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The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big

www.vox.com The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big

Here’s what’s coming in the WGA’s new contract.

The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big
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  • In case you're also interested in what's actually been agreed on...

    The exact language of the contract is yet to be released. But from the WGA summary, it appears the union was successful in its effort. The MOA includes increases to minimum wage and compensation, increased pension and health fund rates, improvements to terms for length of employment and size of writing teams (which had been shrinking drastically in recent years), and better residuals (which are like royalties), including foreign streaming residuals.

    The MOA also lays out terms for artificial intelligence, with an agreement that doesn’t prevent writers or productions from making use of generative AI but prohibits using software to reduce or eliminate writers and their pay. “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,” the MOA states.

    Additionally, “the WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law” — a major issue given many authors’ recent discovery that their work is being used to train AI owned by Meta and other companies.

    • Those are some great accomplishments!
      Are there any points on which they had to concede or compromise?

    • It's hard to tell whether the executives actually believed they could use LLMs to replace writers or if they had seen the possible results of that even one time and pretended they were considering doing that as a negotiation tactic. Hollywood executives are notoriously out of touch and delusional about art so they may have been serious.

      • I bet they saw the difference between "how much we could make from throwing LLM shit at users" vs. "how much users will pay for actual human writer stuff", and conceded some of the projected difference to the writers.

        I wouldn't recommend the writers to get all cozy with that, though; each year the difference is going to be less, each year the executives will reassess it, until the LLMs will get to write "good enough" shitty stuff that the audiences will squint and pay... and if the writers don't get serious with moving their position to close the benefit gap, at some point they'll find there is no gap anymore.

        • Writing-wise, LLMs are only a threat if the customer doesn't actually read/watch/listen to whatever it is they bought. I've read a lot of LLM stuff at this point and not only is the tech currently incapable of producing something with entertainment value that couldn't be reproduced in a few minutes with Mad Libs, it can't be developed to a point which could allow it to write something that is engaging or entertaining. People tend to vastly overestimate this technology and vastly underestimate the true depth of complexity any human mind has whether that mind is aware of its own complexity or not. The threat is from the creativity of some of the best marketers in the world presenting this tech as something it can never possibly be to extremely wealthy investors with no understanding of art, which has been very effective.

          The tech could improve in that the information it provides is less likely to be incorrect. Creating a plot that a human person relates to and is engaged by is many orders of magnitude more difficult to do. A "neural net" is not nearly complex enough to replicate a concious and subconcious mind molded by billions of years of natural selection, using hardware we haven't even scratched the surface of understanding other than being aware of trillions of calculations at any given moment related to certain aspects of cognition, acting on and being acted on by the social and physical aspects of our reality. It can't understand. It's only capable of processing information and reproducing it in language which is similar to how people use language. The best is could do is summarize something that has the potential to be entertaining if an actual writer does something with it.

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