A writers’ union breakthrough around AI
The Writers Guild of America struck a tentative deal this week. I’ve been following the strike because a) I don’t want to live in a world without Ted Lasso or Fleabag, and b) AI was a hot topic during negotiations.
AI is currently my Roman Empire; not because I’m worried it will eat my job — I know my clients better than that. Rather I can’t help thinking about the long-term threat it poses to the art, creativity, and more broadly all of humanity. But I won’t go into that here. Come over for coffee if you want to talk about my existential crises (yes, plural).
For now I just want to highlight that the WGA was able to put some parameters around who is creating what AI spits out. The fact is, it still takes a ton of human initiative and intervention to get a worthwhile finished product via today’s LLMs.
In this morning’s New York Times online edition, Adam Seth Litwin, an associate professor of labour relations at Cornell, wrote: “The W.G.A. contract establishes a precedent … that workers can and should have a say in when and how they use artificial intelligence at work.”
Which isn’t, and is, groundbreaking.
It isn’t groundbreaking that you should get to choose what tools you use to write. Pen vs keyboard, dictionary vs spellcheck, microsoft word vs google docs. On the other hand, workplaces often dictate the tools we use: outlook vs gmail, teams vs zoom, square vs stripe. Especially when there’s a tool that makes things faster and cheaper. When I order a coke at the movies it comes from the soda fountain, not out of a bottle, nor is it concocted by hand. The kid at the concession stand gets no choice in how they get my coke in a cup. (Hmmm, would it be bad to miss the trailers while a teenager shook me up a fresh, artisanal, cocaine-laced coca-cola?)
For now, WGA writers can still pull out their lined yellow writing pads, their stack of index cards, that napkin that came with their fries… just like your shitty first drafts can come to life through whatever birthing method you choose.
More importantly, though, the WGA agreement relegates AI from “creator” to “tool.”
Litwin explains, “In this case, the parties agreed that A.I. is not a writer. The studios cannot use A.I. in place of a credited and paid guild member. Studios can rely on A.I. to generate a first draft, but the writers to whom they deliver it get the credit. These writers receive the same minimum pay they would have had they written the piece from scratch. Likewise, writers can elect to use A.I. on their own, when a studio allows it. However, no studio can require a guild member to use A.I.”
For writers within the WGA at least, the world has to acknowledge there’s a human doing the hardest part.
Which aligns with my belief that there is no hack for the creative process.
There are good habits, routines, and loads of writing advice. There are conventions, frameworks and formulas too (and of course, movie sequels). And now there are super-fast, predictive, text-generating technologies.
But it still takes a human to fill those frameworks and feed those machines.
There’s input, there’s output, and there’s also what comes in between.
That’s the creative process.
Sometimes the process feels hard, and sometimes it feels easy. Sometimes it’s painful and sometimes it’s joyous. Sometimes it’s as quick as a flash. Sometimes it’s slow and deliberate. It never, ever, streams out the same way, every time, at the push of a button, like coke streaming out of a soda machine.
And it feels important that this week the studios agreed to recognize humans for their part in creating both the worlds and the words to describe them.