Artificial Intelligence Enters Into Our Labor Disputes. (A Few Thoughts on the WGA Strike.)

I have written about the "writing life" from time to time--often out of exasperation at the nonsense about it which the media so often inflicts on us. (Indeed, I can think of no remotely contemporary depiction of that life that is even the least little bit as truthful as Balzac's Lost Illusions, or Jack London's Martin Eden.)

Most of the time I have for my subject writers of print fiction. However, the looming threat of a Writer's Guild of America (WGA) strike has brought renewed attention to the conditions in which those who write for the screen toil--which, like the conditions for working people in any other line, have not been improving. Quite the contrary, the WGA informed us in a bulletin this past March that those writers who are actually working are making less--in real, inflation-adjusted terms, almost a quarter (23 percent) less--than was the case a decade ago.

Where this process is concerned one can argue for "organic" changes in the market--like the rise of streaming--but it is also the case that the production companies and studios have fought bitterly to cut writers out of the gains.

In considering the situation it seems worth noting that the writers are up against businesses that, hardly genial to their workers in even the best of times, are very hard-pressed now--battered by the pandemic, and coming to grips with their earlier reckless spending on content as interest rates go up, compelling severe cuts in production. (Disney is a particularly conspicuous case, but Netflix, Warner Bros. and the rest are all doing the same. Remember how WBD buried a nearly complete Batgirl movie rather than put it out there?) The result is that they are even less likely than usual to be concilatory.

Of course, in post-Reagan America organized labor is not exactly known for winning fights with management. Indeed, had the WGA done better out of the last strike in 2007 writers would not have seen their wages collapse as they have. But collapse they did, leaving the matter of how writers are compensated for their work on streamed content--indeed, anything besides the network television we are always told is in a state of advanced decline--unacceptable, as they look ahead to still more radical changes. In coverage of the issue we are seeing reference to how artificial intelligence as such will fit into the picture, not too unreasonably given what some think it may be doing before even a three year contract runs its course. After all, even if the time when a chatbot could crank out whole ready-for-filming scripts of even mediocre quality seems still some way off, its merely producing something a script editor can fix up into something passable would be plenty to reduce the demand for writers--and the bargaining position of those who still land work. Indeed I would not be surprised to find that the studios are already quietly trying to make it happen.

The result is that, as one anonymous member of the Guild said, "We're looking at the extinction of writing as a profession." Should the Guild actually act in accordance with that thinking this might be a long, grueling contest such as Hollywood has not seen in a very, very long time. That seems unlikely to have much of an immediate effect on the saturated media consumer just yet, but it may be a sign of things to come as artificial intelligence as such increasingly enters into the disputes of labor with management.