What caused the Strike?
Every three years, The Writers Guild of America sits down with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to negotiate or accommodate development of industries in salaries and compensation. Usually, matter and agreements come smoothly, however this year things were different. With the drastic increase in use of streaming services ( largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic), the success of the streaming service industry skyrocketed. As a result of the two parties' inability to strike a deal, the Writers Guild of America, in alliance with SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) decided it was time to bring matters public.
What was the Strike about?
A few months ago, tensions were high as large groups like the Writers Guild of America, and SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) prepared to take entertainment titans of Hollywood head on. This strike would go on to completely halt production for a total of 148 days. The longest strike and period of demanded change in Hollywood History. Protestors fought hard, exposing many holes and unfair treatments among the film industry: demanding better wages, residuals equal to streaming age, and common respect as the technology behind artificial intelligence advanced. While the industry as a whole was growing, writer salaries remained stagnant and many felt they were being exploited. Many even argued that the career as a writer was endangered as a result of this development.
What were the results?
While an agreement has not been officially settled, Hollywood and other entertainment giants have proposed a deal raising royalty for streamed content and promises that artificial intelligence will not continue to encroach on writers’ credits. While this deal ultimately satisfies what the Writers Guild of America, and SAG-AFTRA originally sought, the organization as a whole will take a vote ( ending October 9th) to decide whether or not to accept this deal. Due to the large backlash in public opinion on the situation and injustice faced by many actors and writers, these entertainment giants had no choice but to abide by the protestors request. As a result, the deal will most likely be accepted.
Effect on Public Opinion
During the whole strike, public opinion played a large role in helping to bring justice for the Writers Guild of America and workers in the industry as a whole. However, when looking into Polls conducted on random samples of the US population, it is interesting to see the differences between Democratic and Republican views on the strike as a whole. According to AP News, “ sympathy toward the writers and actors runs much more strongly among Democrats (70%), than Independents (47%) and Republicans (39%).” Despite their differences however, both parties bolstered less than 5% of poll takers supporting the studios ( entertainment titans) in the disagreement. Taking into account margin of error and sampling error, the statistics are still too polarized and swayed to one side: the US population supports the Writers Guild much more than they did that of the studios.
- Cody Chen
Sources Cited: Dalton, Andrew, and Linley Sanders. “Hollywood Actor and Writer Strikes Have Broad Support among Americans, AP-Norc Poll Shows.” AP News, AP News, 22 Sept. 2023, apnews.com/article/hollywood-strikes-poll-public-opinion-actors-writers-5727ed3078c4f69851c18c560670f480#:~:text=Half%20of%20Americans%20(50%25),they%20were%20to%20favor%20it.
Koblin, John, and Brooks Barnes. “What’s the Latest on the Writers’ Strike?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/article/wga-writers-strike-hollywood.html.
“Studios’ Shutdown of the Entertainment Industry Puts Diverse Representations at Risk.” SAG, 2 Oct. 2023, www.sagaftra.org/.
“What the Hell Happened: How the Writer’s Guild Strike Changed Hollywood: Arts: The Harvard Crimson.” Arts | The Harvard Crimson, www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/3/wga-writers-strike-union-AI-rights-artificial
intelligence/#:~:text=For%20148%20days%2C%20the%20Writers,the%20era%20of%20artificial%20intelligence. Accessed 2 Oct. 2023.
10 comments:
This draws close parallels with the strike with UAW (United Auto Workers). The percentage of Democrats supporting the Hollywood Strike and the UAW strike is also remarkably similar (79% and 72%). Republican's also have similar rates of approval between the two strikes (around 50%).
