Hollywood authors have long created science fiction stories about how machines would take over the world, but today they are engaged in a battle to prevent robots from taking their employment. Limitations on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scriptwriting for cinema and television are being pushed by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). Hollywood studios have rejected this notion, saying that they would only be open to considering new technology once a year. Hollywood studios are trying to make streaming services lucrative and are coping with declining ad income.
The dispute over AI is one of numerous problems that led Hollywood’s screenwriters for movies and television to go on strike on Monday, the first such action in 15 years. While increasing pay in the era of streaming is the main focus of WGA’s negotiating points, the debate over AI’s role in the creative process will determine the future of entertainment for decades to come.
Writers’ main worries about AI, according to screenwriter John August, who serves on the WGA negotiating committee, are twofold. They don’t want their work to be used to feed AI, and they also don’t want to have to revise shoddy drafts produced by AI.
The discussion is centered on a flexible and quickly developing technology that has quickly impacted the global entertainment business. Hollywood has already used AI to remove excessive profanity from actors’ lines, smooth out the creases on aging actors’ faces, and help create animated short films with OpenAI’s Dall-E, which creates lifelike pictures. Additionally, some writers have begun investigating the use of AI for script creation. The issue seems to be that we thought that creativity, per se, was the last bastion, the line in the sand, that would stop machines from replacing someone’s job,” said Mike Seymour, co-founder of Motus Lab at the University of Sydney.
He has worked as a consultant for various companies and has experience in artificial intelligence and visual effects. “I’d contend that’s just some kind of arbitrary idea people had that captured the general public’s attention.” Seymour thinks AI can help authors avoid the “blank piece of paper phenomenon” and is effective at creating plain, frank communication. It lacks nuance, though, and he isn’t arguing that AI will ever create a work like “Citizen Kane.”
The fear among writers is that they will be undervalued or ignored by AI. For instance, studios might hire them to do a second draft instead of a first draft, which pays less. A proposal from the Writers Guild of America stated that any content produced by an AI system, such as ChatGPT, should not be regarded as “literary material” or “source material,” which are already defined terms in their existing contract.
In effect, this means that a writer cannot be paid less for rewriting or polishing work if a studio executive gives them a script produced by AI for modifications. The union further argues that it is inappropriate to train artificial intelligence using present scripts since doing so could result in intellectual property theft. Ellen Stutzman, the WGA’s chief negotiator, remarked that some of their members call AI “plagiarism machines.” We have made a legitimate suggestion that the firm not try to replace writers by allowing AI to write for television and movies.
