When the union representing Hollywood writers drew up its list of goals for contract negotiations with studios this spring, it included familiar language about compensation, which the writers say has stagnated or declined amid an explosion of new shows.
But way down, the document added a clear 2023 twist. Under a section titled “Professional Standards and Protections in the Employment of Writers,” the union wrote that it aimed to “regulate the use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”
Screenwriters can now be added to the mix of computer programmers, marketing copywriters, travel consultants, lawyers and comic book illustrators suddenly alarmed by the increasing power of generative AI.
“It’s not out of the question that before 2026, the next time we negotiate with these companies, they’ll say, ‘You know what, we’re good,'” said Mike Schur, creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator from “Parks and Recreation.”
“We don’t need you,” he imagines when he hears it from the other side. “We have a bunch of AIs that create a bunch of entertainment that people are kind of OK with.”
In their efforts to push back, the writers have what many other white-collar workers don’t: a union.
Mr Schur, who is a member of the Writers Guild of America’s negotiating committee, which is trying to avert a strike before the contract expires Monday, said the union hopes “now to draw a line in the sand and say ‘Writers are people.'”
But unions, historians say, have generally failed to contain new technologies that enable automation or the replacement of skilled workers with less skilled workers. “I can’t imagine a union that managed to be brave and pull it off,” said Jason Resnikoff, an assistant professor of history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who studies labor and automation.
The fate of the writers, actors and directors negotiating new contracts this year could say a lot about whether the pattern will continue in the age of artificial intelligence.
In December, Apple introduced a service that allows book publishers to use human-sounding AI narrators, an innovation that could displace hundreds of voice actors who make their living performing audiobooks. The company’s website says the service will benefit independent authors and small publishers.
“I know someone always has to be there first, a company,” said Chris Ciulla, who estimates he’s made $100,000 to $130,000 a year telling books under union contracts for the past five years. “But for individuals who don’t understand how that can ultimately affect the bucket-carrying narrator, it’s disappointing.”
Other actors fear that studios will use AI to replicate their voices and remove them from the process. “We’ve seen this happen — websites have popped up with databases of video game and animation character voices,” said Linsay Rousseau, an actress who makes her living doing voice work.
On-camera actors point out that studios are already using motion capture or performance capture to mimic performers’ movements or facial expressions. The 2018 blockbuster “Black Panther” relied on this technology for scenes that depicted hundreds of tribesmen on cliffs, mimicking the movements of dancers hired to perform for the film.
Some actors worry that studios with newer versions of the technology could effectively steal their moves, “creating new performances in the style of a wushu or karate master and using that person’s style without permission,” says Zeke Alton, a voice actor. and movie actor. who sits on the board of his local union, SAG-AFTRA, in Los Angeles.
And Hollywood writers have become increasingly anxious as ChatGPT has become adept at mimicking the style of prolific authors.
“Early on in the guild talks, we talked about what I call the Nora Ephron problem,” says John August, a Writers Guild board member. “Which is basically, what happens if you feed all of Nora Ephron’s scripts into a system and generate an AI that can create a Nora Ephron-sounding script?”
Mr August, a screenwriter for films such as ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, said that while artificial intelligence had taken a backseat in the Writers Guild negotiations, the union made two major demands on the subject of automation .
It wants to ensure that no literary material – scripts, treatments, sketches or even individual scenes – can be written or rewritten by chatbots. “A terrible case of ‘Oh I read your scripts, I didn’t like the scene so I had ChatGPT rewrite the scene’ – that’s the nightmare scenario,” Mr August said.
The guild also wants to ensure that studios cannot use chatbots to generate source material that has been adapted to the screen by humans, the way they might edit a novel or a magazine story.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, says more of its members are marking contracts for individual jobs in which studios appear to be claiming the right to use their voices to generate new performances.
A recent Netflix contract provided the company with free use of a simulation of an actor’s voice “through all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and forever.”
Netflix said the language had been in use for several years and allowed the company to make one actor’s voice sound more like another in the event of a casting change between seasons of an animated production.
The union has said its members are not bound by contract terms that would allow a producer to simulate new performances without compensating actors, though it has sometimes intervened to release them from contracts anyway.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, executive director of SAG-AFTRA, said such contracts posed a much greater risk to non-union members, who could become unwitting accomplices to their own obsolescence. “There are only one or a few times when you have to give up your rights for life to really have a negative impact on your career prospects,” said Mr. Crabtree Ireland.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates with the various unions representing writers, actors and directors on behalf of major Hollywood studios, declined to comment.
When professionals have fended off technology aging, the result has often reflected the status and prestige of their profession.
That seems to have been the case to some extent with airline pilots, whose crew members had dropped to two on most domestic commercial flights by the late 1990s, but have remained largely the same since then, even as computerized technology has become much more advanced. and the industry has explored further reductions.
“The safety net you have when you’re high above the ground — the one that keeps you from hitting the ground — is two well-trained, experienced, equipped pilots,” said Captain Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, who represents pilots for American Airlines. To this day, flight times of more than nine hours require a minimum of three pilots.
The replacement of certain doctors by artificial intelligence, which some experts predicted was imminent in areas such as radiology, also failed to materialize. This is partly due to the limitations of the technology, as well as the stature of the physicians, who have engaged in important conversations about the safety and deployment of AI. The American College of Radiology established a Data Science Institute, in part for this years ago.
Whether screenwriters will find similar success will depend at least in part on whether there are inherent limits to the machines that claim to do their jobs. Some writers and actors speak of a so-called uncanny valley that algorithms may never quite escape.
“Artists look at everything ever created and find a flash of newness,” said Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer and producer for “Lost” and “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.” “What the machine does is recombine.”
No matter how sophisticated the algorithms are, the fate of writers and actors will also depend on how well they protect their status. How good are they at convincing the public that they care if a human is involved?
The unions are pushing their case. Mr. August says it’s up to the Writers Guild, not the studio, to determine who gets a writer’s credit for a project, and that the union will jealously guard this ritual. “We want to make sure an AI is never one of those writers in the title chain for a project,” he said.
The unions also have legal cards to play, Mr Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA said, as does the US Copyright Office’s ruling in March that content created entirely by algorithms is ineligible for copyright protection. It is more difficult to make money from a production if there is no legal obstacle to copying it.
Perhaps more important, he said, is what you might call the Us Weekly factor: audiences’ tendency to be as interested in the person behind the role as they are in the performance. Fans want to hear Hollywood celebrities talk about their method in interviews. They want to gawk at actors’ fashion sensibilities and keep track of who they’re dating.
“When you look at culture in general, the public is generally interested in the real lives of our members,” said Mr. Crabtree Ireland. “AI is not able to replace key elements of it.”
