Opinion | Hollywood’s Deal With Screenwriters Just Rewrote the Rules Around A.I.
It may come as a surprise to some that the W.G.A. apparently never wanted, nor sought, an outright ban on the use of tools like ChatGPT. Instead, it aimed for a more important assurance: that if A.I. raises writers’ productivity or the quality of their output, guild members should snare an equitable share of the performance gains. And the W.G.A. got it.
How did it achieve this? In this case, the parties agreed that A.I. is not a writer. The studios cannot use A.I. in place of a credited and paid guild member. Studios can rely on A.I. to generate a first draft, but the writers to whom they deliver it get the credit. These writers receive the same minimum pay they would have had they written the piece from scratch. Likewise, writers can elect to use A.I. on their own, when a studio allows it. However, no studio can require a guild member to use A.I.
These negotiations were likely aided by the fact that studios have their own concerns about A.I. Material generated by A.I. cannot be copyrighted, which presents several challenges to studios, since they typically own the copyright on material from writers they’ve hired. By assuring that human writers will be involved in any writing that also involves A.I., the studios start to insulate themselves from those copyright concerns.
In the past, when labor has sought to simply resist or impede technological change, it’s been completely run over. Ask any of the 6,000 hot-metal typesetters, compositors and other workers whom News International summarily dismissed in 1986 when Rupert Murdoch secretly transferred newspaper production from London’s famous Fleet Street to the company’s state-of-the-art computerized facility in the London Docklands. Rather than negotiating a more gradual transition, along with buyouts and rules around worker reskilling and reassignment, the union dug in — and lost. They walked away with nothing. The event catapulted Murdoch to international fame without costing him a single day of production or distribution on any of his papers.
The W.G.A. may have taken a lesson from more successful tactics, such as those of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 1960. Their leader, Harry Bridges, convinced a reluctant rank-and-file that they would have to face the reality of port containerization, meaning many jobs would disappear as shipping containers, and the attendant technology, became more prevalent. Instead of opposing this implementation, Mr. Bridges negotiated wage and job guarantees for most workers and generous benefits for those displaced. Mr. Bridges’s strategy was itself informed by the United Mine Workers’ Mechanization Agreement in 1950. Negotiated by John L. Lewis, it encouraged the mechanization of large mines and the windfall returns it would generate — not just for the mine owners but also for the rank-and-file workers and retirees.
