February 25, 2024 • 33 mins
Proper compensation and regulating the use of A.I.-generated content were major points of concern in last year's Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes; and they're major points of concern for *all* artists.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
I'm Stephen Monteith, and I'm hereto talk about the writers and actors strikes
from this last summer and fall.Now, you may know, may have
been vaguely aware that the Writer's Guildand the Screen Actors Guild both went on
(00:22):
strike over the summer of twenty twentythree. You may not know what a
lot of it is about or whatit really means for you. Well,
first of all, there's been aI just want to talk a little bit
(00:46):
about how there have been some memesthat have gone around on Facebook and other
social media for a while now thattry to highlight the importance of entertainers in
our lives. Whenever you listen tothe radio, whenever you watch TV or
(01:12):
watch a movie, whenever you listento a podcast, you're you're bringing entertainment
into your life. You're bringing artinto your life. And when it comes
to things like making movies intoday's world, or making television shows in today's world,
(01:37):
or making web series in today's world, there's there's a lot of business
involved in it, because frankly,America runs on business, and what happens
in the boardroom directly affects a lotof actors and writers' lives as well as
(02:05):
many many other people's. So howthese actors and writers get compensated for the
work that they do is important toall of us because they're who we go
to. They're the ones that helpbring this joy into our lives that we
(02:31):
get from watching their shows and theirmovies. And if you're somebody who who
doesn't care that much about their lives, then at least try and and keep
(02:53):
an open mind while I try toappeal to your sense of fairness, because
fairness, I would hope, issomething that we could all agree upon.
First, a little background on thetwo strikes you. When you go to
(03:16):
a job, when you have yourset schedule and your and your role in
whatever job that you have, youprobably don't think too much about about the
(03:37):
extreme long term of it we're talkingabout. We're talking about the kind of
jobs you know, just you know, full time, forty hours a week,
maybe some overtime. You go there, you think, maybe I'll be
here for another five years, maybeI'll be here until I retire. When
(04:01):
it comes to the Writers Guild andthe Screen Actors Guild, the contracts that
these unions have, and they areunions, the contracts that they have with
their employers, the Alliance of MotionPicture and Television Producers. Their agreements with
(04:32):
them are only good for a fewyears, and then usually the deals have
to be renegotiated at the end ofthose years, and if they can't come
to a new agreement, then youget a strike. There have been several
(04:54):
strikes in my lifetime, in fact, by these organizations because the people that
they're negotiating with don't want to paythem their fair wage. Now, it's
easy to think about actors as beingmillionaires living lavish lifestyles, living in mansions,
(05:15):
traveling all around the world, andall of it on the movie studios
dime. But actors are workers,just like all of us. Know,
their job may be different than ours, but it's still a job, and
they still deserve to get compensated forit, and compensated fairly. Let's talk
(05:41):
a little bit about, first ofall, the Writer's Guild, though as
a writer, I take this particularstrike very seriously. First of all,
(06:04):
the agreements that I mentioned before betweenthe unions and whatnot. It's basically called
a minimum basic agreement an MBA thatis basically a minimum wage for television and
film writers. Now, the onethat they had, the one that expired
(06:30):
in twenty twenty three. It onlyapplied to people who wrote for broadcast television
shows and not for streaming television.When you think about about how many new
shows are coming out on streaming insteadof broadcast television, traditional television, even
(06:57):
cable television, it's there's been apretty big shift. I mean, there
are lots of new programs that areon streaming only so and a lot of
the writers for those shows simply weren'tgetting compensated properly. We're talking about residuals.
(07:20):
We're talking about who gets paid forthese shows down the road if they
keep running and people keep watching them. Who deserves to be compensated for that.
Another big, another big issue wasartificial intelligence. Now, this is
(07:45):
something that really gets under my skin. This is a really big button for
me when it comes to writing shows. And they had they had a reference
to this on Fall of the Houseof Usher, by the way, they
(08:09):
had a little scene that alluded tothis. When it comes to writing shows,
we want them to be written bypeople. We don't want them to
be written by computers. I keepseeing ads online all the time on social
(08:31):
media everywhere I go I see adsfor people that offer to that offer them
a program that will write their storiesfor them. I'm not just talking about
a few conversations between you and chatept. You may know this. There
(08:52):
are people out there who are writingwhole books with art official intelligence, and
I shouldn't even say that they arewriting it. The program is writing it
for them. This is this isnot a proofreading situation here. This is
(09:15):
you give a computer program a promptand it writes the story for you.
