Hollywood writers are meeting many of the demands surrounding artificial intelligence and streaming services. The writers’ union has been on strike for months, partly because of screenwriters’ fears about the influence of AI on the film industry.
The Writer’s Guild of America has reached an agreement with the major Hollywood studios over a series of demands they had put on the table. This puts an end to a months-long strike. The WGA, a major union that represents thousands of writers of films, series and television programs, has been on strike for five months. The writers want, among other things, to receive higher compensation for their work if that work appears on streaming services. When films are rebroadcast on television networks, writers receive new royalties each time. This is not the case with streaming services such as Netflix or Disney+; there is often no such syndication model at all.
Under the new agreement, the payment model will be revised; From now on, writers will be paid based on a new distribution key. This distribution key revolves around, among other things, the number of subscribers at home and abroad and the number of hours streamed, divided over the budget and length of a film or series.
Another important commitment is that streaming services such as Netflix must be more transparent about how many viewers a show has. For example, Netflix does not say how many users watch popular series such as Stranger Things. These figures are not made public. The streaming services will only share those figures with the union under a non-disclosure agreement.
Artificial intelligence
The writers are on strike not only for higher compensation, but also for measures against the use of artificial intelligence. The union members are afraid that studios will take scripts and feed them into language models to produce new content based on them. The studios have now had to make major concessions in this regard.
An important point is that ‘AI should not be used to write or rewrite literary material’. In addition, studios must promise that scripts that are generated by AI cannot serve as original source material and thus undermine the credibility of the original writer. Writers can choose to use AI to write scripts, but this is only allowed if a studio has given permission. Furthermore, studios may not require writers to use AI tools themselves.
If studios provide writers with source material, then the studios should call it mandatory. Finally, the union may ban studios from training AI models on material created by members, but that is largely a future possibility; currently the union does not have such a policy.