Writers Say AI Terms In WGA Deal Set Guardrails For The Industry

Writers are calling the artificial intelligence provisions in the agreement brokered between the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers a big win that sets guardrails for other industries to follow.

The AI Terms

Under the agreement, AI cannot be used as a writer or to rewrite materials. While some say this provision was needed to protect writers’ compensation, John Rogers, who sits on the board of directors of the WGA West, said it drives a larger philosophical point.

He was part of a group of writers who studied the artificial intelligence projects and problems starting last year.

“AI generated work is not creative work. It is not literary material. It does not stand on its own, and so it cannot be treated as something that stands on its own, like an ad or a book to be adapted,” he said.

A writer can elect to use AI if a studio consents under the agreement, but a studio cannot require a writer to use artificial intelligence.

“This is us being open to the future, which is, hey, there may be uses of AI in the future,” he said. “Every writer I know loathes it, but, you know, if something winds up getting qualified as research in the future or something like that, you can use it as long as it goes by the company's rules.”

In the summary of the agreement released on Tuesday, it stated that “the WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.” If a studio chooses to give a writer materials generated by AI, it must be disclosed. The provision was included, Rogers said, to make sure a writers’ pay is not undermined.

While the agreement does not explicitly forbid studios from using a writers’ work to train AI, Rogers said it gives the guild the right to intervene if it does happen.

“It basically says if you try it, we will then pursue everything available to us under current copyright law,” he said. “This is where we found ourselves in a weird alignment with the companies because the companies have had their copyright violated by ChatGPT and these other companies where they own the copyright to the scripts and those have been scraped without their permission."

Reaction to the terms

Prior to the deal being won, AI was a concern for Jasmyne Peck, a producer and lot coordinator at Netflix. They were worried that studios would use computer generated content “to further marginalize or ignore the possibility of success for stories coming from different communities that don't reflect the majority.”

The terms of the agreement, particularly related to AI, they said, are a “wonderful foundation.”

“These are the guardrails for something that is, as a technology, not fully defined yet, something that the studios themselves are still figuring out you know, like, in terms of how, when and how writers are allowed to use AI in their artwork,” Peck said. “The ramifications of what we won are going to be helpful for this union and for this field, but also for like every creative field going forward.”

Oliver Mayer, a playwright, screenwriter, and head of dramatic writing at USC School of Dramatic Arts, echoed Peck. He said the AI provisions in the agreement won by the WGA can help set a legal precedent.

“It is existential that we won this argument that companies realize that they cannot have writers train AI, that we do not give our consent to this, that we should not lose out on writing credits to AI, and essentially that AI is something other than human even if it’s trained by humans,” Mayer said.

If AI takes over a show, he said, it can take over human expression.

JT Allen, a captain at WGA and a site coordinator at the Warner Bros studio lot, said AI puts writers and studios on the same page in a weird way.

“For instance, another studio could take the entire content of Barbie, run it through an AI processing machine and come up with, you know, Gigi or whatever,” he said.

While he thought the provisions were “extraordinarily good,” he added: “I also think more needs to be done, and some of it needs to be done beyond what the AMPTP and the Writer's Guild can do.”