The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big
The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big
Here’s what’s coming in the WGA’s new contract.
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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?From the wording it sounds like they only got foreign residuals on streaming, not US. Given that one of the biggest points of the strike was that writers weren’t getting payed residuals for streaming (which is increasingly the main market) it does seems like a fairly big concession.
Admittedly the biggest issue was that streaming services are shockingly opaque about viewership numbers. There doesn’t really seem to be an industry standard for what counts as a “view”. Does someone scrolling past a video and it auto playing 2 seconds count as a view, does someone watching 90% through than going to the next episode count as a view?
To agree to paying residuals on shows would require admitting to what people are actually watching on their services. They really seem to not want to do that. Probably because most of what they’re hyping up or promoting is failing in real terms and they want to keep massaging the numbers.
So the compromise is they’ll do it for exports but not domestic. Maybe because they can waffle on the reasons for failure in the foreign markets but it is harder to do that domestically.
They are getting residuals from the US, but the problem now is defining "subscriber".
The residuals come if "20% of the subscriber base watches something within the first three months of its release".
As the article I linked gets into, this is more complicated because certain streamers not only keep their subscriber base private (which they can still do, but they'll have to give writers info, probably under NDA), but several also offer their streaming services as bundles with unrelated things (Prime Video with regular Prime subscription, Apple TV+ with Apple One, etc.).
So someone could be "subscribed" to Amazon Prime Video, but because it's bundled in with the normal "online shopping" Amazon Prime, they have inflated numbers of Prime Video subscribers because not everyone with Prime cares about the streaming part of it all.
Figuring that shit out is going to be the main issue with regard to streamers.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. The whole residuals issue sounds very complicated, and it's probably on purpose if it's up to the streaming services to manage this themselves.
I'm sure the companies didn't give them as much money as they originally asked for. Unions usually expect to concede partially on those numbers and start at a higher negotiation number.
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.