'Blood In The Machine' Connects Hollywood Workers Fight Against AI To The Luddites

SAG-AFTRA resumed negotiations with studios and streamers today, and one major topic on the table is artificial intelligence. The Writers Guild of America won significant protections from AI in its tentative agreement, like a guarantee that artificial intelligence cannot be credited as a script writer. Actors similarly want protections from being replaced by AI.

As this battle plays out, a new book tells a little-known but timely story. Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine looks at the history of the Luddites, workers in England who rose up and revolted against automation 200 years ago. Merchant writes that there's much to learn from this history today.

LAist's Nick Roman spoke with Merchant about his book. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Brian Merchant's "Blood In The Machine."

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Hachette Book Group

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LAist: You hear the word "Luddite" and you think of somebody who refuses to use a computer or is somehow anti-technology. You challenge that idea in your book. Who were the Luddites?

Brian Merchant: The real Luddites were cloth workers, skilled workers who formed the biggest industrial base of workers in that early Industrial Revolution era. They were very skilled and they were machinists. They used machines, they were technicians. Technologists, we might call them today.

And their complaint was not that technology was just getting so good and so crazy that they couldn't keep up and they hated it and then wanted to smash it. Their complaint was that a handful of people were using that technology in direct opposition to their way of life. New factory owners were automating work.

And even though the machines couldn't do as good of a job as the skilled workers could, they could produce more stuff. And they could give the factory bosses a reason to use less skilled labor, to use children at times, so they could undercut the workers on pay and push the value of their labor down. And that's the complaint that the Luddites had. It was not with technology.

There's a lot of parallels to the complaints we're seeing from workers over AI today.

LAist: What are those parallels?

BM: 200 years ago, before they became Luddites, these cloth workers had a pretty nice way of life. They weren't rich. But workers would live and work at home in a cottage or in a small shop. They'd have a lot of control over their day.

And under the new regime of automation and the factory owners who saw a chance to use that stuff purely to profit, the Luddites saw their way of life being threatened and technologies being used in ways that they had no control over.

So, today, we see all of these big tech companies like Google and OpenAI and Microsoft trumpeting the arrival of a new AI regime. All these services can basically automate work. It's being touted as a great technological development, but the way that they're really hoping to make money is to sell this to businesses who can then either use it to automate jobs here and there, or to replace jobs wholesale.

And that is where we've seen a lot of the resistance come in because what the studios were basically trying to do – at least reserve the right to do – was to say "Hey we want to be able to use AI to write scripts and then maybe call a writer in to to fix it up and they won't get the credit." And when the writers saw that, that was one of those moments where they drew a red line. I think it was a galvanizing moment in the strikes that we've just seen, but it's also happening with authors and artists and illustrators, copywriters. They're all confronting this.

LAist: Where do you see AI and automation creeping into the rest of our lives?

BM: It depends on what kind of work you do, but it's reached the point where there are very few jobs that are not at some risk of being automated, at least in part. If you're doing creative work, if you're writing or producing, if you're an illustrator – all of these things are now subject to automation. Illustrators are one group that I've heard from the most who say, "We've already seen our livelihoods threatened. We've already seen the number of clients who used to come to us for work dry up."

The Culinary Union in Nevada just authorized a strike, and one of their big grievances is that AI is being used to encroach upon the service work of bartenders, servers, hosts at roulette tables and poker tables. If anyone's been to Vegas lately, you'll see automation increasingly encroaching into those spaces too with a digital dealer at the table instead of a real one, or a kiosk that you order your drink from instead of a server.

LAist: Let's go back to the Luddites. What happened to the movement in the end?

BM: The Luddites did not have the options that we had today. They did not live in a democracy. They did not have the ability to organize or to collectively bargain. That was explicitly outlawed by the state in England at the time. So, when things got bad for them, they didn't have a lot of choices. They spent 10 years going to Parliament saying, "Hey, you're not regulating this trade according to the laws. You're supposed to do things like make sure apprentices work for a number of years before they join the trade." And Parliament didn't listen to them. It threw out all of the rules, it threw out all the regulations that had governed these trades for 200 years, and said, "You're on your own."

And then, when there was an economic depression and the factory owners of the time used it as an excuse to hit the gas on automation, all of these trends really coalesced and the Luddites rose up. It was an explosive rebellion. There were battles, it was really almost like a guerrilla war at the front lines of the Industrial Revolution. And the state decided to send in the military, send in tens of thousands of troops, ultimately. It was the biggest domestic occupation of England, and they had to crush the Luddites.

Now, fortunately, that's not the case today. We have options, like organizing and appealing to legislators, and we have a lot more power to decide how it is that we want technology to affect our lives.And that is what is so amazing about the writer's strike and the victory that they won.

Because in the new contract language says studios don't get to decide how to use AI. If anybody's going to decide how to do it, it's the writers. I think it's an outcome that the Luddites would applaud.