Hollywood screenwriters may be on strike mainly for salary reasons, but their conflict with studios and streaming services is also fueled by a hypothesis deemed insulting: the idea that an artificial intelligence could soon replace them. With their ability to mimic human conversation, programs like ChatGPT have spooked many industries recently. This week, the White House convened the big players in AI to discuss potential risks.
And on the picket lines in Los Angeles, the subject is on everyone’s mind. Especially after the failure of negotiations between the bosses and the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the powerful union which represents 11,500 feathers in the audiovisual industry. “Art cannot be created by a machine,” criticizes Eric Heisserer, the screenwriter of the film Bird Box, which was a hit on Netflix. “We lose the heart and soul of the story… The first word (of Artificial Intelligence) is still artificial.”
The WGA says it pushed to restrict the use of AI during talks. The union wanted any robotic output not to qualify as “literary” or “source” material, key terms that imply royalty payouts. He also wanted to prevent scenarios written by his members from being used to train an AI.
Requirements rejected by the studios, which proposed an annual meeting to “discuss the progress of technology”. “It’s good that they are offering to organize a meeting on how they are exploiting it against us!” quipped Mr. Heisserer, a little disillusioned. The screenwriter laments “having to watch technology companies destroy the market in an attempt to discover for themselves” the creative limits of robots.
Among the screenwriters, very few imagine an artificial intelligence capable of doing their job. But the mere fact that studios and streaming platforms are ready to explore this subject sounds like a final affront to everyone. In a Hollywood disrupted by Netflix and Silicon Valley culture, they fear executives will be willing to make any creative compromises to improve profitability.
After all, the past decade has seen scriptwriting teams shrink, in the name of ever-shorter platform-ordered series seasons. And big studios like Disney are laying off with a vengeance to reassure Wall Street. Remarks at the Milken Institute’s global conference this week in Beverly Hills have fueled their concerns. “In the next three years, you will see a film written by AI, (…) a good film”, thus released the producer of cinema Todd Lieberman.
Beyond storylines, AI could be used for “editing” or “movie storyboarding,” Fox Entertainment director Rob Wade said. Within 10 years, “AI will be able to do absolutely all of these things,” he insisted. The studios also assure that the WGA is not as angry with the AI as it claims.
According to a briefing note, the union explained during negotiations that the screenwriters do not wish to ban AI, and seem happy to use it “as part of their creative process”, as long as it does not affect their remuneration. . This hypothesis “requires much more discussion,” the studios clarified, according to this memo.
For Leila Cohan, pen of the hit series Bridgerton, the only use of an AI could be to assign it to “tedious tasks” or random tasks, such as suggesting character names. The 39-year-old screenwriter, however, fears that the studios are tempted to make first drafts of scripts “incredibly bad with AI and then hire screenwriters to rewrite them”.
“It’s very good that we are tackling this problem now,” she said. Because the lessons of the last writers’ strike, 15 years ago, are still in everyone’s mind. At the time, Netflix was still in its infancy, and the WGA had secured royalties for streaming replays, which are now deemed far too low.
Science fiction writer Ben Ripley also considers it “very necessary” to legislate today “to put in place safeguards” concerning AI. Even if, according to him, it has nothing to do with the creative process. Writers “must be original,” he reminds. However, “Artificial intelligence is the antithesis of originality.”
