches for months, studio executives looking to cut costs might not be able to resist the promise of the technology.
Even with its current limitations, AI is already “a tireless machine that doesn’t need a salary and won’t go on strike when it’s being exploited.”