It’s a fiction that it’s a rewrite, if it’s so unusable that the human writer is effectively starting from scratch.
This is not to say that a human writer may not also create a shitty first draft that has to be replaced. The point is, you have to pay that first writer. With the proposed new model, the studio gets its actual first script at rewrite rates.
This is not complicated to understand.
No doubt that’s the case. I’m at the point now where I want to be fooled. I want to read an excellent article in a magazine then have the rug pulled and informed it was AI generated.
I fail to see why it matters to those rewriting if an unusable script is generated by a person or AI. They are doing the same job. A rewrite.
The studio is saving money in the hope of getting an equivalent product.
I agree it isn’t complicated and it is clear why the union would want to keep as many people in paying positions as possible. That’s what they do.
However, if an unusable script is created by AI or human and it takes more work by more people involving more money to get it into shape then that seems to be a good thing all round. Only one primary writer is missing out.
Of course if unusable AI scripts are truly the norm and causing more work and costs downstream then why not ditch AI anyway and pay for a decent human-generated in the first place. Why would studios persist in a practice that costs them more and/or generates an inferior product?
Seems like a self-solving problem either way.
Maybe.
One of the perks of the travel writing course was they offered to pitch anonymously one of your course work assignments to your nominated travel magazine. It might have been a set-up but for my 1,000 words on the Kansas City World Series of Barbecue I was actually offered a small commission. The problem was it was a work of pure fiction.
For profiles on the other hand it is a piece on your personal encounter with the subject, and if you haven’t actually met them it better be a hagiography elsewise you might well be the defendant in a libel suite.
In general, there are not ‘writers’ and ‘rewriters’ as separate careers (exception exist, I’m sure). There are ‘writers’. Sometimes they write primary drafts and get paid accordingly. Sometimes they rewrite other writer’s primary drafts and get paid less. So the average of their income is above rewrite rates, but below primary rates.
So, if AI takes the primary draft role, then all they get is rewrite rates - which lowers their income overall.
It seems to me though that the union, rather than trying to block AI, should simply say that rewrites of any AI-generated drafts are paid at the primary rates. It still cuts down on the amount of overall work available to the entire pool of writers, but I think that’s somewhat inevitable at this point. What it does is maintain the value of the work being done.
hang on, that’s just what an AI bot would say!
Now there’s an interesting thought. Chat GPT in the dock. All spinning tape reels and flashing lights going “bloop-bleep” (I’m not an expert)
This is exactly right. It’s the studios trying to use a semantic loophole to pay people less money for the same work without saying that’s what they’re doing.
This is probably where things ought to end up, but in any negotiation you don’t offer the likely compromise as your opening position.
I think the lesson of history is that you can’t put the technological genie back in the bottle and it is all about managing the disruption it causes and learning to co-exist with it over time.
No doubt that new ways of working, payment structures and even entirely new jobs altogether will come as a result of this.
I think the one thing that definitely will not happen is restrictions on AI as stated in the WGA demands.
If you think that production companies won’t continue to use a particular method that is profitable for them simply because the artistic output suffers, you and I have been having very different experiences with 21st century media.
I just saw where StabilityAI’s new LLM was trained on something known as The Pile.
Comes into thread curious to know what demands the AIs have made
reads
OK not yet.
Dumb question: If AI drafts are all “crap”, and this is all just semantics to pay a writer less money to “rewrite” a crap script, what is currently preventing a studio exec from hiring themselves to copy/paste random words out of the dictionary and then paying rewrite rates to “fix” it?
Studios will do whatever turns a profit, as they always have. Not sure artistic integrity or quality has had much to do with it over the last few years.
There has been plenty of very expensive dogshit recently with zero AI input, for some of it I’m not sure how using AI would make it worse.
I see that Project Gutenberg and English Wikipedia are in The Pile–and combined make up less than 4% of it, or approximately 4 Enron e-mail archives-worth.
The difference between having to pay to have something that was essentially free need 40% fixing and something you took your own time to do (expensive) and having to pay to have 100% of it ‘fixed’.
Plus, I think there are still restrictions on any person doing it if that person is not a member of the Guild - i.e., you are now blocked from using WGA members on that production.
Yup–most of it not in the public domain, and not intended by its creators to be used in this fashion. There’s nothing in the law currently to prevents its use in this manner (AFAICT), but the law could be a lot better. Otherwise, we’ll get what AI boosters want: huge profits off the unpaid labor of other folks, and a concentration of wealth in the hands of those with the capital to manipulate the AI in data-factory settings.
That is one possible side effect of the existence of the tool, not the purpose for the tool.
Your stance is basically that change is scary and might disrupt the status quo, therefore it must be stopped. Reflect for a moment what that makes you: a conservative.
The union’s job is to protect that primary writer. Even if the first rewrite takes the same effort as writing a completely new script, if it’s paid at a lower rate, the suits have successfully gamed the system. I’m pro-AI, but I’m not pro-gaming.
Don’t restrict AI, pay the first rewriter the same wages as if they were the original writer. That way, if the AI actually saves labor by reducing the amount of work needed, the bosses will save money by making the process more efficient, which is a legitimate way to cost cut. Pushing the same workload at a lower pay tier is a BS way to cost cut.
Help me out here. If this is truly a case of “less money for the same work”, how is a writing job for a script that “needs 40% fixing” the same work as being the 100% primary writer of a script?
No one can remember how to do basic math because of calculators, and can’t spell because of spell-checkers, and don’t know the way to anywhere because of GPS, so I’m pretty sure AI will have an equally disastrous effects on sitcoms, not to mention cop shows that will end up relying on tired old tropes.