One of the biggest issues with theWriter's Guild Strike is that they wanted to
make sure that artificial intelligence would onlybe used as a tool that could help
(09:39):
with research or facilitate script ideas,not as a tool to replace the writers
themselves. Now, there was anotherconcern, a similar concern with the Actors
(10:00):
Strike, that that artificial intelligence AIwould be used to replace actors in movies.
We're talking about we're talking about peoplebeing generated by computer Holy We're not
(10:24):
talking about We're not talking about aCGI movie where an actor acts and has
cameras following them around and translates thatinto a computer generated image that's the voiced
(10:45):
then by the actors. We're nottalking about that we're talking about a computer
just playing generates a generates an actorfor a scene. Now, using a
little simple math here, if you'vegot computers that are writing scripts and computers
(11:09):
that are generating actors them, whatwould you even need writers and actors for.
You could make literally an entire moviewith no writers and no actors whatsoever.
And that's what they referenced in Fallof the House of Usher. They
(11:31):
said there was a scene in theshow that was set back in the eighties.
Somebody was they were having a conversationabout computers and all the wonderful things
that computers will be able to dosomeday. And somebody said, you know,
one day, they may even beable to use computers to make TV
(11:52):
shows, and another character says,not good ones. It was a nice
little acknowledgement of the of the needfor the human element, because even though
humans may use computers as tools,the computers are still just the tools.
(12:22):
Now, I've watched a lot ofdigital artists' videos on YouTube, and they're
they are still in control of thecomputer. They're not seeding that control to
it. They're not saying to thecomputer, hey make this, uh,
(12:46):
make this movie for me. Now, they are making the movie. One
of the one of the issues withwith the Screen Actors Guild strike was there
(13:07):
was the possibility that movie studios weregoing to and this is what I was
saying before about how it's not justthe it's not just the A list stars,
it's not just the multi millionaires whoare at stake here. There was
an issue where movie studios were goingto digitally scan the extras in the movies
(13:33):
and start using the extras images andwhatnot in other movies, and movie studios
hit back and said no, no, no, no, no. We
were just talking about scanning an extrain one scene and then using them in
another scene. Well, either wayyou look at it, that's still using
(13:58):
the extra's image without them being there, without them getting paid for it.
There was a there was an incidentan example, rather the Back to the
Future movies, there was a therewas a if you don't know the Back
(14:24):
to the Future movies they're about theymade in the eighties and early nineties,
there's a story about Michael J.Fox going back into the past and meeting
his parents as when they were hisage, when they were teenagers, and
trying to, you know, getback to the future. In the second
(14:50):
movie. Crispin Glover, who hadplayed who had played Michael J. Fox's
dad as a young man in thefirst movie. He did not return for
the second movie. So what theydid for the second movie was they took
(15:11):
images of him from the first movieand just used that footage in the second
movie. And he actually sued thestudio. He actually began a case that
changed how things are done in Hollywoodbecause they used his image without him getting
(15:37):
paid for it. You know,his likeness, his his scenes from that
movie. So it's a similar situationhere. A lot of people made reference
to during the strike. They madea lot of reference to a movie called
(16:00):
The Congress. Now this is amovie, a more recent movie. The
Robin Wright, the actress who playedJenny and Forrest Gump and played in Wonder
Woman. In Blade twenty forty nine, she plays a version of herself who
(16:26):
is going to give up the rightsto her likeness to a movie studio.
She goes to a she goes toa place where they are photographing her and
videotaping her from every angle, everyemotion, every every bit of her.
