On Wednesday, I participated in a listening session on AI and copyright hosted by the U.S. Copyright Office.
I was representing the WGA West. Other speakers included reps from the DGA, Public Knowledge, the Motion Picture Association and the National Association of Broadcasters.
Video will be up from the event in a few weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to share my opening remarks, which were a group effort with the team at the Guild.
My name is John August. I am a screenwriter and member of the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America West, a union that represents thousands of writers who create the content audiences watch every day in theaters, on television and on streaming services.
This is a unique moment for me to be speaking to this issue, because the subject of AI and its role in our industry is a major point of contention in the Guild’s ongoing nationwide strike against the major motion picture and television studios.
While writers who work under the Guild’s collective bargaining agreement are not copyright owners—we create works for hire—the Guild has negotiated an assortment of contractual rights in the works we create, including the right to residual payments for the reuse of our work across media platforms.
In the current negotiations, the Guild has made a proposal to regulate AI for the first time in our contract. The broad purpose of the proposal is to prevent our employers from using AI to devalue the work that writers do—to lower our pay, to deprive us of credit or attribution rights, or, in the most extreme case, to eliminate the need to hire writers altogether. The proposal would also prohibit the companies from using material written under the Guild’s agreement to train AI programs for the purpose of creating other derivative (and potentially infringing) works.
The companies’ response has been telling: not only did they reject our proposal, they refused to engage on the issue at all. The most they have said is that the technology is new and they are not inclined to limit their ability to use this new technology in the future. This is an ominous response in the eyes of our members and one of many reasons that 11,500 writers have been on strike since May 2.
We often speak of copyright as a means of protecting works of authorship. But copyright was created with the intention of protecting authors from appropriation and theft. As we discuss the impact of AI, we need to remember the human authors and not just the corporations who employ them.
Following our opening remarks, panelists had the opportunity to answer questions about what rules and policies the Copyright Office should consider.
Speaking on behalf of the Guild, and its 11,500 members currently on strike, I focused on the need to protect the human creators of work.
You can read the opening statement of John Bergmayer at Public Knowledge, which specifically mentions the WGA strike. I’ll post other statements as I find them.