Will AI gain ground in Hollywood amid writers’ strike?

Production studios and streaming giants have reportedly found a solution to carrying on with business as usual without their writing staff — with the help of AI software.

While some writers have embraced AI as a tool to increase their writing capacities, no writer wants to see their trade completely overtaken by artificial intelligence.

There has already been a debate in Hollywood, since the release of a deep fake of Drake and The Weeknd circulating on social media in April.

Then and now

After the last strike in 2007 and 2008, there were many new developments in the way the industry utilizes technology.

Netflix was just getting started through a mail-out DVD service, Amazon and Apple were not yet in Hollywood, and people were widely downloading rather than streaming movies and other content.

The industry has skyrocketed in the amount of content it produces each year, with streaming giants like Netflix, Disney, and Warner Bros. working with a spending budget of billions of dollars.

Now, with the writers on strike, the production houses are considering outsourcing such duties as scriptwriting to AI, as per the Hollywood Reporter — in fact, a large part of the WGA negotiations surround the use of AI.

It’s already happening

Meanwhile, Amy Webb, founder and CEO of Future Today Institute, confirmed it was already the case that industry executives are eyeing up artificial intelligence as an alternative to writers.

“I’ve had a couple of higher-level people ask, if a strike does happen, how quickly could they spin up an AI system to just write the scripts? And they’re serious,” Webb revealed. “You’ve got a massive corpus, it’s formulaic, and a lot of the storylines are ripped from the headlines. So you’ve got the data sources that you need.”

“What I am saying is the conditions are right in certain cases for an AI potentially to get the script 80 percent of the way there and then have writers who would cross the picket line do that last 20 percent of polishing and shaping,” the CEO continued. “That’s possible for certain types of content.”

“Every conversation about AI at this point is polarized. It’s binary. AI is going to usher in apocalyptic hellscape doom or total utopia,” says Webb. “What would be better would be to manage the strike and also talk through, ‘Is this an opportunity for us to rethink our approach to how we’re going to use tech?’”

The writers weren’t expecting this

ChatGPT was released in late 2022, and early 2023, writers were saying they did not feel threatened by the technology eclipsing their jobs.

John August, who wrote ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Big Fish’ and is a member of the writer’s union negotiation committee, broke down the concerns of integrating AI in the writing process.

“The challenge is we want to make sure that these technologies are tools used by writers and not tools used to replace writers,” August said. “The worry is that down the road you can see some producer or executive trying to use one of these tools to do a job that a writer really needs to be doing.”