(16:53):
She has to let them use allof it in perpetuity forever. She sells
it to them, and then laterwe see the results of this. We
see that they've created movies where herwhere her generated actress. The generated images
(17:18):
of her are in just the mostabsurd films, but she has no control
over any of it because she soldaway all her rights. Now, this
is one of the this is oneof the most important aspects of AI image
(17:40):
generation. You may have heard thatthat during the whole and the weeks leading
up to the Super Bowl, wheneverybody was starting to starting to fixate on
Taylor Swift for some reason, thatthat images of her that had been computer
(18:03):
generated AI generated were circulating on Twitter, and that that it caused a big
uproar. Obviously, but these weren'tBut these weren't actual naked images of her,
(18:25):
so she didn't own them. Sothere's a lot. There's a lot
to keep in mind about all ofthis, aside from getting paid for your
work, and aside from what thewhat certain people in Hollywood were trying to
(18:48):
avoid paining them for their work.Writers and actors mainly were striking for the
ability to work, to simply work, to not have their jobs taken away
from them, to not have theirlivelihoods taken away from them. They were
(19:11):
fighting for the ability to keep writingand to keep acting. Now, these
were some of the longest strikes inHollywood history, and I think that the
AI argument had a lot to dowith that. The Writer's Guild strike was
(19:37):
from May twi to September twenty seventh, and the SAG after a strike was
from July fourteenth to November ninth,so they overlapped a lot with each other.
A lot of productions were affected byit, you can. I mean
(20:02):
there were a lot of like likefor example, the Avatar movies, the
the Deadpool and Wolverine movie, alot of other action movies and whatnot.
Spider Man beyond the Spider Verse wasaffected, and and but but that's nothing
(20:33):
new. I mean a lot ofa lot of shows, and especially popular
series, always get caught up inin these kinds of things. I remember
a lot of people were If you'veever if you're a Trekky, you probably
know that Star Trek the Next GenerationSeason two is seen as not a very
(20:59):
good season in that show, andit's because its production was affected by a
writer's strike. But in the end, it's worth it to suffer through a
(21:21):
few bad episodes of your favorite showto realize how important it is to let
good writers do their job and becompensated fairly for it. I'm gonna tell
you a little bit about what theabout what the writers and actors strikes yielded
(21:52):
the final agreements that they got whenwhen the strikes finally ended, in addition
to increased health and pension and interms of employment and compensation and whatnot.
When it comes to artificial Intelligence.In the Writer's Guild contract, the agreement
(22:21):
established regulations for AI use. AIcan't write or rewrite literary material, and
AI generated material will not be consideredsource material, meaning that it can't be
used to undermine a writer's credit orwrites. A writer can choose to use
(22:47):
AI when performing writing services if thecompany consents and provided that the writer follows
applicable company policies, but the companycan't require the writer to use AI software
when performing writing services. The companymust disclose to the writer if any materials
given to the writer have been generatedby AI or incorporate AI generated material,
(23:14):
and the Writer's Guild reserves the rightto assert that exploitations of writers material to
train AI is prohibited. Now,now, obviously AI doesn't just doesn't just
wake up one morning and know howto write. When they say train AI,
(23:37):
they're talking about feeding a writer's workto an AI program and then letting
the AI say, okay, Ican write like this. Now, no
more of that. And over onthe actor's side of things, just a
(24:00):
few of the terms when it comesto using AI artificial intelligence. There has
(24:22):
to be consent, it has tobe clear and conspicuous. That's an entire
section of the contract by itself.Consent must be clear and conspicuous. And
there must be compensation for services ona day the performer is not performing other
(24:45):
work for the producer. Now there, Now they're talking about as closely as
I can understand it. They're talkingabout if somebody does consent to have their
artificially generated image used, that they'restill going to get paid for it as
(25:11):
often as it's used. And it'snot just a one time thing. The
compensation if it's used, or evenif it's used other than in the motion
picture for which the performer was employed, there's still must be consent, and
(25:33):
there still must be compensation at theday performer rate, and it must be
at least the minimum the minimum requiredrate. So no undercutting them no,
saying well, it's just the AIimage, so we can pay them less
(25:57):
than minimum wage. As far asas far as anything else digital digital alterations,
there must also be consent. Theremust also be There must also be
(26:19):
a broad protective definition of generative artificialintelligence and established terms for synthetic performers that
are created through generative artificial intelligence.There must be. There must be regular
(26:41):
meetings between the union and each producerwhich which relate to the use of these
images. There must be. It'sa very long list, but basically what
(27:03):
it means is they're establishing a lotof protections here for their for their actors,
for their workers. And like Isay, it's not just the big
name actors. Sag AFTRA, theScreen Actors Guilds American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists is a very big unionand and it takes it's its obligations to
(27:34):
its members very seriously, just likethe Writer's Guild does. And as a
writer myself, even though I'm notpart of any union, even though my
only published works are all self published, they're all they're all written by me.
