When we’re watching a film or a television show, it’s easy to get lost in the world of the story, and not really think about the processes that brought us that story in the first place. Maybe when you finally finish the show or movie, you may stalk the hot actors on Instagram. Maybe you even take a look at who directed it.
But no one ever talks about (or apparently even thinks about paying) the writers! So, they’ve gone on strike.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) began striking on May 2, 2023, over rising concerns about salaries, job stability, and overall treatment of writers in the US entertainment industry. The main topic of contention is the income writers make from residuals. This refers to the money that the people involved in the creation of a show or movie receive from reruns, DVD releases, and other reuses of their material. In past years, the share that writers receive has been reduced, drastically lowering the average writer’s income.
Now, there’s an overwhelmingly common misconception that everyone in Hollywood is filthy rich, and that’s prompted some people online to denounce or just plain make fun of the WGA and their efforts. That is absolutely BONKERS to me.
So many people refuse to do any research whatsoever before forming their opinion, and then they proceed to share that opinion with millions of people. I’m also aghast that some others spend all of their free time on Netflix and not have the slightest shred of empathy to the people that are LITERALLY WRITING THEIR FAVORITE STORIES!
There’s also talk about the use of artificial intelligence in the writing room. With the emergence of ChatGPT, the job of the writer has seemed more and more replaceable. The WGA firmly opposes AI as a way to replace human writers, and they declare that it should only be used as a helping tool. And they’re completely right, because you really can’t use AI to write whole chunks of something, especially an original creative work.
People also seem to forget how ChatGPT works. An AI model is incapable of coming up with completely original, fleshed out, good scenes, because it pulls everything from existing human ideas.
According to Zapier, ChatGPT “was trained on roughly 500 billion ‘tokens,’ which allow its language models to more easily assign meaning and predict plausible follow-on text.” And those tokens are all based on pre-existing works written by humans—meaning books, articles, you name it.
AI doesn’t create. It imitates. Without human writers, ChatGPT doesn’t exist.
This isn’t the first time that the WGA has gone on strike. It happened before from 2007 to 2008, and when you happen to watch the few TV shows that ran during that time, you can see the decline in quality.
So the suggestion that we don’t need writers anymore, that everything would be the same level of quality if we just used AI, is one of the most ignorant ideas I’ve ever heard. And yet, it’s still being spread around like crazy and prompting some resistance to the strike.
But we’ve got to support the strike, y’all. These people are being paid pennies for churning out entertainment gold on the daily. There is no reason why the writers of America’s favorite shows should have to deliver UberEats to get by.
So if you happen to see some writers out striking, make sure to give them a honk or a thumbs up. Maybe even hand them a sandwich. That sequel to Dungeons and Dragons ain’t gonna write itself.
