Hollywood

There is much concern about the frightening advance of AI. In Los Angeles, members of the Writers Guild of America which represents 11,000 writers have entered their fourth week of strikes. They are demanding, among other things, higher pay, and crucially, that the studios guarantee they won’t slice into writers royalty payments by crediting AI tools such as ChatGPT on scripts.

There is indeed a real threat of screenwriters’ jobs becoming redundant as AI advances. Yet the streaming services who employ writers are far more likely to self-sabotage long before AI becomes sophisticated enough to produce television and film scripts worthy of being made.

Writers’ strikes are expensive bad news for almost everyone

It’s a cliché of publishing that men over the age of forty only read military history. In my case it’s not entirely true: I still occasionally squeeze in the odd novel, some politics, even poetry if I’ve drunk too much sweet wine. But it’s true enough that my mind is probably over-furnished with historical military examples, metaphors and allusions. And for the last week I’ve been trying to find the correct analogy, from the annals of war, to characterize the battle recently joined by the Writers Guild of America.

You’ve probably heard by now that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. According to the labor union and its affiliates — representing just fewer than 12,000 writers across traditional and digital media — the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the group representing corporate studios and streaming services, would not grant union writers “a new contract with fair pay that reflects the value of our contribution to company success.”

One of the primary motives behind the ongoing Hollywood writer’s strike is a concern over artificial intelligence (AI) replacing writers.

For the first time in 15 years, some 11,000 Writers Guild of America (WGA) members have walked off the job, which stops anything in the entertainment business having to do with writing. No guild member can write anything. Even if a WGA member is directing a movie or TV show and wants to change dialogue, he can’t. Everything has stopped, especially the late-night shows that can’t survive without up-to-the-minute comedy bits.

There is nothing particularly novel about thinking to yourself, “You know, my job used to be pretty decent. Now, I’m working harder and the money is getting scarcer. What happened?” You might think this, in 2023, as a college professor or a cab driver or a journalist or a factory worker. This is America – our entire economy is built on making millions of jobs worse, in order to make a few people very rich.

What would be remarkable is if – when you realized that your once-good job was being made worse in order to satisfy the profit hunger of some faraway investment banker – you were able to actually do something about it. That, in our nation, would be news. That would be something for everyone to cheer for. The plain old workers standing up against enormous companies to stop the process that is turning their careers into execrable “gigs”. Is it a fairy tale? No, my friends. Welcome to the Great Writers Strike of 2023.

Win for the robots I’m betting.