(28:00):
Yeah, I've spent I've spent thelast I don't know how many years
of my life writing stories, probablysince I even could write, and I
was probably coming up with stories evenbefore that. And I would love it
if there was an easy button forgetting my workout to more people and having
(28:26):
more people read it and appreciate itand yes, pay me for it.
But life isn't about easy buttons.Life isn't about instant gratification. There's always
(29:00):
someone responsible for the good things inlife, and those people should always be
appreciated for it. And as anybodywho's done any job knows, one of
the best ways to show appreciation iswith a fair wage and with not having
(29:27):
your job just taken away from youbecause we suddenly found an easier way to
get it done. I'm not suggestingthat we take away all modern conveniences.
(29:48):
I'm not saying you know that Ihaven't adjusted to a self checkout at Walmart.
It took a long time, butI'm finally there, I think.
But when it comes to art,when it comes to entertainment, when it
(30:11):
comes to things that feed the soul, there must be something with a soul
at its creation, at its inception, at its generation. You can't just
reduce everything to a push button answer. Life is about making and appreciating art,
(30:47):
and there's a lot of hard workinvolved in that. And whichever one
you appreciate, hard work or artor both, you must appreciate the struggle
that these actors and writers have gonethrough in order to ensure that they are
(31:07):
fairly treated when they're doing so.And if you see an advertisement that tells
you about a program that will writethe books for you, that will make
(31:34):
the videos for you, that willmake the art for you, ask yourself,
is it really worth it to takeaway from the artists in this world?
(31:56):
It's not art if it's AI generated. And if you're a writer out
there or any other artist, askyourself this. If you can just use
(32:20):
a program to write the book foryou, then what use are you.
I mean, someday your readers couldjust cut you out entirely. They could
just buy that program for themselves andsay, hey, I'd like a book
(32:42):
to read. Now, make meone. No more writers, no more
artists. You think that's a dystopianfuture that I'm painting for you right now?
It is, But every dystopia hasa start. There are there are
(33:13):
a lot of movies you can watchabout it. Thank you for listening.
I'll talk to you more later.
I'm Stephen Monteith, and I'm hereto talk about the writers and actors strikes
from this last summer and fall.Now, you may know, may have
been vaguely aware that the Writer's Guildand the Screen Actors Guild both went on
(00:22):
strike over the summer of twenty twentythree. You may not know what a
lot of it is about or whatit really means for you. Well,
first of all, there's been aI just want to talk a little bit
(00:46):
about how there have been some memesthat have gone around on Facebook and other
social media for a while now thattry to highlight the importance of entertainers in
our lives. Whenever you listen tothe radio, whenever you watch TV or
(01:12):
watch a movie, whenever you listento a podcast, you're you're bringing entertainment
into your life. You're bringing artinto your life. And when it comes
to things like making movies intoday's world, or making television shows in today's world,
(01:37):
or making web series in today's world, there's there's a lot of business
involved in it, because frankly,America runs on business, and what happens
in the boardroom directly affects a lotof actors and writers' lives as well as
(02:05):
many many other people's. So howthese actors and writers get compensated for the
work that they do is important toall of us because they're who we go
to. They're the ones that helpbring this joy into our lives that we
(02:31):
get from watching their shows and theirmovies. And if you're somebody who who
doesn't care that much about their lives, then at least try and and keep
(02:53):
an open mind while I try toappeal to your sense of fairness, because
fairness, I would hope, issomething that we could all agree upon.
