New WGA contract will change the way Hollywood works


,Disclosure: The Verge’s The editorial staff is also affiliated with the Writers Guild of America, East.,

The WGA released a summary of the contract tonight and it is historic. The most eye-catching wins for the WGA are around wage increases and artificial intelligence. Pay increases are significant across the board, with notable increases for “high budget subscription video on demand” (think Netflix) and streaming movies.

“AI is a fascinating thing… data is a game changer.”

The WGA says writers of streaming features should see an 18 percent increase in minimum compensation provided the film has a budget of at least $30 million, as well as a 26 percent increase in the residual base.

On the AI ​​side of things, the WGA got essentially what it was asking for from the start. According to the summary of the contract, AI will not be able to write or rewrite literary content, and AI-generated content will not be able to be used as source material. So no executive will be able to ask ChatGPT to come up with a story and ask the writers to turn it into a script to which the executive owns the rights.

The WGA also “reserves the right to assert that exploitation of the authors’ material to train an AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.” This means that if laws change or AI training reaches the point of contention for guild members, the WGA will be able to call out that exploit. This is likely related to proposed laws in California regulating the use of materials for training AI.

But “AI is a fascinating thing. Data is a game changer,” said Katherine Trendacosta, director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a reporter who covered the strike. vice president And turncoat, told me.

and I agree. In form of LA Times As mentioned earlier this week, streaming data has essentially been a black hole. This meant that no one working on projects in Hollywood had any idea how well those projects were performing, which created a problem because payment for projects is directly tied to performance.

Now, studios must provide actual data to the WGA. Specifically “the total number of hours of self-produced high-budget streaming programs streamed domestically and internationally.” This means Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon, and other streamers won’t be able to invent weird metrics or meaningless self-referential rankings to give to the WGA. The numbers provided by the studios may be subject to NDA – so the rest of us won’t necessarily have access to those metrics. Yet the WGA will still be able to release data in aggregate form, giving us a more nuanced and revealing look at the business of streaming than before.

And once actual real numbers start circulating, it will be very difficult for streamers to claim that a project has been successful when no one you know has heard of it or, say, has any interest in the show. While the numbers suggest a different story.

The streaming industry has thrived on data opacity – allowing an industry in the business of imagination to bend the narrative to how it fits with carefully crafted data. Now, there will be real, actual, concrete data available to the WGA membership, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it will be very difficult to squeeze it back into the bottle.


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