For most of this year, the Writer's Guild of America (WGA), which represents Hollywood screenwriters, was locked in a grinding labor battle with the studios that make Tinseltown's biggest productions. Among the most contested provisions of the dispute, which led to the drawn-out strike that ended this week, was the use of artificial intelligence—programs like ChatGPT—in the writing and re-writing of scripts.
Could Hollywood producers use AI to write screenplays, or to rework material written by a guild member? In the end, the Writer's Guild won a number of restrictions on how studios can use artificial intelligence. The WGA's viewpoint was clear: AI represents a threat to their livelihoods and work products.