First, a little background on thetwo strikes you. When you go to
(03:16):
a job, when you have yourset schedule and your and your role in
whatever job that you have, youprobably don't think too much about about the
(03:37):
extreme long term of it we're talkingabout. We're talking about the kind of
jobs you know, just you know, full time, forty hours a week,
maybe some overtime. You go there, you think, maybe I'll be
here for another five years, maybeI'll be here until I retire. When
(04:01):
it comes to the Writers Guild andthe Screen Actors Guild, the contracts that
these unions have, and they areunions, the contracts that they have with
their employers, the Alliance of MotionPicture and Television Producers. Their agreements with
(04:32):
them are only good for a fewyears, and then usually the deals have
to be renegotiated at the end ofthose years, and if they can't come
to a new agreement, then youget a strike. There have been several
(04:54):
strikes in my lifetime, in fact, by these organizations because the people that
they're negotiating with don't want to paythem their fair wage. Now, it's
easy to think about actors as beingmillionaires living lavish lifestyles, living in mansions,
(05:15):
traveling all around the world, andall of it on the movie studios
dime. But actors are workers,just like all of us. Know,
their job may be different than ours, but it's still a job, and
they still deserve to get compensated forit, and compensated fairly. Let's talk
(05:41):
a little bit about, first ofall, the Writer's Guild, though as
a writer, I take this particularstrike very seriously. First of all,
(06:04):
the agreements that I mentioned before betweenthe unions and whatnot. It's basically called
a minimum basic agreement an MBA thatis basically a minimum wage for television and
film writers. Now, the onethat they had, the one that expired
(06:30):
in twenty twenty three. It onlyapplied to people who wrote for broadcast television
shows and not for streaming television.When you think about about how many new
shows are coming out on streaming insteadof broadcast television, traditional television, even
(06:57):
cable television, it's there's been apretty big shift. I mean, there
are lots of new programs that areon streaming only so and a lot of
the writers for those shows simply weren'tgetting compensated properly. We're talking about residuals.
(07:20):
We're talking about who gets paid forthese shows down the road if they
keep running and people keep watching them. Who deserves to be compensated for that.
Another big, another big issue wasartificial intelligence. Now, this is
(07:45):
something that really gets under my skin. This is a really big button for
me when it comes to writing shows. And they had they had a reference
to this on Fall of the Houseof Usher, by the way, they
(08:09):
had a little scene that alluded tothis. When it comes to writing shows,
we want them to be written bypeople. We don't want them to
be written by computers. I keepseeing ads online all the time on social
(08:31):
media everywhere I go I see adsfor people that offer to that offer them
a program that will write their storiesfor them. I'm not just talking about
a few conversations between you and chatept. You may know this. There
(08:52):
are people out there who are writingwhole books with art official intelligence, and
I shouldn't even say that they arewriting it. The program is writing it
for them. This is this isnot a proofreading situation here. This is
(09:15):
you give a computer program a promptand it writes the story for you.
One of the biggest issues with theWriter's Guild Strike is that they wanted to
make sure that artificial intelligence would onlybe used as a tool that could help
(09:39):
with research or facilitate script ideas,not as a tool to replace the writers
themselves. Now, there was anotherconcern, a similar concern with the Actors
(10:00):
Strike, that that artificial intelligence AIwould be used to replace actors in movies.
We're talking about we're talking about peoplebeing generated by computer Holy We're not
(10:24):
talking about We're not talking about aCGI movie where an actor acts and has
cameras following them around and translates thatinto a computer generated image that's the voiced
(10:45):
then by the actors. We're nottalking about that we're talking about a computer
just playing generates a generates an actorfor a scene. Now, using a
little simple math here, if you'vegot computers that are writing scripts and computers
(11:09):
that are generating actors them, whatwould you even need writers and actors for.
You could make literally an entire moviewith no writers and no actors whatsoever.
And that's what they referenced in Fallof the House of Usher. They
(11:31):
said there was a scene in theshow that was set back in the eighties.
Somebody was they were having a conversationabout computers and all the wonderful things
that computers will be able to dosomeday. And somebody said, you know,
one day, they may even beable to use computers to make TV
(11:52):
shows, and another character says,not good ones. It was a nice
little acknowledgement of the of the needfor the human element, because even though
humans may use computers as tools,the computers are still just the tools.
(12:22):
Now, I've watched a lot ofdigital artists' videos on YouTube, and they're
they are still in control of thecomputer. They're not seeding that control to
it. They're not saying to thecomputer, hey make this, uh,
(12:46):
make this movie for me. Now, they are making the movie. One
of the one of the issues withwith the Screen Actors Guild strike was there
(13:07):
was the possibility that movie studios weregoing to and this is what I was
saying before about how it's not justthe it's not just the A list stars,
it's not just the multi millionaires whoare at stake here. There was
an issue where movie studios were goingto digitally scan the extras in the movies
(13:33):
and start using the extras images andwhatnot in other movies, and movie studios
hit back and said no, no, no, no, no. We
were just talking about scanning an extrain one scene and then using them in
another scene. Well, either wayyou look at it, that's still using
(13:58):
the extra's image without them being there, without them getting paid for it.
