A Warning to the WGA about Artificial Intelligence, from an Ally
I woke up this morning to this excellent post, Why AI Is the Most Important Issue in the Writers’ Strike, by Cole Haddon. As a novelist who has been working with generative AI since 2021, and as a guy who uses ChatGPT and Vertex every day in my job as Content Editor at a tech company, I’d like to respond in the spirit of helping these striking writers.
I want the WGA to prevail. I want it to be possible to make a stable living writing for TV and movies in Hollywood. Writing is a calling worth preserving, and I identify with the writers who are marching in picket lines with their exquisitely crafted, witty signs.
I’m also wincing at the WGA’s position on Artificial Intelligence so hard that my jaw is starting to hurt.
Backstory
Here’s where I’m coming from. I’ve been a writer my whole life. My first book came out in 2006, with an independent, Manhattan-based publisher, at the same time I was working at Amazon as an Editor on the Media Merchandising team. I lived between two worlds — legacy publishing and the technology company that explicitly sought to overtake it.
The most surprising part of this dual existence was that at no point while publishing three books with publishers in New York did a single person in that industry ask me a question about what it was like to work at Amazon, or ply me for insights on how the e-commerce giant actually operated. I was perplexed at the profound lack of curiosity about the ecommerce behemoth that was touching every job in book publishing. I think this attitude was the result of a combination of things — taking the cultural contours of an old industry for granted, disbelief that anything coming out of Seattle could be a threat, and the sort of technophobia that’s common among the bookish.
I’m worried that the WGA is displaying a similar lack of curiosity and slowness to respond to this latest disruptive technology. It reminds me a lot of how the book industry responded to Amazon and the music industry responded to file sharing. Those industries survived, even thrived in some instances, but the ones who took the status quo for granted and adopted inflexible, neo-Luddite positions are no longer with us.
Your sense of being special will be used against you
The WGA’s proposal regarding AI reads as follows: “Regulate use of AI 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.”
When I read this, I flashed back to a conversation I had with an esteemed publisher around 2007 or so, in which he sniffed derisively and said, “Bloggers in their underwear will never replace the New York Review of Books.”
Brothers and sisters in the WGA: If AI abstinence is your position, you are already finished.
The response from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on this point, an offer for an annual meeting to discuss advancements in the technology, indicates to me that this is a game of running out the clock. The longer this strike goes on, the longer runway the AMPTP will have to develop, hone, and test generative AI programs for writing scripts. It behooves the AMPTP to draw this conflict out for as long as possible, and the best way for them to achieve this is for the WGA to draw a line in the sand in front of gen AI. I’d say you probably have six months max to resolve this.
Smash all the weaving looms you want, but gen AI is not going away. And not only is it coming for the careers of creatives like writers and designers, it is starting to impact anyone who manages projects, develops plans of any kind, oversees schedules, teaches, designs, inputs or analyzes data, or simply uses software to do any part of their job.
This is a sliderules-to-calculators moment, a technological shift is beginning to transform modes of working and entertaining each other that we take for granted. For a sense of how disruptive this is going to get, consider how chess masters felt when computers started beating them. Now amplify that feeling and apply it to every aspect of your life that has anything to do with digital technology.
That’s not all. The next level won’t be just simply generating discete pieces of content — a script here, a blog post there. AI will come to manage entire workflows, such as the planning, targeting, executing, and analyzing the performance of multi-platform, integrated marketing campaigns.
Take control, take ownership, and innovate
We tend to insulate ourselves from technological disruptions by arrogantly coccooning ourselves in a sense of human exceptionalism. Brick and mortar bookstores, record shops, newspapers, movie theaters, taxi cabs, there’s just something that you can’t get from a blah de blah de blah. What’s actually exceptional about humans is our ability to apply our tools to our needs, desires, and whims.
Foot-stomping about machines taking writers’ jobs is a losing strategy. The only rational way forward I can see for the WGA in regard to gen AI is to insist on oversight and ownership of it. Instead of demanding that the AMPTP keep its hands off AIs (which I predict will produce an Oscar-winning screenplay within half a decade, if not earlier), insist that a percentage of revenue generated by AI-written scripts be distributed in some equitable fashion to members of the WGA. Such an arrangement would acknowledge that scripts generated by artificial intelligence draw upon a dataset of work created by the labor of humans.
The craft of writing is changing and will absolutely continue to change and none of us can stop it, as much as we may want to. In many, if not most professions involving the written word, human writers will maintain responsibility for prompts and revision, with AI generating the completions at the center of the process. For sure, this is a shocking development to those of us who imagine screenwriting as Dalton Trumbo in a bathtub.
When it comes to using gen AI, there isn’t anything particularly special about a movie studio that gives it an advantage over a writer with a laptop in an apartment. The rise of gen AI is an occasion to think more inventively about the structure of writing as a profession. The WGA could form a cooperative that produces scripted content using AI, and pay yearly dividends to its members. Movies and TV shows could come with a label similar to organic food, indicating that the humans who provided the dataset and editorial oversight that led to this riveting piece of entertainment were fairly compensated.
If I were in the position of the AMPTP, I would absolutely want all the writers in Hollywood to continue picketing, continue insisting that you just don’t get that special human something from an AI script, and demand that everyone forget about this Generative AI business altogether.
You really want to win? Invent new models for creating movies and TV shows using artificial intelligence that threaten to put legacy media companies out of business. Out-innovate them. You have access to exactly the same tools that they do. Remember, you understand what makes a great story. Seize the power of this understanding, couple it with mastery of this emerging technology, and quit bringing figurative knives to figurative gun fights.
