Mind Readings: The WGA Strike and Artificial Intelligence

In today's episode, let's talk about the very timely topic of the Writers Guild of America Strike and one of their demands in particular. This is about artificial intelligence. No surprise. I have no expertise in the rest of their proposal about how writers are paid, but I do have expertise in artificial intelligence. In their position document, the WGA said the following.

In regards to artificial intelligence, the demands to the studios regulate the use of artificial intelligence on MBA covered projects. It means projects that the union works on. AI cannot write or rewrite literary material, can't be used as source material, and MBA covered material can't be used to train AI. Okay, let's unpack this. They're saying that from their perspective as writers, they don't want machines writing or rewriting literary material.

Writing I can understand. Rewriting, machines are really good at that. The critical one is the their writing can't be used as source material, and MBA covered material can't be used to train any gap. That ship has sailed. If you look at all the public uh large language models like GPT-4, GPT Neo X20B, uh Llama, all of them.

There are tons of sites online that archive scripts and transcripts of TV shows and movies. There are subtitles available for every single major production. Go on to open subtitles.org. Their writing is already in these models. Uh decades of it is in these models.

So that ship has sailed. The part that I think the WGA has underestimated, particularly with streaming companies, is that streaming companies are technology companies first. They're entertainment companies second, right? They are tech companies. Think about Apple and Apple TV Plus, okay?

Think about Amazon and Amazon Prime. Think about Netflix. These are not legacy entertainment companies. This is not MGM or Paramount or CBS. These are tech companies that happen to have a foot in the world of entertainment.

They will, without question, use the WGA strike as a golden opportunity to replace writers as quickly as they can. And they have the tech and the know-how to do so. Yeah, legacy studios will struggle with getting the tech up and running. But Amazon, Amazon, it would not surprise me if Amazon studios already had custom large language models trained specifically on their massive content catalog, ready to go. I mean, Amazon started selling their bedrock uh language model interface two weeks ago to their AWS service.

It's for others to be able to do. So I think this is probably not not the position I would have gone, right? Because think about it, will Hollywood adopt machines instead of humans for script writing? Of course they would. It's an improvement of profitability.

And let's face it, Hollywood studios are not known for their super original content a lot of the time. Projects get green lit for profitability reasons, not artistic ones. And if a production can cost $5 million less because you have machines doing 80% of the writing, no studio exec uh in their right mind is gonna say no to that. I mean, think about it. This is why we've got a never ending supply of reboots and retreads in entertainment.

This strike and the uh implications for AI is going to change the profitability models in entertainment. The companies can spin up the tech real fast, they're going to shed head count and they're gonna move ahead of their peers. The legacy shops that can't get up to speed with tech is going to they're gonna fall behind to the more tech-enabled companies. And when you think about it, with copyright, yeah, the script, the writing itself might not be copyrightable if it's purely generated by machine, but that script is not the final IP. The produced show is.

So from that perspective, there's there's really not much of a copyright issue. So what should the WGA consider as its negotiating position for AI? Now, again, I am not a writer. I do not work in entertainment other than the Save Warrior campaign, right? Um, and I do not have expertise in the entertainment industry, but I do with machines.

So instead of the absolutist no AI negotiating position, what they probably should have gone with, and they still can, they could uh change the position on this. So if you're with the WGA, uh, could we please consider taking this input and feeding it back to uh the folks who are making decisions? Make it the demand instead that WGA writers are required to oversee the use of AI in script production with a quota of one to what, right? One person per one instance of machinery. If a production is using um a machine with a technical person on a union production, a WGA writer is required to supervise its its use and its output.

So it's not a case where a tech division of a streaming company could just spin up a room full of uh GPT instances and just crack out a whole bunch of scripts. No, you still need to do a decent amount of prompt engineering for that and custom model training. But it would be trivial for the WGA to say, yeah, our writers are gonna be attached to the hip to your to your tech folks. Our writers are going to be in the system itself, looking at what people are putting in for prompts and what comes out. And this is gonna do two things.

One, it keeps the WGA writers meaningfully employed. And second, it will show both the studios and the writers what the strengths and limitations of these large language models are, right? Because they do have strengths like rewriting things. They're really good at that. Writing net new stuff, not as good at that, right?

They can't really generate truly original new ideas. But they absolutely could take, you know, a script from an old night rider episode and transform it into a Pokemon episode. These machines are extremely good at rewriting. Filing prompt engineering, which is the discipline of writing the plain language, plain English code that goes into these machines to get them to do what we want them to do. There is no one better qualified conceptually, conceptually, to be a prompt engineer than a skilled writer.

So the WGA's position should be we're going to be doing the prompt engineering as well as supervise. And I think that would give the studios the ability to use the technology to reduce the time to output, right, to speed up production without eliminating WGA writer positions. And WGA writers would be able to supervise and put a leash on AI without outright saying nope, it's not allowed here, because the reality is it's already in the tech naval studios. And those studios, they're just going to march right ahead. Uh and they will use the strike as an excuse to say, well, we don't have human writers, so we'll just use the machine ones.

And that's not a position that's going to help consumers, because we're going to get redreads of redreds. It's not going to help writers. And in the long term, it might not help the studios either because they will be more profitable with it, but the content won't be as good. So again, if you work for the WGA, if you are a union member, please feel free to send this along to the leadership. If you work in entertainment, uh and you've uh spot some obvious flaws in my argument, please let me know.

Just leave a note in the comments or whatever. But uh that's that's where things stand right now, and uh I think there's gonna be a uh a sea change accelerated by the strike. So hopefully folks can adopt a more nuanced position on AI sooner rather than later. Thanks for watching. I'll talk to you soon.

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