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Comment by mattcollins | Hacker News Reader

Per the WGA's summary:

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.

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It reads like the writers are perfectly fine with the AI for as long as they get to use it.

well yeah it always is about protectionism and barrier to entry

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.

The point is that they can decide for themselves if using AI would benefit them and choose to use it or not

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.

How is that any different than the way stories have always been told?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

This is a writing tool.

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.

Look at the top 10 movies released this year. Do any of them have a plot that you would consider it anything new?

I'm not a film analyst, so I can't say since I haven't done the work to analyze them.

Not as a film analyst. Just as someone who has seen any of the popular movies that have been released recently. Which ones have had a plot that you walked out of in amazement and didn’t just employ the standard tropes?

But that’s Sturgeons Law in a nutshell I guess

My or your subjective perception of quality aren't really the topic here, are they? You swapped out the subject while you thought no one was looking.

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.

Have you compared the plot of every single block buster superhero origin story?

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.

Which is how Hollywood has always worked? You can’t do as much as move a light or push “Record” on a film set without being a union member.

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.

I think the issue was in the old rules writers got paid very differently whether they created an original script vs working on an existing script.

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.

Or to get an existing script, somehow write a sequel/prequel with AI, and pay some writers way less to polish it.

It reads more like writers don't want their work being used as corpus for ai without them getting paid.

Which is fair, in a society where people need money for food and shelter.

That’s entirely the way it should be! AI used to help labour, not subjugate it.

In the same way I'm OK with knives so long as one isn't being held to my throat.

Writers' use of AI is self regulating.

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.

Yes.

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

I think this will have 0 effect. Writers that use AI will push some of the writers that don't use AI out of the market.

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?

Enter: writing room minimum staffing

how does it work out with something as old as grammarly or the advanced spell/grammar/usage/style checking now rolled into Word?

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