If the AI does a better job writing said treatments (aka, does the same or more for less cost), why shouldn't it take away the job?
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.