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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.
My main thought here is that, compared to 2007, the competition for eyeballs is much more fierce. Even ignoring social media and video games, unscripted streams and independently scripted free YouTube videos offer video entertainment accessible to the masses that Hollywood has to prove themselves better than. Their production values are still much better than even the best independent professionally produced non-Hollywood stuff, but that advantage keeps getting chipped away. The one advantage they won't lose anytime soon is ownership of lots of intellectual property, which gives them a legal monopoly on producing certain stories. I think they need to hold onto this with a death grip if they want to keep being prosperous in the future.
And to do that, they need to make sure the IPs they own are associated with high quality content. Regardless of AI, this has been in some trouble lately; e.g. for all the money MCU and Star Wars films make, the trend has clearly been negative in recent iterations, both in box office numbers and sentiment from longtime fans. A large part of that has to do with the quality of writing, which I imagine AI could help with. In the meanwhile, we're likely to see independently produced scripts become higher quality thanks to AI aid, and with the production values also getting better for similar reasons, Hollywood probably needs to make sure they're at the cutting edge in using these sorts of tech; for as well an independent creator can use this tech, Hollywood has the resources to do it 1000x as much and better.
Given that, I'm not sure that this kind of limiting of AI in script writing is viable. Looking at the quality of writing in modern Hollywood scripts, it's quite clear that an amateur writer with ChatGPT and rudimentary understanding of storytelling principles could write better-than-median quality scripts right now. And it will only get better. Perhaps the writers' guild can group together enough and prevent scabs, but then the entire industry has to compete against independent producers whose quality would go up. If the quality of writing in mainstream professional films and shows go down during this strike and/or fewer such mainstream professional films and shows get released, resulting in less prestige in the IPs that these companies hold, followed by the guild getting what they want in terms of AI leading to them having a harder time competing against AI-assisted independent creators, it could end up with less overall money flowing to Hollywood, a Pyrrhic victory for the writers.
I see your point, but professional writing is a skill that is probably difficult to easily replace not so much because of writing quality as because of the need to have them follow orders while maintaining that writing quality.
I don't think they can even do this. Whenever a piece of media stops being itself so that the characters can turn to face the screen and tell me about how Donald Trump is bad and that I should hire some more black people it immediately throws me out of the story and ruins my enjoyment. It isn't like the writing that we're getting now is of particularly high quality either ("They fly now? THEY FLY NOW!") - I can absolutely understand being scared of AI writers if your writing is already as devoid of humanity as most modern media products are.
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