ONCE upon a time, way back in the innocent year 2008, I founded a blog about science and science fiction called io9. It was a fun job, where I worked with eight or so full-time writers who were, as far as I know, completely human. After I moved on, io9 continued to thrive under the stewardship of some fine biological entities – until last month. That’s when I opened the site to discover one of the most terrible posts ever written, entitled simply “A chronological list of Star Wars movies & TV shows”. Reader, it was neither chronological nor was it a complete list. It was, of course, written by artificial intelligence.
I wasn’t the only person pissed off by this development. io9 deputy editor James Whitbrook – who wasn’t consulted before the article was posted – wrote an outraged letter to io9 parent company G/O Media, detailing every mistake in the poorly written blob of text. The AI incursion blew up into big news, covered everywhere from The Washington Post to Hollywood trade publication Variety. For its part, G/O Media claimed this was just a start, then noted ominously that, next time, the AI would write a better article.
The story was such big news because the threat of AI-authored content hangs over many creative industries right now. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is currently on strike in part because the labour union wants a contract that guarantees AI won’t be given writing credits for screenplays. The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) joined the strike because some movie studios have started replacing actors with digital replicas. In one widely reported case, a studio asked actors for digital scans of their bodies and voices to be used “in perpetuity”. An actor who took up that offer could be paid for one day of work, while the studio would make a profit from it until the end of time.
I talked to Eric Heisserer, a member of the WGA contract negotiation team, about why AI has become such a big threat now. As the screenwriter of alien-contact movie Arrival and showrunner on Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone, Heisserer is no stranger to speculative scenarios. But AI is no longer the stuff of science fiction. He said that when contract negotiations started earlier this year, AI was barely on anyone’s mind at the WGA. But by April, most members had heard enough about AI apps like ChatGPT and Midjourney that they had started to worry.
Then stories started pouring in from people in the industry. One came from an actor who shared “audition sides”, scenes used to audition actors for projects where the script is under wraps. Typically, a writer would be paid to make audition sides as part of their job as a screenwriter. But these were entirely written by ChatGPT and the dialogue was hard to read; it was like the “uncanny valley version of writing”, said Heisserer.
Another member of the union came forward to say “she had been approached by a producer who [wanted] to hire her for 48 hours to do what they called ‘a voice pass’ on an AI-generated feature screenplay. They wanted to make it sound human or fix whatever felt off in the dialogue.” Not only was it depressing to contemplate a gig making an AI script sound human, but the pay was unacceptable. A job that would normally take months – writing a screenplay – was compressed into two days. Plus, who would get the writing credit? Writers in the union get paid based on screenwriting credits and if an AI takes top billing, then the writer loses.
Another issue that Heisserer thinks studios should be worried about is copyright. Generative AI models like ChatGPT learn to write by consuming and regurgitating text written by human beings. It “could end in a feeding frenzy where work the studio owns is now being legally devoured by a rival studio”, he mused. “It’s going to be a spaghetti bowl for lawyers figuring out the ownership of material.”
Still, AI isn’t going away. OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, and Google have been meeting with newspapers in the US and offering to pay them to test out AI for covering local news and doing research. io9 is just one of dozens of companies and publications trialling AI, including CNET. Heisserer thinks that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are just the beginning. He foresees a need for journalists and novelists to push back on the use of automation in their workplaces too.
I wondered aloud if AI would ever join a union. Heisserer laughed. “AIs are going to join unions long after they become CEOs and executives. There are far trickier elements to being an artist than there are to [executive] decision-making and market analysis.” It was the kind of sick burn only a human could come up with. For now.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
We Need New Stories, a fantastic analysis of political myth-making in the media by Nesrine Malik.
What I’m watching
Polite Society, the wild tale of a teenage wannabe stuntwoman from Nida Manzoor.
What I’m working on
Growing chamomile and mint in my garden to make tisane.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Terraformers and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com