Yeah, from a high level that is the question. Will the writers use AI or will the studios? Is AI a tool to make the writers more efficient or is it a tool the studios will use to replace writers. The writers generally have no problem with the former, but they wanted protection from the latter.
They will do it the very first second they think that they can get away with it without major consequences (such as profit loss from bad AI writing).
For example, a writer will often write a treatment of a movie which is effectively a short summary of a movie that is done before writing a script. Sometimes different writers will do the treatment and screenplay. This is generally the distinction you might see in "Story By" and "Written By" credits in movies (although these distinctions can and often are a lot more complicated). One likely goal of the studios is for an AI to write the treatment and then hand that off to a writer to turn it into a screenplay. That is one of the most practical ways AI can be used since treatments aren't an end product themselves and the AI's flaws can be corrected by humans when translating the treatment into a script. However, that is still effectively replacing writers by taking away one of their clearly defined jobs and in turn one of their paychecks.
If a studio thinks AI can genuinely do a better job than human writers, that studio has the right to replace those human writers with AI. The human writers likewise have the right to refuse to work with any studio that does so. The fact that no studio has even hinted at taking this route during a 5-month-long strike suggests that no one believes AI would actually do a better job than WGA members.
Eventually, given enough investment, yes it could.
Because in context of the current generation of "AI" , i.e the ChatGPT cohort, all that it's doing is "given a very large number of examples of this text, generate one more that fits the prompt". It's nothing without the training data. And the training data is the output of people's jobs.
If you called it "distributed plagiarism" would that make the problem with the idea that AI replaces the need for the writers more apparent? It can not, but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution, as it's further from the end product.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/chatgpt-stocastic-parrot/
https://apnews.com/article/openai-lawsuit-authors-grisham-ge...
The same applies to the DALL-E cohort of image generators:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/open-letter-urges-publishe...
so do you not claim that a student learning off textbooks or teachers are also doing "distributed plagiarism"?
> but it might replace the need to _pay them_ for the contribution
assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee, or was using material that was publicly available to be learnt off, the contribution is already paid for.
There's no possibility of a royalty payment with AI generated content.
No, these are not the same. A student has mental faculties that ChatGPT does not. The understanding-free predictive text processing of ChatGPT is the whole deal of that software. A student does not require 10 thousand textbooks as examples in order to understand a concept. Students do exhibit originality and reasoning that is not in the training data. You should not equate them.
> assuming the training data is paid for via a one time fee
Why would you assume that, when the links provided make it clear that this did not happen?
If you removed all of humanities writing and language and raised a million ignoramuses it would be quite a while before you got Shakespeare v2 centuries at minimum.
Make the AI pay taxes, sleep 10 hours a night, and start off with thousands of dollars in student debt, then we'll talk.
If there was ever a company that needs to take that money invest it back into the kind of artists and work that made them such a powerhouse in the first place, it’s Disney. But, instead, they’ll pay out this money to some execs friend with a BS AI startup to procedurally generate another shitty Marvel or Star Wars thing.
Increases in efficiencies will still make people redundant. Automation means less people are needed. I dont think even the most optimistic executive thought you could get rid of writers entirely.