WGA writers’ strike over AI, ChatGPT has higher stakes than you think

It is already evident that the first of many protests to come against artificial intelligence will be taking place. It started with Hollywood writers who wanted to make sure they won’t be forced to work with — or be replaced by — AI tools like ChatGPT. It has grown far beyond this. And it’s not hyperbolic to say that what’s happening in Hollywood right now will have broad ramifications for, well, all of us.

Writers Guild of America is currently on strike over streaming residuals. The bulk of the WGA’s proposals, as of May 1, are calls for clearer and more fair budgets and compensation for the TV shows and movies that make their way in some form to various streaming platforms.

But nestled down at the end of the last page of the WGA’s two-page proposal sheet is a section called “Artificial Intelligence.” It is the first large-scale attempt by a labor union to pressure an industry to regulate and, in some cases, ban the use of AI as a replacement for workers. It is certain that unions will replicate this model as AI technology advances and becomes more common.

The WGA is requesting that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) ban the use of AI for writing and rewriting any source material, as well as its use as a source material of its own, and that no AI material be trained on WGA writers’ work. So far, the AMPTP has rejected the WGA’s proposal and merely offered to hold “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”

SAG-AFTRA has voted unanimity to support the strike if the WGA and AMPTP negotiations fail.

The fears that these unions are reacting to, that studios could replace human writers in a writers room or human actors on a movie set, aren’t hypothetical. Recent research suggests that the fear of studios replacing human actors and writers on movie sets or in writers rooms is not hypothetical. New York Times piece that asked “Will a Chatbot Write the Next Succession?” a recent Netflix contract reserved the rights to simulations of actors’ voices “throughout the universe and in perpetuity.”

Now, what was once only reserved for science fiction can be seen as a very real reality. And it won’t just impact pop culture. In a few years, we could be on the verge of a future where AI will not only replace hundreds of millions people with automations but also key services. And if workers can’t draw a line now, while this technology is still in its infancy, there might not be another chance to wrestle back what we’ve lost. Hollywood is not the only front line.

It is still unclear whether audiences will even notice when AI-based tools start producing their favourite TV shows. Technologist and activist Cory Doctorow told Polygon you’d notice pretty fast.

Image: Alexi Rosefeld/Getty Images

“I think it’d be pretty immediate,” he said. “I’m not clear that the studios could do it; like, they might try for a while, but they’d be like rolling the dice that the U.S. Copyright Office would reverse itself on the copyright status of materials produced by machine learning models.”

Another big question is: What’s the point? In February of this year, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that you can’t copyright purely AI-generated material. A company that wants to claim copyright on anything generated by an AI must prove it was altered enough by a person to make it original.

“If it becomes the case that the way you make a new Pixar movie is by typing some prompts into a keyboard, and then going down the street to the smokehouse for a three-martini lunch and then coming back, and it’s there on your hard drive,” Doctrow said, “then all of a sudden people are like, Anyone can buy the Pixar movies I copied.. Because it was made by a bot.”

But to understand what these tools are even capable of and why it’s so hard to figure out how they fit into our existing legal frameworks, you need to know a bit about how they work. When we talk about AI in this context, we’re really talking about a kind of AI called generative AI. Specifically, we’re talking about large language models.

ChatGPT is the most popular model for large languages right now. It is owned and operated by OpenAI, using a GPT (generative pretrained transformor). Basically, it’s a whole lot of text taken from all over the web, which it then pulls from to respond in ways that seem naturally human. Currently, ChatGPT is running on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and it’s also integrated into the AI interface for Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Edge web browser.

Though you’ve probably heard that GPT language models are — or could become — sentient, you don’t really have to worry. They work the same way the autocomplete function on your phone works, except they’re using massive chunks of the internet to reply to you. But generative AI can’t generate something it doesn’t know.

For instance, ChatGPT still currently has a “knowledge cutoff” of 2021. There have been instances of current events slipping into its data set — it seems to know that the queen of England died — but for the most part it still thinks it’s 2021 when you talk to it. When an AI doesn’t know something but is pushed to answer a question about it, it will “hallucinate,” or spit out nonsense errors. Users on sites like Reddit will also often share ways of “jailbreaking” these chatbots so they can answer questions that are banned by their terms of service.

