The US screenwriters union has suspended its strike after 148 days, once reaching an agreement in principle that its members must ratify during the next fortnight. However, they have already returned to their work, and the industry will slowly recover its production rate, after a collective stoppage that has forced the delay of release dates for feature films and seasons of television series.
The claims of the authors of the scripts, and the content of the agreement with the industry, had a first component purely focused on Labor conditions: They have gotten salary increases and guarantees that, depending on the budget and size of each project, a minimum of creative staff must be available. But on the table have also been the difficulties adapting to an industry paradigm that can no longer be described again (the differences between the system of exploitation of free-to-air television, or even on cable, based on premieres and reruns, with respect to the formula of immediate and indefinite availability of its creations that characterizes the ‘streaming‘). In this sense, they have achieved promises of greater transparency about the elusive digital audience metric and obtain greater economic performance due to continuous reissues and sales of rights abroad. A change in consumption patterns should not mean a drop in income for creators when it does not, as in this case, lead to a drop in income for the industry as a whole.
The strikers have also faced another major change in the rules of the game that at the moment only shows glimpses of how far it can go but is advancing by leaps and bounds, the application of artificial intelligence (or from forms of exploitation of algorithms that are improperly classified as such) to creative work. The strikers have achieved concessions from the producers (not using AI to create original material and not imposing the use of these tools on them). But the possibilities they offer are still too unpredictable to think that they can be limited, solely from a point of view. protectionist, even in a sector as regulated and with union controls as Hollywood. It will be difficult, in cases where AI applications clearly serve to increase the productivity of companies, creators and, more clearly, in the most routine tasks, to prevent them from taking up space. AND It’s not even clear that this has to mean a threat for the maintenance of jobs (at least in some sectors or tasks).
Another thing is the objections that may be raised from the point of view of exploitation of copyright by creators of text, plastic or audiovisual content, from individual authors to media companies. Just these days, leading writers have opted for the courts in the US to question the “large-scale theft” of their works to feed the engines of a tool like ChatGPT. Combining images, texts and information created by others to give them a new form or answering queries in the form of natural language is not creating a new work. There is a lot of room (in this case from the legal side) for set new rules of the game that do not involve an open plundering of creativity.