There was a there was an incidentan example, rather the Back to the
Future movies, there was a therewas a if you don't know the Back
(14:24):
to the Future movies they're about theymade in the eighties and early nineties,
there's a story about Michael J.Fox going back into the past and meeting
his parents as when they were hisage, when they were teenagers, and
trying to, you know, getback to the future. In the second
(14:50):
movie. Crispin Glover, who hadplayed who had played Michael J. Fox's
dad as a young man in thefirst movie. He did not return for
the second movie. So what theydid for the second movie was they took
(15:11):
images of him from the first movieand just used that footage in the second
movie. And he actually sued thestudio. He actually began a case that
changed how things are done in Hollywoodbecause they used his image without him getting
(15:37):
paid for it. You know,his likeness, his his scenes from that
movie. So it's a similar situationhere. A lot of people made reference
to during the strike. They madea lot of reference to a movie called
(16:00):
The Congress. Now this is amovie, a more recent movie. The
Robin Wright, the actress who playedJenny and Forrest Gump and played in Wonder
Woman. In Blade twenty forty nine, she plays a version of herself who
(16:26):
is going to give up the rightsto her likeness to a movie studio.
She goes to a she goes toa place where they are photographing her and
videotaping her from every angle, everyemotion, every every bit of her.
(16:53):
She has to let them use allof it in perpetuity forever. She sells
it to them, and then laterwe see the results of this. We
see that they've created movies where herwhere her generated actress. The generated images
(17:18):
of her are in just the mostabsurd films, but she has no control
over any of it because she soldaway all her rights. Now, this
is one of the this is oneof the most important aspects of AI image
(17:40):
generation. You may have heard thatthat during the whole and the weeks leading
up to the Super Bowl, wheneverybody was starting to starting to fixate on
Taylor Swift for some reason, thatthat images of her that had been computer
(18:03):
generated AI generated were circulating on Twitter, and that that it caused a big
uproar. Obviously, but these weren'tBut these weren't actual naked images of her,
(18:25):
so she didn't own them. Sothere's a lot. There's a lot
to keep in mind about all ofthis, aside from getting paid for your
work, and aside from what thewhat certain people in Hollywood were trying to
(18:48):
avoid paining them for their work.Writers and actors mainly were striking for the
ability to work, to simply work, to not have their jobs taken away
from them, to not have theirlivelihoods taken away from them. They were
(19:11):
fighting for the ability to keep writingand to keep acting. Now, these
were some of the longest strikes inHollywood history, and I think that the
AI argument had a lot to dowith that. The Writer's Guild strike was
(19:37):
from May twi to September twenty seventh, and the SAG after a strike was
from July fourteenth to November ninth,so they overlapped a lot with each other.
A lot of productions were affected byit, you can. I mean
(20:02):
there were a lot of like likefor example, the Avatar movies, the
the Deadpool and Wolverine movie, alot of other action movies and whatnot.
Spider Man beyond the Spider Verse wasaffected, and and but but that's nothing
(20:33):
new. I mean a lot ofa lot of shows, and especially popular
series, always get caught up inin these kinds of things. I remember
a lot of people were If you'veever if you're a Trekky, you probably
know that Star Trek the Next GenerationSeason two is seen as not a very
(20:59):
good season in that show, andit's because its production was affected by a
writer's strike. But in the end, it's worth it to suffer through a
(21:21):
few bad episodes of your favorite showto realize how important it is to let
good writers do their job and becompensated fairly for it. I'm gonna tell
you a little bit about what theabout what the writers and actors strikes yielded
(21:52):
the final agreements that they got whenwhen the strikes finally ended, in addition
to increased health and pension and interms of employment and compensation and whatnot.
