by In a response that put off many professional writers, the Motion Picture and Television Producers Alliance, the trade association representing most of the industry’s big entertainment companies, rejected that proposal. (The WGA represents some of the employees of the NBCUniversal news division.)
Instead, according to WGA leaders, the companies “hired back by offering annual meetings to discuss advances in technology,” a vague proposition that suggests industry leaders are not prepared to give any guarantees. (Comcast, the corporation that owns NBCUniversal, is represented by the trade group.)
Technology moves very fast and will move even faster than we can anticipate, and that’s why we have to deal with that in this negotiation.
— Marc Guggenheim, co-creator of “Arrow” and “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”
Marc Guggenheim, co-creator of superhero shows “Arrow” and “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,” said studios were trotting out “the same old song and dance” and delaying major decisions about major technological changes.
“Historically, whenever a new piece of technology comes out, studios say, ‘We understand your concerns, but it’s all too new. Wait for the next trading cycle,’” he said. “But eventually a precedent is set and in the next negotiation cycle they say, ‘I don’t know what to tell you. The precedent is set. There are always delays.”
The AMPTP’s main spokesman did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
ChatGPT has shown that it is capable of generating narratives that mimic the content and style of previously published works. NBC News asked ChatGPT to write an original episode of HBO’s anthology series “The White Lotus,” for example, and the chatbot responded with a six-paragraph recap that featured characters from the first season in new settings.
The ersatz episode of “The White Lotus” reviewed by NBC News might not be Emmy-caliber, but the outline nonetheless points to a future that many professional writers find harrowing.
“We all have to understand that this is the bad version of ChatGPT. It’s not the best version we’re going to see six months from now,” Guggenheim said. “Technology moves very fast and will move even faster than we can anticipate, and that is why we have to deal with that in this negotiation.”
Actor and producer Justine Bateman he said in a tweet that other professional sectors should pay close attention to the WGA strike, which he called a fight for the “devaluation of human effort, skill and talent in favor of automation and profit.”
The stagnation of artificial intelligence technology in Hollywood mirrors the strains in other creative professions.
ChatGPT has raised questions about whether media corporations will reduce the number of humans writing everything from copywriting to news articles. (Full disclosure: what you’re reading was written by a human.) AI-powered image generators like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney have baffled people who make visual art for a living.
In a notable case study that made national headlines, an AI-generated song mimicking the styles of hip-hop artists Drake and The Weeknd sent waves of anxiety through the music industrydeepening existential concerns at the intersection of creativity, authorship, technology, and law.
“Whether it’s music, photography, whatever the medium, there are creatives who are understandably and justifiably concerned about the displacement of their livelihoods,” said Ash Kernen, an intellectual property and entertainment lawyer who focuses on new technologies.
But at the same time, Kernen said there is a group of artists who welcome the rise of AI, seeing it as a tool to experiment with their work and a new creative frontier to conquer. He said he could envision a “dual market future”: some art created by humans, some by AI-driven technologies.
The fact that the WGA and the studios are fighting over AI underscores how much the entertainment industry has changed since the last time Hollywood writers went on strike in the fall of 2007. In those days, Netflix was best known for sending DVD in red envelopes and YouTube was only two years old.
Fast forward to 2023, and the economic and technological landscape is very different. These days, ChatGPT is available to weigh in, as novelist and former WGA president Howard A. Rodman found out when he asked the chatbot to write a response to a tweet about the studios rejecting the guild’s AI proposal.
“The response from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers…seems to be contemptuous of the WGA’s concerns,” ChatGPT told Rodman, according to a screenshot he shared on Twitter. “It is important to consider the potential consequences of automation on the livelihood of writers and other creative professionals.”