There are also a few other important parallels between the two movements:
1) Both are demanding significant pay increases (40% in the case of UAW)
2) Job Security (many workers with UAW feel uncomfortable with the rise of EVs which is similar to writer concerns about being replaced by AI)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-broadly-support-auto-hollywood-strikes-reutersipsos-poll-2023-09-21/
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/20/1200357955/uaw-big-3-strike-auto-shawn-fain
It is very hopeful for writers, animators, and actors to see big Hollywood executives finally give in to their demands. Originally, they seemed very much against properly negotiating with the Writer's Guild, even going as far as cutting down trees that the protestors were using as shade and asking social media creators for advertisement. Furthermore, the idea that AI could replace human-made work is preposterous as there is so much more effort going into writing and acting than a simple computer code can replicate. People would have easily been able to see the degradation in content if Hollywood had gone down that route. Creatives deserve to be respected and paid properly as without them, Hollywood would not be as famous and profitable as it is today. Hollywood has always been a big part of American culture, and to see the people working so hard to have their creative visions brought to life be treated so poorly is disheartening. Hopefully, public opinion and the risk of another strike will stop large Hollywood companies from trying to underpay their workers.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sag-aftra-strike-trees-trimmed-nbcuniversal-investigation/
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/sag-aftra-issues-strike-guidance-specifically-influencers-confusion-rcna94747
It is super nice to see that the corporate goons are finally caving in to union pressure. Just as Amit mentioned, the companies were so uncooperative to the point where they would cut down trees to make it harder to protest on the picket lines (of course cutting them down without permission from the county), and it just indicated the permeating corporate greed that has corroded the American system over the years. I also think that it's important to mention a few conservative scabs that are refusing to cooperate with the Unions as well. In my opinion, I think that refusing to not join the union and work IS a right that an individual has. With that being said, I think it's completely immoral to do so, and that it undermines the whole point of this strike. Often times, many scabs tend to hold a condescending tone over the striking workers, calling them unappreciative and telling them that they are lazy, but I think that is completely and utterly false. These workers have a right to be paid the amount they are due, and I side with them completely. There is also a growing trend in Unionization in general, with the UAW also striking recently, and I believe that this is an excellent check of power against excessive corporate greed.
I think the strike and strikes in general are an interesting phenomenon in the economical landscape. I think the pandemic has in part shown writers how indispensable they are, especially since, as amit mentioned, AI is no-where near the level of a working hollywood screen writer. I do however think that the possibility of Ai becoming common place in the creative process is not far fetched in the near future. Ai's such as chat-gpt are very elementary and I dont think "natural language processing" Ai's will be the end all be all of generative AI. I think integration of AI is inevitable (not entirely replacing people, but it will likely cut down the workforce greatly). How unions will manage to keep wages reasonable when there comes a time of more supply than demand for writers will be interesting to see.
In general though, I think its good that workers are demanding a larger piece of the pie since they are so instrumental in the process, especially since Streaming services have seen greater success as of late (and still jacked up prices).
What I did find interesting about the WGA strike deal that was recently agreed upon was that within the regulations section for Artificial Intelligence usage, studios are allowed to use generative AI to create first drafts of scripts/ideas, and give those drafts to writers to review/use as a basis. There are some obvious caveats, i.e. the studio must tell the writer that they're working on AI-generated work, but another detail particularly stuck out to me: the writer who reviews that AI draft gets the full credit, and also gets compensation resembling if they wrote it from scratch.
Here's an example from the WGA contract itself:
“Company furnishes Writer A with written material produced by GAI (generative AI) which has not been previously published or exploited. Company instructs Writer A to rewrite the GAI-produced written material. The GAI written material is not considered source material when determining writing credit to Writer A..."
Both parties agreed that AI wouldn't be considered a writer on its own, because of obvious reasons regarding paying the salaries of writers, but this NYT article also gives an interesting reason for studio agreements; "Material generated by A.I. cannot be copyrighted, which presents several challenges to studios..."
There was a case back in August, where a man challenged the U.S. Copyright Office, as his piece of "art" generated by AI was not open to copyright protections (Thaler v. Perlmutter); the judge stated that copyright only extends to art of "human creation." (Funnily enough, this also extends to animals; there was an earlier case where a monkey managed to take a selfie using a photographer's camera; the photographer was denied copyright of the image, since he did not "create" the photo.)
Given that studios still seem to want to be able to use AI within writing processes, it makes sense that they'd use writers to sort of side-step that "little copyright problem" and still legally own those works.
I do think that the extremes of banning AI entirely or using AI to remove writers from the equation itself are both pretty illogical when it comes to producing works (although many will say that AI should be removed from art entirely). Putting AI on the table WHILE keeping regulations on it seems to be a pretty good first step for both writers and executives, considering that the other major option that executives were looking at seemed to just be kicking writers out and only using AI; at least if AI is used within Hollywood, writers seem to be getting a benefit out of it rather than a consequence.
WGA contract: https://www.wgacontract2023.org/wgacontract/files/memorandum-of-agreement-for-the-2023-wga-theatrical-and-television-basic-agreement.pdf
NYT Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/opinion/wga-strike-deal-ai-jobs.html
Thaler v. Perlmutter: https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2022cv1564-24
I agree with Owen that the success of the strike highlights the importance of writers for Hollywood. I think this strike speaks to the power of protest and unions as a means of enacting change in people's lives. By completely halting the production of Hollywood, as Cody states, the strike proved effective at applying economic pressure to have its demands met. Even if these giant corporations were powerful, the strikers showed how they, too, held power, proving that their work was what kept everything running. I'm happy to see so much coverage on the strike, which goes to show how the protest successfully generated awareness for the situation of the writers.