Meanwhile, Bing’s version of GPT-4 is actually connected to a live feed of the internet. It can summarize current events easily — though, when it first launched, it threatened journalists that were writing adversarial pieces about it and begged for users to kill it. A universal reaction to using the internet whether you’re man or machine, apparently. (It’s fixed now.)

Though GPT-4, OpenAI’s newest language model, is still only a few months old, we’ve already got a good handle on what it is and isn’t good at. It’s pretty bad at creating anything. If you ask it to tell you a joke or write you a song it will, but they’re pretty bad. It’s the same result if you ask it to write, say, a basic scene of two people having a meet-cute in a romantic comedy. It’s not what it is You can learn more about it here.Summarizing large amounts of information is what you are good at.

A user requested that it read J.R.R. Tolkien’s work on Middle-earth and then asked the AI if there’s any evidence that people in Middle-earth poop (there isn’t). Another user asked it to summarize — and make a diagnosis based on — his dog’s blood charts (the diagnosis was largely correct). In February of last year, Twitch broadcast a stream called No, Not ForeverLaunched, using GPT-3 for endless generation Seinfeld scripts that would then be “acted out” by AI 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The scripts were mostly gibberish, but the channel was a huge hit… until its content became transphobic and its creators took it down for maintenance.

This is a risk that creatives are trying to manage. Doctrow said that if a right to train an AI were created — as in, if suddenly writers had a legal right to say who could and couldn’t train an AI on their writing — that right could become a demand from prospective employers.

“All the employers will demand that you assign that right to them as a condition of working for them,” he said. “It’s just a roundabout way of saying that large corporations who are in a buyers market for creative labor will be the only people in a position to build models that can be used to fire all the creators.”

What is its performance? Well, this month a Disney fan blog wrote a story titled “An AI rewrites the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. It’s more coherent than Disney’s.” The AI was asked to “pretend that Disney did not create any more Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi” and then imagine the plots of movies that George Lucas would have created instead of the sequel trilogy we got.

The three films that were made are: The Force Unleashed – Episode Seven, Episode VIII: Rise of the SithThen, Episode IX – Balance of the Force. It even described a pretty tight narrative arc across the three movies, featuring a trio of main characters, including “a young Jedi named Kira,” “a former stormtrooper named Sam,” and “a wise old Jedi named Ben.” Honestly, the AI’s new sequel trilogy sort of reads like the one that actually happened, but it moves the discovery of an evil Sith home world and the reveal of a Sith master villain to the second movie, not the third.

Image by Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Also, the AI suggested characters for each of the three main plot lines, described new vehicles and planets, and wrote a brief scene with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia making cameos. All of this is it perfect? Definitely not. Does it look good enough to be cleaned up by a person for production or publication purposes? No question.

There are a number of common tropes which can be combined to create new genres. As the Hollywood Reporter noted last week, the chatbot could be used as a way to get past the picket lines during the strike of long-running series like Law & Order. The AI can create new remixes of the scripts if it has a large number to choose from.

But, also, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about here. A generative AI like GPT-4 can’t create anything new. The AI can only combine what is already there. A film industry where chatbots are allowed in writers rooms — or allowed to replace them entirely — is an industry that has quite literally run out of ideas.

But Hollywood isn’t the only sector of the American workforce in the midst of a generative AI upheaval. IBM halted all hiring and a company executive recently suggested that chatbots could replace almost one-third of the employees. And retail isn’t safe either. Wendy’s is currently testing a drive-thru chatbot as we speak. According to a Bloomberg article published recently, AI is expected to affect at least 25% of American jobs in the next 5 years.

Non-unionized creative sectors are beginning to experiment with these tools. Ashley Cooper, who is a video game designer and narrative lead, said to Polygon she had recently been approached by an independent video game studio that was interested in using AI for writing scripts.

“An indie studio I’d done some work for a few years back emailed me asking, ‘We are looking for a writer to use some AI and get us some back-and-forth dialogue,’” she said.

Cooper noted that AI is likely to make the industry worse at hiring creatives. She also expressed concern that AI might prevent young people from gaining a foothold in this field.

“At its core, [AI] doesn’t exist to make the lives of writers easier; it exists to minimize a studio’s need for writers,” she said.