When the union representing Hollywood writers made its list Goals As for contract negotiations with the studios this spring, they involved familiar language about compensation, which the writers say has either stagnated or declined amid an explosion of new offerings.
Below, however, the document added a clear twist in 2023. In a section titled “Professional Standards and Protections in Employing Writers,” the union wrote that it aims to “regulate the use of materials produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies.”
To a mix of computer programmers and marketing copywriters, Travel Consultants, lawyers, and comics artists suddenly alarmed by the increasing dexterity of generative AI, one could now add screenwriters.
said Mike Shore, founder of The Good Place and co-creator of Parks and Recreation.
He imagines hearing it from the other side: “We don’t need you.” “We have a bunch of AI systems that create a bunch of entertainment that people kind of agree with.”
In their attempts to back off, the writers possess what many white-collar workers do not have: a labor union.
Mr. Shore, who serves on the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America as it seeks to avoid a strike before its contract expires on Monday, said the union hopes to “draw a line in the sand now and say: ‘Writers are human beings.'”
But historians say unions have generally failed to rein in new technologies that enable automation or the replacement of skilled labor with less skilled labor. “I am at a loss to think of a union that has managed to be brave and succeed at that,” said Jason Resnikoff, associate professor of history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who studies labor and automation.
The fortunes of writers, actors, and directors negotiating new contracts this year may say a lot about whether the pattern will continue in the age of artificial intelligence.
In December, Apple Do a favor allowing book publishers to use human-like AI narrators, an innovation that could replace the hundreds of voice actors who make a living performing audiobooks. The company’s website says the service will benefit independent authors and small publishers.
“I always know someone has to get there first, some company,” said Chris Ciola, who estimates he’s made $100,000 to $130,000 a year over the past five years from bookselling under union contracts. “But for individuals who don’t understand how that can affect the bucket-carrying narrator there in the end is disappointing.”
Other actors fear that studios will use artificial intelligence to duplicate their voices while excluding them from the process. “We’ve seen this happen — there are websites that have come up with databases of character voices from video games and cartoons,” said Linsay Rousseau, an actress who makes a living doing voice work.
Camera reps point out that studios are already using motion capture or performance capture to replicate artists’ movements or facial expressions. 2018 flagship movieBlack Panther“I relied on this technique for scenes that depict hundreds of tribesmen on cliffs, mimicking the movements of the dancers hired to perform in the movie.
Some actors worry that newer versions of the technology will allow studios to effectively steal their moves, “create a new performance in the style of a wushu master or karate master and use that person’s style without consent,” said Zeke Alton, a voice and screen actor who sits on the board of his local union, SAG. -AFTRA, in Los Angeles.
And Hollywood writers grew increasingly anxious as ChatGPT became adept at imitating the authors’ prolific style.
“Early in the conversations with the union, we talked about what I call the Nora Ephron problem,” said John August, a member of the Writers’ Guild negotiating committee. “Which is basically: What happens if you feed all of Nora Ephron’s text into a system and create an AI that can generate text that looks like Nora Ephron’s voice?”
Mr. August, a screenwriter for such films as “Charlie’s Angels” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” said that while AI took a back seat to compensation in writers’ union negotiations, the union was making two major demands on the subject of automation.
It wants to make sure that no literary material — texts, treatments, outlines, or even separate scenes — can be written or rewritten by chatbots. A terrible case like, ‘I read your scripts, I didn’t like the scene, so I rewrote the scene in ChatGPT – that’s the nightmare scenario,’ said Mr. August.
The Syndicate also wants to make sure that studios can’t use chatbots to create source material that’s adapted to the screen by humans, the way they might adapt a novel or magazine story.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, says more of its members are raising contracts for one-man jobs in which studios appear to be claiming the right to use their voices to spawn new shows.
Netflix’s latest contract sought to give the company the free use of emulating an actor’s voice “by all technologies and processes now known or hereafter developed, throughout the universe and forever.”
Netflix said the language had been around for several years and allowed the company to make one actor’s voice sound more like another’s if it changed casting between seasons of an animated production.
Union has He said that its members It is not bound by provisions of the contract that would have allowed the producer to mimic new shows without compensating the actors, although it has occasionally stepped in to get them out of contracts nonetheless.
Such contracts pose a much greater risk to non-union actors, who could become unwitting accomplices in its demise, said Duncan Crabtree Ireland, executive director of SAG-AFTRA. “It only takes one or a few instances of signing your rights on a lifetime basis for it to have a negative impact on your career prospects,” said Mr. Ireland Crabtree.
The Film and Television Producers Alliance, which negotiates with various unions representing writers, actors and directors on behalf of major Hollywood studios, declined to comment.
When professionals avoid obsolescence at the hands of technology, the outcome often reflects the prestige and prestige of their profession.
This appears to be somewhat the case with airline pilots, whose crew size fell to two on most domestic commercial flights in the late 1990s, but has remained largely flat since then, although automated technology has become more sophisticated and industry has explored Other cuts.
“The safety net you have when you’re high off the ground—that keeps you from hitting the ground—is two highly trained, experienced, relaxed pilots,” said Capt. Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association. Representing pilots for American Airlines. To this day, flight times over nine hours require at least three pilots.
The replacement of some doctors with artificial intelligence, which some experts had predicted would be imminent in fields such as radiology, also failed to materialize. This is partly because border of technology, and because of the prestige of physicians, who have inserted themselves into high-stakes conversations about the safety and deployment of AI. Data Science Institute partly for this purpose several years ago.
Whether screenwriters find similar success will depend at least in part on whether there are inherent limits to the devices that claim to do their jobs. Some writers and actors talk about a so-called uncanny valley that algorithms may not quite escape from.
“Artists look at everything ever created and find a flash of modernity,” said Javier Grillo-Marxuach, writer and producer on “Lost” and “Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.” “What the machine does is recombine.”
However 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 masses that they should care whether a human being is involved?
Unions press their case. Monsieur Auguste says that it is for the writers’ guild and not the studio to decide who gets a writer’s credit on a project, and that the guild will jealously guard this ritual. “We want to make sure that AI will never be one of those writers on the project’s title string,” he said.
SAG-AFTRA’s Mr Crabtree-Ireland said unions also had legal cards to play, such as the US Copyright Office’s permit in March This content generated entirely by algorithm is not eligible for copyright protection. It is difficult to monetize a production if there is no legal impediment to copying it.
Perhaps most important, he said, is what you might call our weekly factor—the tendency for audiences to be as interested in the human behind the role as they are in the performance. Fans want to hear Hollywood celebrities discuss their interview style. They want to stare at the actors’ fashion sensibilities and keep up with who they’re dating.
“If you look at the culture in general, the public is generally very interested in the real lives of our members,” said Mr. Ireland Crabtree. “Artificial intelligence is not in a position to replace the key elements of that.”
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