Los Angeles : Hollywood writers are clashing with studios over the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in film and television scriptwriting. The Writers Guild of America wants to limit AI's involvement to preserve the jobs of human writers, but studios are hesitant and only willing to discuss new technologies once a year.
However, the studios are resistant to this idea, stating that they are willing to discuss new technologies on a yearly basis but not limit their use entirely. The studios are facing financial challenges due to the rise of streaming services and declining advertising revenue.
Hollywood writers are clashing with studios over the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in film and television scriptwriting. The Writers Guild of America wants to limit AI's involvement to preserve the jobs of human writers, but studios are hesitant and only willing to discuss new technologies once a year. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the studios' negotiators, have declined to comment.
This disagreement, coupled with the need to improve compensation in the streaming era, has resulted in the first work stoppage by Hollywood's film and TV writers in 15 years. The future of entertainment is at stake, as the debate over the role of AI in the creative process continues.
According to John August, a screenwriter and member of the WGA negotiating committee, Hollywood writers have two concerns about artificial intelligence (AI). The first is that they don't want their material to be fed to AI, and the second is that they don't want to be responsible for fixing AI's "sloppy first drafts." AI is a rapidly growing technology that has become prevalent in multiple industries.
In Hollywood, it is being used to remove wrinkles from an aging actor's face, bleep out explicit language, and even create realistic images for animated films using OpenAI's Dall-E. Some writers are also experimenting with using AI to create scripts.
Mike Seymour, co-founder of Motus Lab at the University of Sydney, who has experience in visual effects and artificial intelligence and has consulted with several studios, believes that the issue with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scriptwriting is that people have long considered creativity to be the one thing that machines couldn't replace.
However, Seymour argues that this is an arbitrary notion that has caught the popular imagination, and there is no reason why AI cannot be used to assist writers in creating scripts.
According to Mike Seymour, AI can help writers overcome the "blank piece of paper phenomenon" and is useful for producing straightforward dialogue, but it lacks the nuances of human writing. However, he does not believe that AI will become intelligent enough to produce groundbreaking works of cinema such as "Citizen Kane."
Despite this, many writers are concerned that they will be marginalized or underpaid if AI-generated material is used in the industry. They fear that studios will hire writers to do less creative work, such as polishing or revising AI-generated scripts, which would pay less.
To prevent this, the union has proposed that material generated by an AI system should not be considered "literary material" or "source material" under their contract. This means that if a writer is handed an AI-generated script to revise, they cannot be paid at a lower rewrite or polish rate.
The union is also calling for a ban on using existing scripts to train AI systems, as this could lead to intellectual property theft.
In Hollywood, a dispute is currently underway between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Hollywood studios over the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in writing film and television scripts.
The WGA is advocating for limits on the use of AI in order to protect the jobs of human writers, while studios have been resistant, only willing to discuss new technologies once a year. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, negotiating on behalf of the studios, has not commented on the issue.
The conflict over AI's involvement in the creative process, along with the need to improve compensation in the streaming era, has led to the first work stoppage in 15 years by Hollywood's film and TV writers. As Hollywood becomes increasingly reliant on AI technology, the outcome of this dispute is expected to have significant implications for the future of entertainment.