The Writers’ Strike Makes Sense; Their Demands About AI, However, Do Not

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike again. Given how much writers contribute to the entire entertainment ecosystem—every satisfying cinematic moment begins its life on the written page—the WGA is asking studios to grant professional writers a reasonable slice of Hollywood’s huge profit pie: a higher minimum wage across all media, higher contributions to benefits, more residuals for streaming. Basically, the same story as writers’ strikes from years past. And, let’s face it: the studios can afford it. Nearly all the WGA’s requests seem sensible, and worth striking over. As such, the overall strike seems righteous.

However, the WGA is also asking Hollywood to “regulate use of artificial intelligence on MBA-covered 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.“

The studios’ response? Let’s talk about it next year. (Given the exponential growth of AI in just the last two months, an entire year will feel like a century, and the studios know this, but that’s beside the point.)

The WGA speaks for at least a majority of writers in its guild, and that majority is dead wrong about AI. Perhaps it’s a negotiation tactic to walk back from, but even so, it is a disappointingly myopic starting point. Imagine if someone had just invented flight and the response was, “That’s cool, but we like cars; road trips are more fun. So let’s ban planes.”

The first airplanes were flimsy, I’ll give you that. And dangerous as hell. But come on… surely anyone can see the long-term potential. Why would you prevent people from using the latest and greatest tools? Because using better tools for faster results… has less value?

Let’s stop for a moment to catalog what professional screenwriters actually do.

Screenwriters pick a genre, then create a basic plot. They flesh out a brief synopsis (called a “logline”), a list of character names, a longer and more detailed synopsis (called a “treatment”), and a list of story “beats”, i.e., critical story junctures. Maybe a list of “must have” shots, too.

I’ve personally done all these things. It’s hard. It’s grunt work. It takes time—many days and often weeks, and sometimes months—to get all of it right, to make sure it lands, that all the parts work in harmony with each other. You add, you take away, you agonize, you celebrate… In the end, you trade 2-12 weeks of your life but finally, the hard part is over. Now you can shop the story around town hoping someone will pay you to write the actual screenplay.

With ChatGPT (the free version which anyone can access), I can collapse those days/weeks/months of hard work into just three minutes.

From weeks/months… to minutes.

You don’t have to be a studio producer to see the value here. Not only does AI save time, but it saves costs, as well.

Oh, you don’t like my pitch? Bummer. Just give me three minutes and I’ll give you another one. Or another. Or 10 more just like it.

AI is a screenwriter’s superpower which pancakes all that boring grunt work so writers can iterate faster and spend more time on the really fun part—actually writing the scenes. Is something lost in that process? Maybe. What’s gained, though? The part that’s gained is surely far greater than what’s lost. Perhaps this is why Ashton Kutcher is warning companies to embrace AI or “You’re probably Going to Be Out of Business“.

The WGA is concerned their members will be asked to do more and be paid less, and the WGA might be right. Times are changing. Better tools always remove inefficiencies in the market and removing those redundancies makes room for more nimble competitors: writers copiously using AI will be able to do more than those who don’t.

The WGA is not advocating for a better entertainment system—which would mean better stories coming out more quickly—though that would be great for consumers. Instead, the WGA’s directive is to protect its members. By painting AI as the bogeyman, the WGA is only delaying the inevitable. And they make themselves obsolete along the way.

In 1986, British print unions went on strike. Their members used hot-metal Linotype to lay out newspapers, and the strike was to protest the newly installed desktop computers which let journalists type in their own articles, thereby rendering expensive Linotype printers obsolete. In retrospect, desktop computers were obviously more efficient than Linotype printers, but print unions fought against computers to keep their members from losing their (now obsolete) job. Although this strike lasted a whole year, nothing changed. If anything, desktop computers got even better. The British print unions weren’t trying to make a more efficient printing business, though that was better for consumers; unions only protect their members, often at the expense of creating a more efficient business.

Innovative disruption ends with obsolete jobs being removed from the industry. Will some writers lose their jobs to AI bots? Perhaps. Should they lose their jobs? Yes—if their job can be done better by AI. This is the bitter truth nobody in the WGA dare speak aloud.

There is some good news. AI, as it currently exists, is still not perfect; users still need to understand how to craft a prompt to coax decent results out of ChatGPT. The best writers probably wouldn’t even use AI to write entire scripts (yet)—instead, they’ll use AI as an expeditious collaborative partner to iterate routine actions on the fly:

“Give me five versions of this scene.” 

“Give me 10 alternate endings.”

“Give me an iconic character like Keyser Söze with a 3 page background story.”

“Give me something that’s never been done before.”

Ironically, the one thing AI-generated content lacks clarity about is the one thing that will protect WGA members the most—AI-generated content isn’t currently protected by copyright. What studio would invest millions of dollars into an intellectual property they couldn’t lock down with copyright protection?

We haven’t even covered the question of what copyrighted material the AI has been trained on—given the explosion of new content from AI bots, how could anyone ferret out potential copyright violations? Obviously, you’d need to have AI bots scouring for copyright infringement… oh, the irony. All told, human writers might be the safer bet simply because they’re a known risk, legally speaking.

The WGA needs to think of AI like the early days of avionics. At the start of the 20th century, the plane in its current design was highly unreliable, untested, and unsafe. It might take you from New York to New Jersey, but you might also crash along the way. Yet just two decades later, planes would turn the tide of world wars.

Moreover, in the 19th century, it took six weeks to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. In bad weather, it could take fourteen weeks. By 1919, it took a single day to cross the Atlantic Ocean by airplane. Certainly, flying by plane wasn’t the same experience as boarding a ship for weeks on end—that luxurious time aboard a cruise ship was lost. Yet on that single day in 1919, life got faster. We could still take a six week cruise ship if we wanted, but faster options were now available, at last.

Professional screenwriters finally have a superpower to collapse their time doing boring grunt work from months into mere minutes.

And their own union won’t let them use it.