Writers rally against rise of the machines

from Drama Quarterly – Summer 2023

Writers rally against rise of the machines

WOULD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAVE DELIVERED THAT FANTASTIC SUCCESSION FINALE, created a villain as horrible as Bad Sisters’ abusive John-Paul or written dialogue as naturalistic as that in Shane Meadows’ standout historical drama The Gallows Pole?

Perhaps an even more pertinent a question is, if it had, would we even know?

Writers shouldn’t be worried about being usurped by technology –yet. But anyone who spends any amount of time at a computer screen will know just how quickly advancements online can move.

Until it became a central part of the negotiations between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and studio body the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), fears about the impact and encroachment of AI on the creative arts were largely conﬁned to the worlds those writers had created on screen.

From classic German feature Metropolis, which was released in 1927, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Star Wars: A New Hope and more recent hits such as The Matrix, Ex Machina and Interstellar – not to forget television series such as Westworld – AI has become a common feature of scienceﬁction storytelling.

Notably, bringing to life sentient AI – whether in the form of a blinking red eye called Hal 9000 in 2001 or humanoid robots sent back from the future in The Terminator – doesn’t tend to end well for the people in the story.

But now, with the advent of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, AI has never been more accessible. While scientists and engineers continue to develop new advancements in healthcare, motoring and manufacturing, chatbots are now providing online customer support for numerous businesses and generating automatic social media posts. People are also just a touch of a button away from using AI to answer any question they might have, create a picture in the style of a famous artist or generate emails and essays – and even TV scripts.

And that’s where AI entered the negotiations between the WGA and the AMPTP. The main arguments from the writers – on strike since May 2 at the time of writing – have focused on the ﬁght for increased pay and residuals and assurances over the future of writers rooms.

But it was the introduction of protections against AI that stood out and pushed the conversation about the use of AI, and how quickly it is becoming part of everyday life, into the spotlight, focusing on the implications and ramiﬁcations of this rapidly changing technology.

In a Twitter discussion on the subject, The Walking Dead executive producer Gale-Ann Hurd signed one message from “one of the people who started worrying about #Skynet in 1982.” Hurd, of course, was a co-writer and the producer of 1984’s The Terminator, the feature that launched the ﬁlm and TV franchise in which the AI system known as Skynet becomes self-aware, leading to a nuclear war against the human resistance.

More speciﬁcally to the writers’ strike, the WGA is proposing regulating, and in some cases banning, the use of AI on projects. It wants to stop AI from writing or rewriting literary material or being used as a source material, and prevent certain content from being used to train AI in the art of screenwriting.

It’s all part of an attempt to stop AI from replacing human writers in the creative process and turning them into editors tasked with rewriting AI-generated scripts.

For those familiar with chatbots, perhaps one of the reasons why the debate over AI in screenwriting has come as a surprise is the quality of its work. Writers who brought us 30 Rock, Abbott Elementary, The West Wing and Mad Men shouldn’t be worried about being usurped by technology – yet. But anyone who spends any amount of time at a computer screen will know just how quickly advancements online can move.

Let’s not forget, AI is already hard at work in the entertainment business, monitoring what we watch on streaming platforms and suggesting the next shows and ﬁlms we might want to watch by generating endlessly curated lists of titles similar or related to the one we just marked with a thumbs up.

But it should go without saying that, even if it is possible, will we want the films and series we watch to have been artificially generated? Unlike some of the heroes in AI-related stories on screen, let’s hope the writers fighting the WGA fight have a better ending.

Michael Pickard Editor, Drama Quarterly

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