May 4, 2023
After six weeks of discussions with major entertainment firms such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Disney through the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has gone on strike.
The WGA’s two AI requirements include prohibiting AI from generating literary content and prohibiting AI from generating source material. The AMPTP’s viewpoint is just another example of an overestimation of AI’s potential, and it comes on the heels of a number of corporate media shake-ups in which CEOs elected to favor AI material over human-created content.
While the immediate fear of AI is not that writers’ work will be replaced by artificially generated content, there are concerns that writers will be underpaid to rewrite material that they could have done better from the start. The WGA is opposed, but the studios want it.
The WGA advocated regulating the use of AI on union projects, claiming that AI cannot compose or revise literary work and cannot be utilized as source material or to teach AI. The AMPTP rejected this plan, instead proposing yearly meetings to review “technological advancements.”
The sources for this piece include an article in Vice.
