A fight erupted in Los Angeles this week when 11,500 writers for film and television went on strike. Screenwriters know all about confrontations: they are the second acts of three-act dramas, when the protagonists face a crisis that is only resolved at the end.
“You put them in the worst possible position they could ever walk into their lives,” George Lucas, creator of Star Wars film, once remarked about the second act. In this drama, the writers saw their own pay erode in the age of streaming, they have lost the comfortable conditions of broadcast television and fear their jobs will be taken by robots.
It’s strange to find among a list of requests presented producers from the Writers Guild of America with a request that only humans, not AI chatbots, be allowed to “write or rewrite literary material.” Drawing attention to the fact that you think software can do some of your work is a bold move, but screenwriters have vivid imaginations and reasons to be insecure.
The chances of ChatGPT or another AI agent advancing fast enough to write is slim The White Lotus OR Everything everywhere all at once in the immediate future. Sometimes they make things up, which might come in handy, but it takes a lot of experience to create drama that engages viewers, structure it into episodes, and polish dialogue.
Nor does screenwriting top the professions economists predict will soon be disrupted by AI: entertainment and media rank only in the middle of industries likely to be affected, with government and legal services at the top, second at Goldman Sachs. Robots aren’t yet breaking down the doors to the writers’ rooms that Hollywood is built on.
But the writers’ strike reflects a wider economic phenomenon: the shifting of high salaries to a few individuals at the top end and the disruption of traditional promotion pathways with increasing responsibility for apprentices. Machines are learning more than before, while humans are learning less – it’s not fanciful to fear a collision of trends in the future.
There was a moment during the last writers’ pay strike in 2008 where the studios let slip what was to come. Jeff Zucker, then chief executive officer of NBCUniversal, Talk to the Financial Times of the “remnants of an era that has passed and will not return”. He cited the broadcast’s tradition of ordering many pilots, turning only a few into series, and teasing them gradually.
It was an expensive habit, but it provided steady work for writers of series that would run for 20 or more episodes, as well as residual payments for repeat screenings on cable networks. The writers were employed for much of the year and worked on not only writing initial scripts but also rewriting during production and learning how dramas worked in the studio.
“Part of the job is training the writers under you so that they eventually understand what you do. How can you do a show if you’ve never been taught it? says Blake Masters, a writer and producer who created the drama Brotherhood. What seemed to employers like a financial extravagance meant steady employment, long-term training, and opportunities for writers.
That has diminished with the rise of streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime, which have favored shorter series of six to eight episodes to provide their subscribers with constant novelty. They have also paid a lot to attract top showrunners as reported by Netflix A 150 million dollar deal in 2017 with Shonda Rhimes, writer and producer of series including Bridgerton.
They’ve switched to hiring writers on short-term contracts to develop new dramas in what are known as “mini-rooms”; these are dissolved before the show is commissioned. Not only does this approach pay writers less and limit residuals, it means they don’t gain hands-on experience on productions; they have to find themselves another mini-room project instead.
So the writers can’t be blamed for fearing that studios will also exploit AI. Rhimes won’t be replaced by a robot, but AI could be implemented in more subtle ways. It’s easy to imagine a future showrunner creating a story outline, getting an AI model that’s been trained on thousands of scripts to sketch out potential scenes, and finally giving the result for humans to perfect.
The guild wants to prevent the work of its members from being used to train the AI. He also wants to get paid big money to rewrite the AI output as their own. Both protections appear right for me: without them, studios that have fragmented the work of junior writers seem very likely to use AI to do some of their work for free. Technology could unleash a vicious cycle of creative underskill.
The strike therefore has far-reaching implications. As did Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University writtenThe crucial question for AI in the workplace is whether it is used to augment or automate work. The former would increase productivity (and create better drama); the latter would concentrate wealth and power in fewer hands. I hope for a happy resolution but the danger is real.
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