While I agree with Amit that it is good that the Hollywood executives finally caved in, I am worried that the tensions between the studios and the writers/actors represent a growing polarization between employees and giant corporations. The fact that it took so long for the studios to finally cave in reveals how stubborn they were to not accept the demands of the guild. I'm happy that a majority of U.S. adults support the writers/actors, and so many more support the writers/actors over the studios, and that this majority opinion was able to prevail.
This is a huge change in the industry of filmmaking and entertainment. I've personally been watching Adam Conover's overview and participation of the Writers Guild Strike, and I've wondered quite a bit what producers have been using in place of writers.
They are using the recent ChatGPT in their writing, but this has a large number of problems compared to human writers. First of all, ChatGPT is entirely reliant on other people's work in order to create content, and most people in ChatGPT's database didn't necessarily give consent to have their work used, which can lead to legal issues in the future. Second of all, again, ChatGPT is entirely reliant on other people's work. This means that ChatGPT isn't the best at coming up with new or innovative writing or filmmaking ideas that can lead the industry. Another major concern for them using ChatGPT for their scriptwriting is the reputation of using AI to write things for them. Just like a student who uses AI to write their essays, companies who use AI to write their movies can be seen as scummy or lazy.
Having seen the many problems of using AI to write their scripts, it makes sense that Hollywood may not see ChatGPT as a replacement for human writers.
Sources used:
https://fortune.com/2023/05/05/hollywood-writers-strike-wga-chatgpt-ai-terrifying-replace-workers/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/23/its-the-opposite-of-art-why-illustrators-are-furious-about-ai#:~:text=Harry%20Woodgate%2C%20author%20and%20illustrator,by%20illustrator%20Anoosha%20Syed%3A%20%E2%80%9CAI
-Ray Zhang
One of the WGA demands Cody mentioned was residuals, which is money writers and actors are paid each time a show or film they created was rerun, or a DVD was sold. Residuals used to offer a fair amount of additional income to writers and actors, but they're not paid for streaming, so many writers and actors are getting next to nothing after their initial payment. I think raising royalties on streaming is a critical part of the deal, and will hopefully set up a more fair payment system for the next few decades.
https://fortune.com/2023/07/19/what-are-residuals-hollywood-writers-actors-strike-streaming/
https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/residuals-survival-guide
I agree with Owen. With streaming services becoming more popular than going to the movie theater and especially AI on the rise, it is inevitable that the writing workforce is slowly going to decrease. Thus, I think that this strike is the only thing that will shine a light on the unfair wages writers and actors are paid. In addition, for as long as I have been watching movies, I haven't noticed much recognition towards those who are writers for them. It is usually praises to actors since they are the ones who are mainly displayed in this business. If anyone asked me to name a writer, I would have no idea. On the other hand, if I was asked to name an actor, I could easily provide a name within a few seconds. Names such as RDJ, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Zendaya, Margot Robbie, Chris Evans, etc. all came to my mind within an instant of writing this comment. I think it is only fair that especially the writers receive a fair pay. This is because without writers there would be no script for the actors to follow and without a script to follow there is no movie to be filmed.
I too am interested to see how this strike will play out in favor of the writers and actors as it is well deserved. Hopefully, this strike was effective enough for there to be an impact on their salaries to reflect the work and effort that they put into their jobs.
As everyone is stating, it is definitely great to see success with the strike and the New WGA deal. Especially with the movetowards the digital streaming era, the agreements with new practices, AI, and viewership practices, will bring major changes to the industry. The increase in minimum pay has been highlighted, but adjustments as seen with the second step guarantee for younger writers, also goes to display the fundamental changes which are being implemented to value writers in response to the strike. The step states that if a writer is hired to produce a draft for less than twice minimum pay, they must be given the opportunity to create a second draft before another writer can come in. Similarly, the deal has implemented minimum staffing requirements for development and writers. Such positive development goes to highlight the strike's success in bringing protection for more distributed workload along with an increase in diversity of voices.
On the topic of AI, I completely agree with Amit in stating that it is preposterous that AI could replace such writers. The deal has implemented safeguards to ensure AI is not used to replace a writer for production, but regardless, the diminishing creativity and quality of production if this were to have happened, would reveal the impracticality. However to minimize such possibility anyway, I do believe the deal has set strong safeguards, such as with preventing studios to use a writer to train language models.
Source: https://www.cbr.com/wga-deal-explained/
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