Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA
wgacontract2023.org
wgacontract2023.org
1) AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the MBA, meaning that AI-generated material can’t be used to undermine a writer’s credit or separated rights.
2) A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.
3) The Company must disclose to the writer if any materials given to the writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material.
4) The WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.
I find it interesting tho that they are not worried about competition between writers within the association, they will have members that decide for using assisted writing and being a lot more productive than others.
Personally, I wonder how useful AI is going to be in terms of output over the long term. AI will endlessly regurgitate a mash up of what it was trained on in various flavors, but the output will all seem pretty samey after a while since it lacks actual originality. "This reads like something AI wrote" is something I see a lot of already. I'm sure there'll be writers who find it useful, but I don't see it being used for the bulk of their output. At least, I hope they don't just churn out scripts with AI, spend 5 minutes tweaking them, then call it day. I can't imagine that making great material.
You're making the same mistake AI people do. You can create stuff that's like what came before all day, but it won't create anything new. Literary analysis, like these plots and the more common monomyth, is about what already exists, and lags far behind. It's the same deal with music theory. People will spend years in music school learning all kinds of stuff about music, but then they have no idea how to make anything anyone wants to listen to. Music theory as taught in schools is just catching up to jazz, rock, and rap, and there's a lot of resistance.
An AI could probably do some solid analysis, like producing a beat sheet from a novel. That might be helpful. I could pants a draft, then have an AI make the outline for the second draft.
But that’s Sturgeons Law in a nutshell I guess
Bringing it back to the point: the movies are popular. You can't make a popular movie from a list of plots in one book built on one guy's subjective analysis. Anyone who's tried to hew too close to any plot formula finds this out. No actual plot out in the real world with any success has a plot that looks like any other. They're unique even if you can boil it down to some list of common plot beats by tossing what makes them unique.
Doing that is fine for teaching a writing class to people who know nothing about writing yet and just need to get started. It won't produce anything good. Real plots branch and loop and evolve.
The standard “heroes chase after the MacGuffin device” story?
They are called “tropes” for a reason. If you know the tropes you can pick them out very easily from almost any movie.
Every transformers movie plot is basically the same as is every James Bond movie and Mission Impossible movie play to same story.
The VFX industry has been an exception. But frankly the deteriorating working conditions, rampant outsourcing to semi-shady companies, and just the overall downwards spiral of the quality of VFX in Hollywood movies suggests that maybe it’s not a model to emulate.
The fear was, studio's would use AI to generate a garbage script then pay a writer far less to effectively completely rewrite it to make it usable.
Which is fair, in a society where people need money for food and shelter.
If the writer is completely opposed to AI, they can omit its use, or if they want, they can use the way they see fit, incl. turning it up to 11.
If the writer's quality decreases because of excessive AI use, it's the writer's problem. They need to regulate their use. If the writer can use it to hone their skills, they can profit from it.
From my personal perspective, as a person who doesn't use xGPT or other models because of unethical training from my perspective, this makes sense.
Empowerment of worker (or in this case, creative) = good thing
Replacement of worker = bad thing
This has been the fight over automation since :checks notes: at least 1811 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
What exact scenario have they prevented?
At the extreme end, which won't happen but which would be possible under these rules, there could be a single writer who is basically just prompt engineering and reviewing what the AI spits out, for hundreds of shows.
That a studio would use AI to generate a script without the involvement of a single writer? That wasn't going to happen anyways.
So what was the point of this? Is there something I am missing?
Of course it is. If you say don't worry about x technology and you're not using state of the art then it's meaningless. The "Big 3" is meaningless. The best model is far ahead of the rest.
Some AI services (especially those run as services by megacorps with lively legal departments) are gimped this way (usually as a sort of "thought police" model running on top of the core model, as I understand), but once you get to self-hostable models not all have such limitations.
1. Speed of output (not very fun to wait multiple seconds for each letter to be output)
2. Coherence of output (how far back does the model remember the context of the conversation?)
3. Variety of output (how's the diversity of the model's vocabulary? How about topics it can plausibly discuss?)
You can easily get comparable speed, so nothing of interest to really compare there.
I haven't done particularly strenuous coherence comparisons, but for my uses, at least, megacorp and self-hosted models are pretty comparable. Though you do need the better models to get the best coherence simply because they retain more tokens in memory.
Variety is, in my opinion, where the megacorp models still rule. Most of my dabbling has been with models designed to be writing assistants and they can certainly generate plausible strings of words and follow a general theme, but they barely "know" anything (generally when using them to write fiction, you would provide them a "factbook" that they can work from). ChatGPT by comparison can generate plausible responses to a surprising breadth of technical questions, although it definitely has a feeling of being generated from scraping certain online sources since it's decent at answering devops questions but bad at obscure grammar and physics questions, at least in my experience.
I disagree. Despite the first taste of the technology cannot completely replace humans, it will get there in an imho relatively short time from now.
Its like the Chinese real estate market where more houses have been built than people available. Same story with content and eyeballs available.
Its an extremely unstable demand-supply equation. And it will break down until new ideas about the supply side emerge.
When AI became plausible and produced full body deepfakes, I concluded that it was only a matter of time to use AI to extend and emulate real actors.
The sensible agreement should have been that an actor, via an agency, or a software stack, will control their full body AI avatar. And they will license them to studios for a movie or a commercial ad. They will charge maybe 20%-90% of the fees that they receive.
BUT, it blew my mind that studios were audacious enough to float the idea or propose that actors will be paid a small hourly wage or minimum wage for small actors for scanning their bodies, and after that the studios get to keep and use the digital avatar for perpetuity for free.
Whoa!
I was shocked to learned that. There was, as expected, dispute.
What happened to that part?
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6 or fewer, 3
7-12, 5
13+, 6
Minimum number of writers? Ok, go ahead and tell me that union labor isn't about padding payrolls.
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I mean, one person could probably come up with six scripts given enough time, but having input from other writers is likely to be very helpful. Even if you thought collaboration had no value whatsoever, having 3 people each working on a script at once means your entire 6 episode season gets done that much faster. Plus you figure life happens and people get sick, need days off, etc. Having more than one body in the writer's room still seems like a good idea.
It isn't just the production that would suffer if the writer is overworked. The writer is the person under pressure to deliver the script on time. Worse, the output would suffer because one stressed out person, who doesn't have the time needed to do the job properly, isn't going to be doing their best work. It's the writer's name that ends up in the credits of whatever gets produced and the quality of the work determines their future employment.
Writing a script is more involved than it seems, and when push comes to shove I think enforcement of hours/day per script writers is not so great. And you can't come with all ideas by yourself