When it comes to artificial Intelligence.In the Writer's Guild contract, the agreement
(22:21):
established regulations for AI use. AIcan't write or rewrite literary material, and
AI generated material will not be consideredsource material, meaning that it can't be
used to undermine a writer's credit orwrites. A writer can choose to use
(22:47):
AI when performing writing services if thecompany consents and provided that the writer follows
applicable company policies, but the companycan't require the writer to use AI software
when performing writing services. The companymust disclose to the writer if any materials
given to the writer have been generatedby AI or incorporate AI generated material,
(23:14):
and the Writer's Guild reserves the rightto assert that exploitations of writers material to
train AI is prohibited. Now,now, obviously AI doesn't just doesn't just
wake up one morning and know howto write. When they say train AI,
(23:37):
they're talking about feeding a writer's workto an AI program and then letting
the AI say, okay, Ican write like this. Now, no
more of that. And over onthe actor's side of things, just a
(24:00):
few of the terms when it comesto using AI artificial intelligence. There has
(24:22):
to be consent, it has tobe clear and conspicuous. That's an entire
section of the contract by itself.Consent must be clear and conspicuous. And
there must be compensation for services ona day the performer is not performing other
(24:45):
work for the producer. Now there, Now they're talking about as closely as
I can understand it. They're talkingabout if somebody does consent to have their
artificially generated image used, that they'restill going to get paid for it as
(25:11):
often as it's used. And it'snot just a one time thing. The
compensation if it's used, or evenif it's used other than in the motion
picture for which the performer was employed, there's still must be consent, and
(25:33):
there still must be compensation at theday performer rate, and it must be
at least the minimum the minimum requiredrate. So no undercutting them no,
saying well, it's just the AIimage, so we can pay them less
(25:57):
than minimum wage. As far asas far as anything else digital digital alterations,
there must also be consent. Theremust also be There must also be
(26:19):
a broad protective definition of generative artificialintelligence and established terms for synthetic performers that
are created through generative artificial intelligence.There must be. There must be regular
(26:41):
meetings between the union and each producerwhich which relate to the use of these
images. There must be. It'sa very long list, but basically what
(27:03):
it means is they're establishing a lotof protections here for their for their actors,
for their workers. And like Isay, it's not just the big
name actors. Sag AFTRA, theScreen Actors Guilds American Federation of Television and
Radio Artists is a very big unionand and it takes it's its obligations to
(27:34):
its members very seriously, just likethe Writer's Guild does. And as a
writer myself, even though I'm notpart of any union, even though my
only published works are all self published, they're all they're all written by me.
(28:00):
Yeah, I've spent I've spent thelast I don't know how many years
of my life writing stories, probablysince I even could write, and I
was probably coming up with stories evenbefore that. And I would love it
if there was an easy button forgetting my workout to more people and having
(28:26):
more people read it and appreciate itand yes, pay me for it.
But life isn't about easy buttons.Life isn't about instant gratification. There's always
(29:00):
someone responsible for the good things inlife, and those people should always be
appreciated for it. And as anybodywho's done any job knows, one of
the best ways to show appreciation iswith a fair wage and with not having
(29:27):
your job just taken away from youbecause we suddenly found an easier way to
get it done. I'm not suggestingthat we take away all modern conveniences.
(29:48):
I'm not saying you know that Ihaven't adjusted to a self checkout at Walmart.
It took a long time, butI'm finally there, I think.
But when it comes to art,when it comes to entertainment, when it
(30:11):
comes to things that feed the soul, there must be something with a soul
at its creation, at its inception, at its generation. You can't just
reduce everything to a push button answer. Life is about making and appreciating art,
(30:47):
and there's a lot of hard workinvolved in that. And whichever one
you appreciate, hard work or artor both, you must appreciate the struggle
that these actors and writers have gonethrough in order to ensure that they are
(31:07):
fairly treated when they're doing so.And if you see an advertisement that tells
you about a program that will writethe books for you, that will make
(31:34):
the videos for you, that willmake the art for you, ask yourself,
is it really worth it to takeaway from the artists in this world?
(31:56):
It's not art if it's AI generated. And if you're a writer out
there or any other artist, askyourself this. If you can just use
(32:20):
a program to write the book foryou, then what use are you.
I mean, someday your readers couldjust cut you out entirely. They could
just buy that program for themselves andsay, hey, I'd like a book
(32:42):
to read. Now, make meone. No more writers, no more
artists. You think that's a dystopianfuture that I'm painting for you right now?
It is, But every dystopia hasa start. There are there are
(33:13):
a lot of movies you can watchabout it. Thank you for listening.
I'll talk to you more later.
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