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The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) is on strike as of May 2nd, after negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) broke down. While most of their demands deal with the way pay and compensation in the streaming era is structured, on the second page towards the bottom is:
I think this is an interesting first salvo in the fight over AI in creative professions. While this is just where both parties are starting for strike negotiations, and either could shift towards a compromise, I still can't help but see a hint that AMPTP isn't super interested in foregoing the use of AI in the future.
In 2007, when the WGA went on strike for 3 months, it had a huge effect on television at the time. There was a shift to unscripted programming, like reality television, and some shows with completed scripts that had been on the back burner got fast tracked to production. Part of me doubts that generative AI is really at the point where this could happen, but it would be fascinating if the AMPTP companies didn't just use traditional scabs during this strike, but supplemented them with generative AI in some way. Maybe instead of a shift to reality television, we'll look back on this as the first time AI became a significant factor in the production of scripted television and movies. Imagine seeing a "prompt engineer" credit at the end of every show you watch in the future.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Some data about how oppressed the struggling worker masses are (https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/wga-contract-inflation-minimums-1235564920/):
In other words, their minimum wages are about 1.5x to 3x country's median wages for essentially half-time work.
I don't think it is bad for anyone to earn a lot of money, but given that the number of decent quality shows has been extremely low for many years now, and most of those that had decent quality have been based on existing literary work, what it seems to be there is extremely overpaid bunch of people producing a very low-quality product. Still, I am sure eventually they'd get what they want - this time - because AIs aren't ready to produce scripts yet. But in 5-10 years. given the immense savings it promises? I can totally see it.
Or because the production and distribution pipelines are much more global now they adapt by investing content from other production centers + some scab work to pick up the slack.
Just the other day news came that netflix further increased its content budget for new Korean dramas to $2.5b over the next 4 years. Maybe more news in that vein will come in the coming weeks/months.
I'd love to see more international content in places like Netflix. There are many decent works done outside the US and I am too lazy to find ways to discover them independently...
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