Writers Guild

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• In solidarity with the striking workers, the sustainable solutions and services studio Roboro is holding Green for Good, a clothing swap benefit event that will raise money for union relief funds and provide work for film industry professionals.
• She saw how the strike affected her brothers and sisters, so she was inspired to take action to support those in need.
• The event’s fundraising goal is $3 million, which is estimated to be what the strikes are costing out-of-work individuals and families in LA.
• “Having been a costume designer in Hollywood, I personally know many people who have been affected by the strikes,” Clark says.

• And some of the gains actors made through prior labor struggles – particularly through residuals, which are a small percentage of shared earnings from film or television – have vanished.
• Though the Writers Guild of America ended its strike on Sept. 27, 2023, actors represented by SAG-AFTRA remain on strike.
• Residuals are one of their main sticking points: They want to receive 2% of revenue generated by shows they appear in on streaming platforms.

The pandemic revealed a glimpse of the future

• The extent to which streaming changed the entertainment landscape came into focus during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• For the made-to-be-blockbuster “Black Widow,” Disney decided to release the film simultaneously in theaters and on its propriety streaming service, Disney+, for US$30.
• At $30, the price to stream “Black Widow” on television was equivalent to roughly three theater tickets.

A struggle for dignity

• The Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s was an era of vertical integration in the film industry.
• The “Big Five” major studios – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and RKO – employed directors, writers, actors and camera operators.
• This created an efficient system that allowed for assembly-linelike production of films, not unlike Ford automotive factories.
• Actors – just like everyone else employed by the studios – received a salary for the length of their contracts.

Getting a slice of streaming revenue

• Examples include foreign box office revenue, DVD sales, syndicated television shows and theater releases that appear on television.
• In the streaming era, all new shows produced by streaming platforms are concurrently reruns and original runs.
• Actors want 2% of streaming revenue generated by the show or film to replace this line of income.
• Data on earnings tied to streams aren’t as clear as ticket sales or advertising revenue, and streaming platforms tend to keep this information in-house.

Closing the loophole

• In this sense, it harks back to the old studio system of the 1930s and 1940s.
• For this reason, there is no benefit for studios and platforms to offer actors revenue for every stream, because technically there is no secondary market.
• This is the loophole striking actors are looking to close.

• In the long-running Writers Guild of America strike, a central sticking point has been the guild’s demand that AI be used only as a research tool and not a replacement for its members.
• For many creative types, it seems harder to earn a living with AI around.
• At the same time, however, AI tools are often seen as a springboard to next-level human creativity.

What is creativity?

• Psychological or personal (p-type) creativity happens when an individual thinks something for the first time – even if others have thought it separately before.
• Historical creativity (h-type), on the other hand, happens when an individual thinks something that has never been thought before.
• One example would be Archimedes’s “eureka” moment in the bath, which supposedly led to him discovering the law of buoyancy.

Generative AI doesn’t belong in either category

• AI obviously has the potential to promote both p-type and h-type creativity.
• But there is one key difference between human creativity and AI-driven creativity: the latter doesn’t stem from the evolutionary clash of mind and world.
• It formalises the fact that while AI models are capable of provoking new thought, they are limited by the underlying data they have been trained on.

The big risk: a generic spiral

• This sameness further put us at risk of a generic spiral.
• So the more we use AI for g-type creativity, the more generic our content will become – and since this will be used to further train AI, the more generic AI outputs will become.
• While this might be useful for certain specialist tasks – such as consistently interpreting law – it’s worrying to contemplate the kind of Orwellian political economy a generic spiral might give rise to.

Can we enjoy AI and also preserve creativity?

• Balancing and reconciling human creativity with AI isn’t as simple as going for regular walks in nature – although that will probably help.
• Generative AI may well be a transformative technology to rival the printing press or steam engine.