The Writers' Strike is Over, and a New Deal Will Change Hollywood

It is reported that the Writers Guild of America (WGA) will not hold a strike march starting at 0:00 a.m. local time on September 27. The union will then carefully study the information sister of the negotiation agreement with the AMPTP representing major studios and decide whether to vote to approve the new contract.

The latest agreement has now been released with a summary, in which two of the WGA's previous key demands, namely salary increases and AI-related concerns, are included in the new agreement, marking a major victory for the WGA. In the agreement, Hollywood screenwriters' salaries increased significantly across the board, with the most significant increases in streaming media and "high-budget subscription media on demand (such as Netflix)".

The WGA said writers for streaming movies should receive at least an 18% increase in earnings if the film's budget is at least $30 million, plus a 26% increase on the remaining base.

On the AI ​​side, the WGA got a win early on. According to the summary of the agreement, the AI ​​will not be able to write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be used as source material. So an executive can't ask ChatGPT to come up with a story and ask a screenwriter to turn it into a script that the executive owns the copyright to.

The WGA will also “reserve the right to assert that the use of screenwriting materials to train AI is prohibited by the MBA or other law.” This means that if the law changes or AI training becomes a point of contention for union members, the WGA will be able to call it exploitation. This could be related to a proposed law in California regulating the use of AI training materials.

The new agreement also requires that film and television studios must provide the WGA with real data from now on, specifically "the total number of hours of domestic and international broadcasts of self-produced high-budget streaming programs." This will affect Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and other streaming companies, which will no longer be able to invent strange indicators or self-reference rankings that have no reference value to provide to the union. The data provided by the studio may be subject to confidentiality agreements, so others may still not have access to the data. However, the WGA will be able to publish aggregated data to make the streaming industry more transparent. When the actual data is made public, it will be difficult for streaming media to claim whether a project is successful or failed.